Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

[Stephen P. King]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22144-brain-might-not-stand-in-the-way-of-free-will.html

This is a BFD!

--
Onward!

Stephen

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

[Russell Standish]

I never thought it did in the first place.

What is BFD?

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[L.W. Sterritt]

Libet's work is really dated. Soon et al, in Nature Neuroscience/ May 2008 report time delays of several seconds. This does require explanation - more sophisticated measurements that are not so easy to dismiss.

L.W.Sterritt

[Russell Standish]

IIUC, the delays in question are between when the brain plans
(possibly decides) (the action potential) to do a course of action,
and when the mind becomes consciously aware of the decision.

Why would a several second delay between these two events have any
implications on the existence or otherwise of free will?

Cheers

[meekerdb]

On 8/9/2012 12:06 AM, Russell Standish wrote:

IIUC, the delays in question are between when the brain plans
(possibly decides) (the action potential) to do a course of action,
and when the mind becomes consciously aware of the decision.

Why would a several second delay between these two events have any
implications on the existence or otherwise of free will? 

I think it is that in the 'spirit' conception of mind, all thought is conscious thought.  So if there is an unconscious physical process that is causally connected to the decision that is evidence against the 'spirits free will'.

Of course it has no implications for compatibilist 'free will'.

Brent

[Russell Standish]

Interesting - it might explain what all the fuss is about. Of course,
I don't know what is meant by "spirits free will", I'm guessing here it
has something to do with that ill-defined notion of soul.

It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or
unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the
total.

Cheers

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 07/08/2012, at 11:40 AM, "Stephen P. King" <step...@charter.net> wrote:

> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22144-brain-might-not-stand-in-the-way-of-free-will.html
>
> This is a BFD!

The problem of free will is not a scientific one, it is one of definition. People continue to argue about it even though they are talking about different things. For example, if you think that free will means "I do what I want to do, and if I wanted to do something different I would have" then Libet's experiment doesn't challenge this. If you think free will means "my decisions are neither determined nor random" then Libet's experiment doesn't challenge this either. (The first position is trivial, the second incoherent, but that is not a scientific question either.)

-- Stathis Papaioannou

[Bruno Marchal]

On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 09, 2012 at 08:55:03AM -0700, meekerdb wrote:
>> On 8/9/2012 12:06 AM, Russell Standish wrote:
>>> IIUC, the delays in question are between when the brain plans
>>> (possibly decides) (the action potential) to do a course of action,
>>> and when the mind becomes consciously aware of the decision.
>>>
>>> Why would a several second delay between these two events have any
>>> implications on the existence or otherwise of free will?
>>
>> I think it is that in the 'spirit' conception of mind, all thought
>> is conscious thought. So if there is an unconscious physical
>> process that is causally connected to the decision that is evidence
>> against the 'spirits free will'.
>>
>> Of course it has no implications for compatibilist 'free will'.
>>
>> Brent
>>
>
> Interesting - it might explain what all the fuss is about.

Yes. Of course I agree with Brent here. To be clear.

> Of course,
> I don't know what is meant by "spirits free will", I'm guessing here
> it
> has something to do with that ill-defined notion of soul.

I guess you allude to the non compatibilist notion of soul.
I usually define it by the first person (like in UDA or in AUDA). In
UDA it is the owner of the personal diary, and in AUDA it is defined
by the modality Bp & p. The soul is the heart of the person, so to
speak. It has no name, like truth and God.

Soul is far more easier to define than free-will (for a compatibilist,
or a (digital) mechanist).

>
> It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or
> unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the
> total.

This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point which
is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including mine). When
you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts, you realise
that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea of non-
consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be realized
by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have stopped to
believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think that we can
only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'.

Best,

Bruno

>
> Cheers
>
> --
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
> Principal, High Performance Coders
> Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
> University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

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

[Russell Standish]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:10:43PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote:
>
> >
> >It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or
> >unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the
> >total.
>
> This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point
> which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including
> mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts,
> you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea

> of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be

> realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have
> stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think
> that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'.
>

With due respect to your salvia experiences, which I dare not follow,
I'm still more presuaded by the likes of Daniel Dennett, and his
"pandemonia" theory of the mind. In that idea, many subconscious
process, working disparately, solve different aspects of the problems
at hand, or provide different courses of action. The purpose of
consciousness is to select from among the course of action
presented by the pandemonium of subconscious processes - admittedly
consciousness per se may not be necessary for this role - any unifying
(aka reductive) process may be sufficient.

The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian
process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian evolution
is the key to any form of creative process.

[Alberto G. Corona]

The modern positivist conception of free will has no
scientific meaning. But all modern rephasings of old philosophy are
degraded. Positivist philosophy pass everithing down to what-we-know-by-science
of the physical level, that is the only kind of substance that they
admit. this "what-we-know-by-science" makes positivism a moving ground, a kind
of dictatorial cartesian blindness which states the kind of questions
one is permitted at a certain time to ask or not.

Classical conceptions of free will were concerned with the
option ot thinking and acting morally or not, that is to have the capability to
deliberate about the god or bad that a certain act implies for oneself
and for others, and to act for god or for bad with this knowledge.
Roughly speaking, Men
have such faculties unless in slavery. Animals do not. The interesting
parts are in the details of these statements. An yes, they are
questions that can be expressed in more "scientific" terms. This can
be seen in the evolutionary study of moral and law under multilevel
selection theory:

https://www.google.es/search?q=multilevel+selection&sugexp=chrome,mod=11&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

which gives a positivistic support for moral, and a precise,
materialistic notion of good and bad. And thus suddenly these three
concepts must be sanctioned as legitimate objects of study by the
positivistic dictators, without being burnt alive to social death, out
of the peer-reviewed scientific magazines, where sacred words of
Modernity resides.

We are witnessing this "devolution" since slowly all the old
philosophical and theological concepts will recover their legitimacy,
and all their old problems will stand as problems here and now. For
example, we will discover that what we call Mind is nothing but the
old concepts of Soul and Spirit.

Concerning the degraded positivistic notion of free will, I said
before that under an extended notion of evolution it is nor possible
to ascertain if either the matter evolved the mind or if the mind
selected the matter. So it could be said that the degraded question is
meaningless and of course, non interesting.

2012/8/10, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au>:

[meekerdb]

On 8/10/2012 3:10 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts, you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'.

I have never supposed that asleep=unconscious.  When one is asleep, one is still perceptive; just trying whispering a sleeping person's name near them.  This is quite different from being unconscious due to a concussion.

I agree that being unconscious might be a combination of loss of all bodily control plus a loss of memory.  But that seems an unlikely coincidence.  Rather it is evidence that memory is physical and that consciousness requires memory.

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 8/10/2012 5:04 AM, Russell Standish wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:10:43PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote:
>>
>>> It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or
>>> unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the
>>> total.
>> This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point
>> which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including
>> mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts,
>> you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea
>> of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be
>> realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have
>> stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think
>> that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'.
>>
> With due respect to your salvia experiences, which I dare not follow,
> I'm still more presuaded by the likes of Daniel Dennett, and his
> "pandemonia" theory of the mind. In that idea, many subconscious
> process, working disparately, solve different aspects of the problems
> at hand, or provide different courses of action. The purpose of
> consciousness is to select from among the course of action
> presented by the pandemonium of subconscious processes - admittedly
> consciousness per se may not be necessary for this role - any unifying
> (aka reductive) process may be sufficient.

But a course of action could be 'selected', i.e. acted upon, without consciousness (in
fact I often do so). I think what constitutes consciousness is making up a narrative
about what is 'selected'. The evolutionary reason for making up this narrative is to
enter it into memory so it can be explained to others and to yourself when you face a
similar choice in the future. That the memory of these past decisions took the form of a
narrative derives from the fact that we are a social species, as explained by Julian
Jaynes. This explains why the narrative is sometimes false, and when the part of the
brain creating the narrative doesn't have access to the part deciding, as in some split
brain experiments, the narrative is just confabulated. I find Dennett's modular brain
idea very plausible and it's consistent with the idea that consciousness is the function
of a module that produces a narrative for memory. If were designing a robot which I
intended to be conscious, that's how I would design it: With a module whose function was
to produce a narrative of choices and their supporting reasons for a memory that would be
accessed in support of future decisions. This then requires a certain coherence and
consistency in robots decisions - what we call 'character' in a person. I don't think
that would make the robot necessarily conscious according to Bruno's critereon. But if it
had to function as a social being, it would need a concept of 'self' and the ability for
self-reflective reasoning. Then it would be conscious according to Bruno.

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 8/10/2012 7:23 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
> The modern positivist conception of free will has no
> scientific meaning. But all modern rephasings of old philosophy are
> degraded.

Or appear so because they make clear the deficiencies of the old philosophy.

> Positivist philosophy pass everithing down to what-we-know-by-science
> of the physical level,

That's not correct. Postivist philosophy was that we only know what we directly
experience and scientific theories are just ways of predicting new experiences from old
experiences. Things not directly experienced, like atoms, were merely fictions used for
prediction.

> that is the only kind of substance that they
> admit. this "what-we-know-by-science" makes positivism a moving ground, a kind
> of dictatorial cartesian blindness which states the kind of questions
> one is permitted at a certain time to ask or not.
>
> Classical conceptions of free will were concerned with the
> option ot thinking and acting morally or not, that is to have the capability to
> deliberate about the god or bad that a certain act implies for oneself

One deliberates about consequences and means, but how does one deliberate about what one
wants? Do you deliberate about whether pleasure or pain is good?

> and for others, and to act for god or for bad with this knowledge.
> Roughly speaking, Men
> have such faculties unless in slavery. Animals do not.

My dog doesn't think about what's good or bad for himself? I doubt that.

> The interesting
> parts are in the details of these statements. An yes, they are
> questions that can be expressed in more "scientific" terms. This can
> be seen in the evolutionary study of moral and law under multilevel
> selection theory:
>
> https://www.google.es/search?q=multilevel+selection&sugexp=chrome,mod=11&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
>
> which gives a positivistic support for moral, and a precise,
> materialistic notion of good and bad. And thus suddenly these three
> concepts must be sanctioned as legitimate objects of study by the
> positivistic dictators, without being burnt alive to social death, out
> of the peer-reviewed scientific magazines, where sacred words of
> Modernity resides.
>
> We are witnessing this "devolution" since slowly all the old
> philosophical and theological concepts will recover their legitimacy,
> and all their old problems will stand as problems here and now. For
> example, we will discover that what we call Mind is nothing but the
> old concepts of Soul and Spirit.

After stripping "soul" of it's immortality and acausal relation to physics.

>
> Concerning the degraded positivistic notion of free will, I said
> before that under an extended notion of evolution it is nor possible
> to ascertain if either the matter evolved the mind or if the mind
> selected the matter. So it could be said that the degraded question is
> meaningless and of course, non interesting.

But the question of their relationship is still interesting.

Brent

[Roger]

Hi Russell Standish

 

But Dennet has no agent to react to all of those signals.

To perceive. To judge. To cause action.

 

To do those, an agent has to be unified and singular -- a point of focus--

and there's no propect for such in current neuroscience/neurophilosophy.

 

Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say

contradictory. That agent or soul or self you have is your

monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling

agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and

neurophilosophy.

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/10/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Russell Standish

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-10, 08:04:44

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

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[Roger]

Hi Russell Standish

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/10/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Russell Standish

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-10, 08:04:44

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

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[meekerdb]

On 8/10/2012 5:53 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi Russell Standish

 

But Dennet has no agent to react to all of those signals.

To perceive. To judge. To cause action.

If he had an agent he would have failed to explain anything -  he would have just pushed the problem off into the "agent".

 

To do those, an agent has to be unified and singular -- a point of focus--

and there's no propect for such in current neuroscience/neurophilosophy.

But that's Dennett's point.  Humans aren't that way.  They may do something because of X and yet think they did it because of Y.  This is blatant in split brain experiments where the subjects brain on one side makes a reasonable decision based on the information available to it; while the other side, which doesn't have that information, confabulates a completely different story about the decision.  This is most obvious in split brain patients, but it happens to the rest of us too.  There is only one action because a physical body can't do two different things at the same time; but that doesn't mean the person is not of two minds.

Brent

[Russell Standish]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 09:36:22AM -0700, meekerdb wrote:
> But a course of action could be 'selected', i.e. acted upon, without
> consciousness (in fact I often do so). I think what constitutes
> consciousness is making up a narrative about what is 'selected'.

Absolutely!

> The evolutionary reason for making up this narrative is to enter it
> into memory so it can be explained to others and to yourself when
> you face a similar choice in the future.

Maybe - I don't remember Dennett ever making that point. More
importantly, its hard to see what the necessity of the narrative is
for forming memories. Quite primitive organisms form memories, yet I'm
sceptical they have any form of internal narrative.

> That the memory of these
> past decisions took the form of a narrative derives from the fact
> that we are a social species, as explained by Julian Jaynes. This
> explains why the narrative is sometimes false, and when the part of
> the brain creating the narrative doesn't have access to the part
> deciding, as in some split brain experiments, the narrative is just
> confabulated. I find Dennett's modular brain idea very plausible
> and it's consistent with the idea that consciousness is the function
> of a module that produces a narrative for memory. If were designing
> a robot which I intended to be conscious, that's how I would design
> it: With a module whose function was to produce a narrative of
> choices and their supporting reasons for a memory that would be
> accessed in support of future decisions. This then requires a
> certain coherence and consistency in robots decisions - what we call
> 'character' in a person. I don't think that would make the robot
> necessarily conscious according to Bruno's critereon. But if it had
> to function as a social being, it would need a concept of 'self' and
> the ability for self-reflective reasoning. Then it would be
> conscious according to Bruno.
>
> Brent

IIRC, Dennett talks about feedback connecting isolated modules (as in
talking to oneself) as being the progenitor of self-awareness (and
perhaps even consciousness itself). Since this requires language, it
would imply evolutionary late consciousness.

I do think that self-awareness is a trick that enables efficient
modelling of other members of the same species. Its the ability to put
yourself in the other's shoes, and predict what they're about to do.

I'm in two minds about whether one can be conscious without also being
self-aware.

[meekerdb]

On 8/10/2012 4:57 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 09:36:22AM -0700, meekerdb wrote:
>> But a course of action could be 'selected', i.e. acted upon, without
>> consciousness (in fact I often do so). I think what constitutes
>> consciousness is making up a narrative about what is 'selected'.
> Absolutely!
>
>> The evolutionary reason for making up this narrative is to enter it
>> into memory so it can be explained to others and to yourself when
>> you face a similar choice in the future.
> Maybe - I don't remember Dennett ever making that point.

He didn't. It's my idea.

> More
> importantly, its hard to see what the necessity of the narrative is
> for forming memories.

It's not necessary, but it's efficient. As opposed to a tape just recording everything, a
narrative picks out what's important and encodes it relative to what's already known (if
it's routine - forget it). It's also important for social interactions, for explaining
yourself to others, persuading them, lying to to them (liars need good memories).

> Quite primitive organisms form memories, yet I'm
> sceptical they have any form of internal narrative.

I agree. But I don't think they are conscious in a human sense either.

>
>> That the memory of these
>> past decisions took the form of a narrative derives from the fact
>> that we are a social species, as explained by Julian Jaynes. This
>> explains why the narrative is sometimes false, and when the part of
>> the brain creating the narrative doesn't have access to the part
>> deciding, as in some split brain experiments, the narrative is just
>> confabulated. I find Dennett's modular brain idea very plausible
>> and it's consistent with the idea that consciousness is the function
>> of a module that produces a narrative for memory. If were designing
>> a robot which I intended to be conscious, that's how I would design
>> it: With a module whose function was to produce a narrative of
>> choices and their supporting reasons for a memory that would be
>> accessed in support of future decisions. This then requires a
>> certain coherence and consistency in robots decisions - what we call
>> 'character' in a person. I don't think that would make the robot
>> necessarily conscious according to Bruno's critereon. But if it had
>> to function as a social being, it would need a concept of 'self' and
>> the ability for self-reflective reasoning. Then it would be
>> conscious according to Bruno.
>>
>> Brent
> IIRC, Dennett talks about feedback connecting isolated modules (as in
> talking to oneself) as being the progenitor of self-awareness (and
> perhaps even consciousness itself). Since this requires language, it
> would imply evolutionary late consciousness.

I don't recall that Dennett referred to talking to oneself, but that's Julian Jaynes idea
and indeed it makes consciousness very late indeed. According to Jaynes, human
consciousness as we have now didn't come about until the interaction of different tribes
and it become advantageous to lie or at least to conceal your own thoughts.

>
> I do think that self-awareness is a trick that enables efficient
> modelling of other members of the same species. Its the ability to put
> yourself in the other's shoes, and predict what they're about to do.

Yes, but that it a higher-level of self-awareness. Even dogs have awareness of being who
they are (having a name and a location) and even of having a status in the pack. But they
have no need or ability to explain their actions to others.

>
> I'm in two minds about whether one can be conscious without also being
> self-aware.

I think a solitary animal, like a tiger, is self-aware in that it knows where it is,
whether it's hungry or thirsty, that there are other tigers and other animals. But since
it's not social it needn't have a sense of status or position within a society. It
doesn't care what other tigers think. But wolves probably care what other wolves think.
But without language it's hard for this kind of recursive reflection to get very far or
even to be evolutionarily useful.

Brent
"I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members
of a weird religious cult."
--- Rita Rudner

[Stephen P. King]

Hi Roger,

    I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony?

On 8/10/2012 8:53 AM, Roger wrote:

Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say

contradictory. That agent or soul or self you have is your

monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling

agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and

neurophilosophy.

[Alberto G. Corona]

Your questions add nothing to the current duscussion and my time is limited.  Please revise your wrong concept of positivism. It is almost thw opposite of what you think

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[Alberto G. Corona]

The Dennet conception is made to avoid an agent in the first place because i so, it whould be legitimate to question what is the agent made of an thus going trough an infinite regression.

The question of the agent is the vivid intuition for which there are ingenious evolutionary explanations which i may subscribe. But a robot would implement such computations and still I deeply doubt about his internal notion oof self, his quialia etc. The best response to many questions for the shake of avooiding premature dogmatic closeness is to say "we don't know"

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[Roger]

The question of self. Dennet is here expanded through the use of Leibniz's monads

as Kant's categories with self as a supercategory logically including all of Kant's

categories.

 

Dennet has painted himself into a corner by following the materialistic view of mind.

 

The agent or self is a function of mind (Leibniz's dominant monad), not a material thing. 

 

Leibniz and Kant combine through kant's categorial structure of mind shown below.

 

I, II, III and IV are all monads.

 

The self  or agent is not shown directly in Kant's categories. I will call it V.

V contains the other four categories as subsets. V is the self or dominant monad.

It is the active observer and agent.

 

 

                              V Observing self or acting agent (contains Kant's functional categories below as logical

                                        subcategories)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Alberto G. Corona

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 04:08:29

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

The Dennet conception is made to avoid an agent in the first place because i so, it whould be legitimate to question what is the agent made of an thus going trough an infinite regression.

The question of the agent is the vivid intuition for which there are ingenious evolutionary explanations which i may subscribe. But a robot would implement such computations and still I deeply doubt about his internal notion oof self, his quialia etc. The best response to many questions for the shake of avooiding premature dogmatic closeness is to say "we don't know"

El 11/08/2012 07:57, "Stephen P. King" <step...@charter.net> escribi�:
>
> Hi Roger,
>
> 锟斤拷� I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony?

>
>
>
> On 8/10/2012 8:53 AM, Roger wrote:
>>
>> Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say
>> contradictory. That agent or soul or self you have is your
>> monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling
>> agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and
>> neurophilosophy.
>
>
>
> --
> Onward!
>
> Stephen
>
> "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
> ~ Francis Bacon
>
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[Roger]

Hi Alberto G. Corona

 

Agreed. Computers are quantitative instruments and so cannot have a self or

feelings, which are qualitative. And intution is non-computable IMHO.

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Alberto G. Corona

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 04:08:29

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

The Dennet conception is made to avoid an agent in the first place because i so, it whould be legitimate to question what is the agent made of an thus going trough an infinite regression.

The question of the agent is the vivid intuition for which there are ingenious evolutionary explanations which i may subscribe. But a robot would implement such computations and still I deeply doubt about his internal notion oof self, his quialia etc. The best response to many questions for the shake of avooiding premature dogmatic closeness is to say "we don't know"

El 11/08/2012 07:57, "Stephen P. King" <step...@charter.net> escribi�:
>
> Hi Roger,
>
> 锟斤拷� I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony?

>
>
>
> On 8/10/2012 8:53 AM, Roger wrote:
>>
>> Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say
>> contradictory. That agent or soul or self you have is your
>> monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling
>> agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and
>> neurophilosophy.
>
>
>
> --
> Onward!
>
> Stephen
>
> "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
> ~ Francis Bacon
>
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[Roger]

Hi Alberto G. Corona

 

Amen. Well said.

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Alberto G. Corona

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-10, 10:23:24

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

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[Roger]

Hi Stephen P. King

 

As I understand it, Leibniz's pre-established harmony is analogous to

a musical score with God, or at least some super-intelligence, as

composer/conductor.

 

This prevents all physical particles from colliding, instead they

all move harmoniously together*. The score was composed before the

Big Bang-- my own explanation is like Mozart God or that intelligence

could hear the whole (symphony) beforehand in his head.

 

I suppose that this accords with Leibniz's belief that God,

whoc is good, constructed the best possible world where

as a miniomum, that least physics is obeyed.  Hence

Voltaire's  foolish criticism of Leibniz in Candide that how

could  the volcanic or earthquake disaster in Lisbon be

part of the most perfect world ?

 

Thus, because physics must be obeyed, sometimes crap happens.

 

* As a related and possibly explanatory point, L's universe

completely is nonlocal.

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Stephen P. King

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 01:56:41

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

[Roger]

Hi meekerdb

 

Leibniz seems to be the first philosopher (and one of the few) to discuss the

unconscious, which was necessary, since like God (or some Cosmic intelligence), it is an

integral part of his metaphysical system. 

 

In Leibniz's metaphysics, the lowest or "bare naked" monads (as in rocks) are unconscious bodies.

Leibniz ways that they are very drowsy or asleep. They lie in darkness.

 

Animals can feel but not think. Man has conscious thought, feelings, and body intelligence.

And these are non-local (universal), since they (the entire universe) are reflected in man's perceptions,

which are only given to us indirectly, since substances cannot act on one another.

 

This suggest a possible mechanism of myth construction, since all of

man's unconscious thoughts are nonlocal, although to a limited extent.

 

These perceptions (including possibly elepathy) however are limited in scope in man,

since they may be darkened by ignorance and lack of intgelligence and

are always distorted to some exxtent. Only the supreme monad has

perfect vision of everything. Knows all. Does all.

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: meekerdb

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-10, 12:18:46

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

[Roger]

 

Positivism seems to rule out native intelligence.

I can't see how knowledge could be created on a blank

slate without intelligence.  

Or for that matter, how the incredibly unnatural structure

of the carbon atom could have been created somehow

somewhere by mere chance.  Fred Hoyle as I recall said

that it was very unlikely that it was created by chance.

 

All very unlikely things in my opinion show evidence of

intelligence. In order to extract energy from disorder

as life does shows that, like Maxwell's Demon,

some intelligence is required to sort things out.

 

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

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Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-10, 14:05:31

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

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[Roger]

Hi meekerdb

 

 

No, the agent is not part of the material world, it is nonmaterial.

It has no extension and so is outside of spacetime.

Mind itself is such (as Descartes observed).

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

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Time: 2012-08-10, 15:16:55

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

[Bruno Marchal]

The brain parts I was talking about must be enough big and integrated,
like an half hemisphere, or the limbic system, etc. What I said should
not contradict Daniel Dennett "pandemonia" or Fodor modularity theory,
which are very natural in a computationalist perspective.
Only sufficiently "big" part of the brain can have their own
consciousness as dissociation suggests, but also other experience,
like splitting the brain, or the removing of half brain operation(*)
suggest.
The sleeping or paralysis of the corpus callosum can also leads to a
splitting consciousness, and people can awake in the middle of doing
two dreams at once. This consciousness multiplication does echoed
Darwinian evolution as well, I think.
Yet, I am not sure that Darwin evolution is a key to creativity. It
might be a key to the apparition of creativity on earth, but
creativity is a direct consequence of Turing universality. Emil Post
called creative his set theoretical notion of universal probably for
that reason: the fact that universal machine can somehow contradict
any theories done about them, and transform itself transfinitely often.
Or look at the Mandelbrot set. The formal description is very simple
(less than 1K), yet its deployment is very rich and grandiose. It
might be creative in Post sense, and most natural form, including
biological, seem to appear in it. So very simple iteration can lead to
creative process, and this echoes the fact that consciousness and
creativity might appear more early than we usually thought.

I was of course *not* saying that all parts of the brain are
conscious, to be clear, only big one and structurally connected.

Bruno

(*) See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSu9HGnlMV0


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

[meekerdb]

On 8/11/2012 3:33 AM, Roger wrote:

The question of self. Dennet is here expanded through the use of Leibniz's monads

as Kant's categories with self as a supercategory logically including all of Kant's

categories.

 

Dennet has painted himself into a corner by following the materialistic view of mind.

Do you agree with Dennett that we can make a machine that has a mind?

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

On 10 Aug 2012, at 18:18, meekerdb wrote:

On 8/10/2012 3:10 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts, you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'.

I have never supposed that asleep=unconscious.  When one is asleep, one is still perceptive; just trying whispering a sleeping person's name near them.  This is quite different from being unconscious due to a concussion.

OK.

But I think we remain conscious after concussion, except that the first person go through amnesia or sequence of amnesia, and also that the notion of you can momentarily change a lot, and this followed by amnesia. 

I agree that being unconscious might be a combination of loss of all bodily control plus a loss of memory. 

I am not sure. It is conceivable that we can remain conscious and lost all memories. But I thought before that we were still obliged to have a short term memory of the immediate conscious experience itself, so that consciousness implies a short term memory of elementary time events, but I am no more sure about this.

Like Brouwer I related strongly consciousness with subjective time, but I am relinquishing that link since more recently. That's just more doubts and foods for thought!

But that seems an unlikely coincidence.  Rather it is evidence that memory is physical

?

and that consciousness requires memory.

The conscious feeling of identity requires memory, but I am not sure that consciousness needs more "memory" than the minimal number of flip-flop needed to get a universal system, to which I begin to think has already a disconnected form of consciousness. Again, it is not the system itself which is conscious it is the abstract person it represents, or can represent.

Bruno

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

[Bruno Marchal]

OK. Not just a narrative though, but the meaning associated to it.

> If were designing a robot which I intended to be conscious, that's
> how I would design it: With a module whose function was to produce a
> narrative of choices and their supporting reasons for a memory that
> would be accessed in support of future decisions. This then
> requires a certain coherence and consistency in robots decisions -
> what we call 'character' in a person.

OK.

> I don't think that would make the robot necessarily conscious
> according to Bruno's critereon.

I think it would, if the system is universal it will potentially
represent itself, and the consciousness is the meaning attached to the
fixed point. In the worst case, it is trivially conscious.

> But if it had to function as a social being, it would need a concept
> of 'self' and the ability for self-reflective reasoning.

That is already self-consciousness, which ask for one more loop of
self-awareness. Like the K4 reasoners in Smullyan Forever Undecided,
or any Löbian machine (universal machine believe correctly that they
are universal). Robinson arithmetic is conscious (the person defined
by Robinson arithmetic, to be sure), and Peano Arithmetic is already
self-conscious (but still disconnected, without further memories). I
think currently, but I can change my mind on this later.

> Then it would be conscious according to Bruno.

OK.

Bruno

>
> Brent
>>
>> The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian
>> process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian evolution
>> is the key to any form of creative process.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>

[Jason Resch]

As I understand it, the Leibniz's rational for advocating the pre-established harmony idea was Newton's discovery of conservation of momentum.  Descartes knew that energy was conserved, but not momentum.  This would have permitted a non-physical mind to alter the trajectories of particles in the mind so long as the speed of the particles remained unchanged.  Newton's revelation however was that in order for the motion of one particle to be changed, another physical particle must have an equal and opposite change in momentum.  This does not permit a non physical force to change the motion of particles, and hence Leibniz concluded that the mental world does not affect the physical word, or vice versa.  Rather, they were made to agree beforehand (you might think of it as a bunch of souls watching a pre-recorded movie of the physical world, but this pre-recorded movie also agrees with the intentions of the souls watching it).

In Monadology, published in 1714, Leibniz wrote “Descartes recognized that souls cannot impart any force to bodies, because there is always the same quantity of force in matter. Nevertheless he was of opinion that the soul could change the direction of bodies. But that is because in his time it was not known that there is a law of nature which affirms also the conservation of the same total direction in matter. Had Descartes noticed this he would have come upon my system of pre-established harmony.”

Jason

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[Jason Resch]

Roger,

You say computers are quantitative instruments which cannot have a self or feelings, but might you be attributing things at the wrong level?  For example, a computer can simulate some particle interactions, a sufficiently big computer could simulate the behavior of any arbitrarily large amount of matter.  The matter in the simulation could be arranged in the form of a human being sitting in a room.

Do you think this simulated human made of simulated matter, all run within the computer not have a self, feelings, and intuition?  After all, we are made up of material which lacks feelings, nonetheless, we have feelings.  Where do you believe these feelings originate?

Jason

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 5:47 AM, Roger <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:

Hi Alberto G. Corona

 

Agreed. Computers are quantitative instruments and so cannot have a self or

feelings, which are qualitative. And intution is non-computable IMHO.

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Alberto G. Corona

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 04:08:29

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

The Dennet conception is made to avoid an agent in the first place because i so, it whould be legitimate to question what is the agent made of an thus going trough an infinite regression.

The question of the agent is the vivid intuition for which there are ingenious evolutionary explanations which i may subscribe. But a robot would implement such computations and still I deeply doubt about his internal notion oof self, his quialia etc. The best response to many questions for the shake of avooiding premature dogmatic closeness is to say "we don't know"

El 11/08/2012 07:57, "Stephen P. King" <step...@charter.net> escribi�:
>
> Hi Roger,
>

> 牋� I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony?

[meekerdb]

On 8/11/2012 5:13 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi meekerdb

 

Leibniz seems to be the first philosopher (and one of the few) to discuss the

unconscious, which was necessary, since like God (or some Cosmic intelligence), it is an

integral part of his metaphysical system. 

 

In Leibniz's metaphysics, the lowest or "bare naked" monads (as in rocks) are unconscious bodies.

Leibniz ways that they are very drowsy or asleep. They lie in darkness.

 

Animals can feel but not think.

And your evidence for this is?

Man has conscious thought, feelings, and body intelligence.

And these are non-local (universal), since they (the entire universe) are reflected in man's perceptions,

which are only given to us indirectly, since substances cannot act on one another.

?

 

This suggest a possible mechanism of myth construction, since all of

man's unconscious thoughts are nonlocal, although to a limited extent.

 

These perceptions (including possibly elepathy) however are limited in scope in man,

since they may be darkened by ignorance and lack of intgelligence and

are always distorted to some exxtent. Only the supreme monad has

perfect vision of everything. Knows all. Does all.

Brent
Peter: What would you say if I told you there was Master of all we see, a Creator of the universe, who watches and judges everything we do.
Curls: I'd say you were about to take up a collection.
    --- Johnny Hart, in B.C.

[meekerdb]

On 8/11/2012 5:56 AM, Roger wrote:

 

Positivism seems to rule out native intelligence.

I can't see how knowledge could be created on a blank

slate without intelligence.  

Or for that matter, how the incredibly unnatural structure

of the carbon atom could have been created somehow

somewhere by mere chance.  Fred Hoyle as I recall said

that it was very unlikely that it was created by chance.

 

All very unlikely things in my opinion show evidence of

intelligence.

How likely is the shape of Japan?

In order to extract energy from disorder

as life does shows that, like Maxwell's Demon,

some intelligence is required to sort things out.

Life extracts energy by increasing disorder.

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 8/11/2012 6:00 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi meekerdb

 

 

No, the agent is not part of the material world, it is nonmaterial.

It has no extension and so is outside of spacetime.

Mind itself is such (as Descartes observed).

Maybe.  But wherever 'the agent' is, it is a non-explanation of agency.  If you're going to explain something you have to explain it in terms of something else that is better understood.  So to 'explain' mind as being an immaterial agent is vacuous.

Brent

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[Jason Resch]

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 5:14 PM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

On 8/11/2012 5:13 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi meekerdb

 

Leibniz seems to be the first philosopher (and one of the few) to discuss the

unconscious, which was necessary, since like God (or some Cosmic intelligence), it is an

integral part of his metaphysical system. 

 

In Leibniz's metaphysics, the lowest or "bare naked" monads (as in rocks) are unconscious bodies.

Leibniz ways that they are very drowsy or asleep. They lie in darkness.

 

Animals can feel but not think.

And your evidence for this is?

Here is some disproof:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYZnsO2ZgWo

Jason

 

[meekerdb]

That is a point of your ideas which frequently brings me up short. Perhaps it is because
of your assumption of "everythingness", but I see a distinction between what my robot will
be and do, per my design, and what it can *potentially* do. As I understand the defintion
of "universal" it is in terms of what a machine can potentially do - given the right
program when we're referring to computers. But if it is not given all possible programs
it will not realize all potentialities. Yet you often interject, as above, as though all
potentialities are necessarily realized? And this is not merely a metaphysical question.
John McCarthy has pointed out that it would be unethical to create robots with certain
levels of consciousness in certain circumstances, e.g. it would certainly be wrong to have
programmed Curiosity with the potential to feel lonely.

Brent

> and the consciousness is the meaning attached to the fixed point. In the worst case, it
> is trivially conscious.
>
>
>
>
>> But if it had to function as a social being, it would need a concept of 'self' and the
>> ability for self-reflective reasoning.
>
> That is already self-consciousness, which ask for one more loop of self-awareness. Like

> the K4 reasoners in Smullyan Forever Undecided, or any L�bian machine (universal machine

[Russell Standish]

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 03:52:29PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> I was of course *not* saying that all parts of the brain are
> conscious, to be clear, only big one and structurally connected.
>
> Bruno
>

Thanks for this clarification. And to be sure, the split brain example
shows that conscousiousness within a brain need not be unified.

I still think that the vast bulk of brain processes are unconscious,
though. That was the original bone of contention. But I am not a
neuroscientist - others may know better.

[Bruno Marchal]

On 10 Aug 2012, at 20:05, meekerdb wrote:

> On 8/10/2012 7:23 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
>>
>> We are witnessing this "devolution" since slowly all the old
>> philosophical and theological concepts will recover their legitimacy,
>> and all their old problems will stand as problems here and now. For
>> example, we will discover that what we call Mind is nothing but the
>> old concepts of Soul and Spirit.
>
> After stripping "soul" of it's immortality and acausal relation to
> physics.

Comp makes the soul immortal, and it makes the physical reality a
somehow derivative of soul + arithmetic.
The soul here can be defined by the first person notion, or the owner
of the memory/diary, etc.
How many souls are there is an open question (in the comp theory), and
depends on identity criteria, unlike what is derived from comp up to
now.

Bruno

>
>>
>> Concerning the degraded positivistic notion of free will, I said
>> before that under an extended notion of evolution it is nor possible
>> to ascertain if either the matter evolved the mind or if the mind
>> selected the matter. So it could be said that the degraded question
>> is
>> meaningless and of course, non interesting.
>
> But the question of their relationship is still interesting.
>
> Brent
>

[Bruno Marchal]

On 10 Aug 2012, at 14:53, Roger wrote:

Hi Russell Standish

 

But Dennet has no agent to react to all of those signals.

To perceive. To judge. To cause action.

 

To do those, an agent has to be unified and singular -- a point of focus--

and there's no propect for such in current neuroscience/neurophilosophy.

I insist. The self is what computer science handles the best.

I agree with you that it is immaterial, and beyond space and time, which are construct of souls

 

Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say

contradictory.

It is factually contradictory. Leibniz is coherent as he seems to recognize changing his mind on that issue.

Different theories are not necessarily contradictory, when they are not mixed together. On the contrary Leibniz is rather very coherent in each of its different approach, but some followers mix them.

That agent or soul or self you have is your

monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling

agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and

neurophilosophy.

But not in computer science, which is indeed not very well known by neuroscientists.

Bruno

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/10/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Russell Standish

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-10, 08:04:44

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:10:43PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote:
>
> >
> >It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or
> >unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the
> >total.
>
> This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point
> which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including
> mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts,
> you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea
> of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be
> realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have
> stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think
> that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'.
>

With due respect to your salvia experiences, which I dare not follow,
I'm still more presuaded by the likes of Daniel Dennett, and his
"pandemonia" theory of the mind. In that idea, many subconscious
process, working disparately, solve different aspects of the problems
at hand, or provide different courses of action. The purpose of
consciousness is to select from among the course of action
presented by the pandemonium of subconscious processes - admittedly
consciousness per se may not be necessary for this role - any unifying
(aka reductive) process may be sufficient.

The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian
process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian evolution
is the key to any form of creative process.

Cheers

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

On 11 Aug 2012, at 01:57, Russell Standish wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 09:36:22AM -0700, meekerdb wrote:

>> But a course of action could be 'selected', i.e. acted upon, without
>> consciousness (in fact I often do so). I think what constitutes
>> consciousness is making up a narrative about what is 'selected'.
>

> Absolutely!

>
>> The evolutionary reason for making up this narrative is to enter it
>> into memory so it can be explained to others and to yourself when
>> you face a similar choice in the future.
>

> Maybe - I don't remember Dennett ever making that point. More

> importantly, its hard to see what the necessity of the narrative is

> for forming memories. Quite primitive organisms form memories, yet I'm

> sceptical they have any form of internal narrative.
>

>> That the memory of these
>> past decisions took the form of a narrative derives from the fact
>> that we are a social species, as explained by Julian Jaynes. This
>> explains why the narrative is sometimes false, and when the part of
>> the brain creating the narrative doesn't have access to the part
>> deciding, as in some split brain experiments, the narrative is just
>> confabulated. I find Dennett's modular brain idea very plausible
>> and it's consistent with the idea that consciousness is the function

>> of a module that produces a narrative for memory. If were designing

>> a robot which I intended to be conscious, that's how I would design
>> it: With a module whose function was to produce a narrative of
>> choices and their supporting reasons for a memory that would be
>> accessed in support of future decisions. This then requires a
>> certain coherence and consistency in robots decisions - what we call

>> 'character' in a person. I don't think that would make the robot
>> necessarily conscious according to Bruno's critereon. But if it had

>> to function as a social being, it would need a concept of 'self' and

>> the ability for self-reflective reasoning. Then it would be
>> conscious according to Bruno.
>>

>> Brent
>
> IIRC, Dennett talks about feedback connecting isolated modules (as in
> talking to oneself) as being the progenitor of self-awareness (and
> perhaps even consciousness itself). Since this requires language, it
> would imply evolutionary late consciousness.
>

> I do think that self-awareness is a trick that enables efficient
> modelling of other members of the same species. Its the ability to put
> yourself in the other's shoes, and predict what they're about to do.
>

> I'm in two minds about whether one can be conscious without also being
> self-aware.

I tend to think that consciousness is far more primitive than self-
consciousness. I find plausible that a worm can experience pain, but
it might not be self-aware or self-conscious.

Bruno


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

[Bruno Marchal]

On 11 Aug 2012, at 12:47, Roger wrote:

Hi Alberto G. Corona

 

Agreed. Computers are quantitative instruments and so cannot have a self or

feelings, which are qualitative. And intution is non-computable IMHO.

Computer have a notion of self. I can explain someday (I already have, and it is the base of all I am working on).

Better, they can already prove that their self has a qualitative components. They can prove to herself and to us, that their qualitative self, which is the knower, is not  nameable.  Machines, like PA or ZF,  can already prove that intuition is non-computable by themselves.

You confuse the notion of machine before and after Gödel, I'm afraid. You might study some good book on theoretical computer science. Today we have progressed a lot in the sense that we are open to the idea that we don't know what machine are capable of, and we can prove this if we bet we are machine (comp).

Bruno

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Alberto G. Corona

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 04:08:29

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

The Dennet conception is made to avoid an agent in the first place because i so, it whould be legitimate to question what is the agent made of an thus going trough an infinite regression.

The question of the agent is the vivid intuition for which there are ingenious evolutionary explanations which i may subscribe. But a robot would implement such computations and still I deeply doubt about his internal notion oof self, his quialia etc. The best response to many questions for the shake of avooiding premature dogmatic closeness is to say "we don't know"

El 11/08/2012 07:57, "Stephen P. King" <step...@charter.net> escribi�:
>
> Hi Roger,
>

> 牋� I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony?

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

[Bruno Marchal]

On 11 Aug 2012, at 14:56, Roger wrote:

 

Positivism seems to rule out native intelligence.

I can't see how knowledge could be created on a blank

slate without intelligence.  

OK. But with comp intelligence emerges from arithmetic, out of space and time.

Or for that matter, how the incredibly unnatural structure

of the carbon atom could have been created somehow

somewhere by mere chance. 

Hmm... This can be explained by QM, which can be explained by comp and arithmetic.

Fred Hoyle as I recall said

that it was very unlikely that it was created by chance.

 

All very unlikely things in my opinion show evidence of

intelligence. In order to extract energy from disorder

as life does shows that, like Maxwell's Demon,

some intelligence is required to sort things out.

Not sure what you mean by intelligence here.

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

Well, they are realized, in the same sense that the distribution of the primes exist independently of us. But this is used to derive pohysics, and is not relevant for the intelligence and consciousness of universal system, which is an "here and now" physical sensation.

And this is not merely a metaphysical question.  John McCarthy has pointed out that it would be unethical to create robots with certain levels of consciousness in certain circumstances, e.g. it would certainly be wrong to have programmed Curiosity with the potential to feel lonely.

I agree with McCarthy, but Curiosity, as far as I know, has no capability to represent itself enough to feel lonely. His consciousness is still in the disconnected in Platonia. His soul has not yet felt on Earth, well on Mars :)

Bruno

and the consciousness is the meaning attached to the fixed point. In the worst case, it is trivially conscious.

But if it had to function as a social being, it would need a concept of 'self' and the ability for self-reflective reasoning.

That is already self-consciousness, which ask for one more loop of self-awareness. Like the K4 reasoners in Smullyan Forever Undecided, or any Löbian machine (universal machine believe correctly that they are universal). Robinson arithmetic is conscious (the person defined by Robinson arithmetic, to be sure), and Peano Arithmetic is already self-conscious (but still disconnected, without further memories). I think currently, but I can change my mind on this later.

Then it would be conscious according to Bruno.

OK.

Bruno

Brent

The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian

process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian evolution

is the key to any form of creative process.

Cheers

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[Roger]

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

As before, there is the natural, undeniable dualism between brain and mind:

 

brain   objective and modular

mind   subjective and unitary

 

The brain can be discussed, the mind can only be experienced.

 

I  believe that the only subjective and unitary item in the universe

is the monad.  It is the eye of the universe, although for us we

can only perceive indirectly.

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/12/2012

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From: Bruno Marchal

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Time: 2012-08-11, 09:52:29

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 12 Aug 2012, at 14:28, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

As before, there is the natural, undeniable dualism between brain and mind:

 

brain   objective and modular

mind   subjective and unitary

OK. You can even say:

brain/body:   objective and doubtable

soul/consciousness: subjective and undoubtable

 

The brain can be discussed, the mind can only be experienced.

Exactly. I would say the soul, as the mind can be discussed in theories, but the soul is much more complex. We can discuss it through strong assumption like mechanism.

 

I  believe that the only subjective and unitary item in the universe

is the monad.  It is the eye of the universe, although for us we

can only perceive indirectly.

I am open to this. The monad would be the "center of the wheel", or the fixed point of the doubting consciousness. 

The machines already agree with you on this : )

(to prove this you need to accept the most classical axiomatic (modal) definition of belief, knowledge, etc.)

See my paper here for an introduction to the theology of the ideally correct machine:

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html

Bruno

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 6:47 AM, Roger <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:

> Computers are quantitative instruments and so cannot have a self or feelings

Do you have any way of proving that isn't also true of your fellow human beings? I don't.

> intution is non-computable

Not true. Statistical laws and rules of thumb can be and are incorporated into software, and so can induction which is easier to do that deduction, even invertebrates can do induction but Euclid would stump them.

  John K Clark  

 

[Stephen P. King]

Hi Roger,

    I will interleave some remarks.

On 8/11/2012 7:37 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi Stephen P. King

 

As I understand it, Leibniz's pre-established harmony is analogous to

a musical score with God, or at least some super-intelligence, as

composer/conductor.

    Allow me to use the analogy a bit more but carefully to not go too far. This "musical score", does it require work of some kind to be created itself?

 

This prevents all physical particles from colliding, instead they

all move harmoniously together*. The score was composed before the

Big Bang-- my own explanation is like Mozart God or that intelligence

could hear the whole (symphony) beforehand in his head.

    I argue that the Pre-Established Harmony (PEH) requires solving an NP-Complete computational problem that has an infinite number of variables. Additionally, it is not possible to maximize or optimize more than one variable in a multivariate system. Unless we are going to grant God the ability to contradict mathematical facts, which, I argue, is equivalent to granting violations of the basis rules of non-contradiction, then God would have to run an eternal computation prior to the creation of the Universe. This is absurd! How can the existence of something have a beginning if it requires an an infinite problem to be solved first?
    Here is the problem: Computations require resources to run, and if resources are not available then there is no way to claim access to the information that would be in the solution that the computation would generate. WE might try to get around this problem the way that Bruno does by stipulating that the "truth" of the solution gives it existence, but the fact that some mathematical statement or sigma_1 sentence is true (in the prior sense) does not allow it to be considered as accessible for use for other things. For example, we could make valid claims about the content of a meteor that no one has examined but we cannot have any certainty about those claims unless we actually crack open the rock and physically examine its contents.
    The state of the universe as "moving harmoniously together" was not exactly what the PEH was for Leibniz. It was the synchronization of the simple actions of the Monads. It was a coordination of the percepts that make up the monads such that, for example, my monadic percept of living in a world that you also live in is synchronized with your monadic view of living in a world that I also live in such that we can be said to have this email chat. Remember, Monads (as defined in the Monadology) have no windows and cannot be considered to either "exchange" substances nor are embedded in a common medium that can exchange excitations. The entire "common world of appearances" emerges from and could be said to supervene upon the synchronization of internal (1p subjective) Monadic actions.

    I argue that the only way that God could find a solution to the NP-Complete problem is to make the creation of the universe simulataneous with the computations so that the universe itself is the computer that is finding the solution. This idea is discussed by several people including David Deutsch, Lee Smolin, Roger Penrose and Stuart Kaufman in their books. This implies that God's creative act is not a singular event but an eternal process.

 

I suppose that this accords with Leibniz's belief that God,

whoc is good, constructed the best possible world where

as a miniomum, that least physics is obeyed.

    Yes.

  Hence

Voltaire's  foolish criticism of Leibniz in Candide that how

could  the volcanic or earthquake disaster in Lisbon be

part of the most perfect world ?

    Voltair was a poor fool that could not understand the simple idea that only one variable can be maximized. Perhaps he was not a fool and knew the facts but wanted to discredit Leibniz's superior ideas.

 

Thus, because physics must be obeyed, sometimes crap happens.

    Indeed. One might even argue that the existence of evil in the world is a consequence of choice; that only in a world completely devoid of choice might it be possible for crap to never occur. But this can be shown to have a vanishingly small probability or even zero chance of actually occurring, as 1) the NP-Complete problem would have to first be solved and 2) there would have to be a very happy "accident" where no one ever happen to be doing the actions which would lead them to see evil - given that evil is a valuation that occurs in our minds and is not an actual extant state of the world.

 

* As a related and possibly explanatory point, L's universe

completely is nonlocal.

   

    Indeed! I argue that L's monadology almost exactly anticipated the concept of a quantum mechanical system, since a QM system by definition is a windowless monad that never exchanges substances with others and is "simple" by L's definition. All notions of interactions in QM are defined internal to single QM systems as the scattering states of its Hamiltonian. This latter idea was explored and written about by Prof. Hitoshi Kitada as found here: http://www.metasciences.ac/Articles/works.html

[Stephen P. King]

On 8/12/2012 10:47 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 12 Aug 2012, at 14:28, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

As before, there is the natural, undeniable dualism between brain and mind:

 

brain   objective and modular

mind   subjective and unitary

OK. You can even say:

brain/body:   objective and doubtable

soul/consciousness: subjective and undoubtable

 

The brain can be discussed, the mind can only be experienced.

Exactly. I would say the soul, as the mind can be discussed in theories, but the soul is much more complex. We can discuss it through strong assumption like mechanism.

 

I  believe that the only subjective and unitary item in the universe

is the monad.  It is the eye of the universe, although for us we

can only perceive indirectly.

I am open to this. The monad would be the "center of the wheel", or the fixed point of the doubting consciousness.

    By Leibniz' definition, a monad would be the entire consciousness, the "ego" of "i" or "self" of the monad would be the fixed point.

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

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

[Stephen P. King]

On 8/12/2012 2:13 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 8/12/2012 10:47 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 12 Aug 2012, at 14:28, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

As before, there is the natural, undeniable dualism between brain and mind:

 

brain   objective and modular

mind   subjective and unitary

OK. You can even say:

brain/body:   objective and doubtable

soul/consciousness: subjective and undoubtable

 

The brain can be discussed, the mind can only be experienced.

Exactly. I would say the soul, as the mind can be discussed in theories, but the soul is much more complex. We can discuss it through strong assumption like mechanism.

 

I  believe that the only subjective and unitary item in the universe

is the monad.  It is the eye of the universe, although for us we

can only perceive indirectly.

I am open to this. The monad would be the "center of the wheel", or the fixed point of the doubting consciousness.

    By Leibniz' definition, a monad would be the entire consciousness, the "ego" of "i" or "self" of the monad would be the fixed point.

    What I wrote was incorrect. The monad is defined by the closure on the topological space that is dual to the Boolean algebra representing the consciousness. The "I" is the fixed point that is defined in this closure.

[Bruno Marchal]

On 12 Aug 2012, at 20:05, Stephen P. King wrote:

Hi Roger,

    I will interleave some remarks.

On 8/11/2012 7:37 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi Stephen P. King

 

As I understand it, Leibniz's pre-established harmony is analogous to

a musical score with God, or at least some super-intelligence, as

composer/conductor.

    Allow me to use the analogy a bit more but carefully to not go too far. This "musical score", does it require work of some kind to be created itself?

 

This prevents all physical particles from colliding, instead they

all move harmoniously together*. The score was composed before the

Big Bang-- my own explanation is like Mozart God or that intelligence

could hear the whole (symphony) beforehand in his head.

    I argue that the Pre-Established Harmony (PEH) requires solving an NP-Complete computational problem that has an infinite number of variables. Additionally, it is not possible to maximize or optimize more than one variable in a multivariate system. Unless we are going to grant God the ability to contradict mathematical facts, which, I argue, is equivalent to granting violations of the basis rules of non-contradiction, then God would have to run an eternal computation prior to the creation of the Universe. This is absurd! How can the existence of something have a beginning if it requires an an infinite problem to be solved first?
    Here is the problem: Computations require resources to run,

That makes sense, but you should define what you mean by resources, as put in this way, people might think you mean "primitively physical resource".

and if resources are not available then there is no way to claim access to the information that would be in the solution that the computation would generate. WE might try to get around this problem the way that Bruno does by stipulating that the "truth" of the solution gives it existence, but the fact that some mathematical statement or sigma_1 sentence is true (in the prior sense) does not allow it to be considered as accessible for use for other things. For example, we could make valid claims about the content of a meteor that no one has examined but we cannot have any certainty about those claims unless we actually crack open the rock and physically examine its contents.
    The state of the universe as "moving harmoniously together" was not exactly what the PEH was for Leibniz. It was the synchronization of the simple actions of the Monads. It was a coordination of the percepts that make up the monads such that, for example, my monadic percept of living in a world that you also live in is synchronized with your monadic view of living in a world that I also live in such that we can be said to have this email chat. Remember, Monads (as defined in the Monadology) have no windows and cannot be considered to either "exchange" substances nor are embedded in a common medium that can exchange excitations. The entire "common world of appearances" emerges from and could be said to supervene upon the synchronization of internal (1p subjective) Monadic actions.

    I argue that the only way that God could find a solution to the NP-Complete problem is to make the creation of the universe simulataneous with the computations so that the universe itself is the computer that is finding the solution.   <snip>

Even some non universal machine can solve NP-complete problem. 

Bruno

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

[Platonist Guitar Cowboy]

When this cowboy has to write a score, there are always the constraints of what client/audience expect; even if they expect breaking a set of conventions.

But the actual writing, the 1p experience of it, is out of my control. If I am afforded conditions to be allowed to be open for surprise, this control loss is ecstatic and overwhelming, in the sense that I can't keep up with the seemingly "foreign?!" streams of notes and melodies filling my head. Kind of like, when you start dreaming and you're sort of conscious that you're dreaming pre-sleep, then complex imagery/thought starts to unfold "automatically" without our control, at a rate much higher and denser than we would ever be able to code in real time, with interfaces available to us today. Mahler said to Bauer Lechner upon conducting his symphonies later in life: "I don't feel like I wrote the damned things. I feel like I'm conducting somebody else's score." And although I can't write anything close to a Mahler symphony, I feel the same towards "my" own scores.

The craft part, tools of formal music theory and so on, are only useful after this "generation" phase; serving merely to organize, make presentable, to perfume, polish and make palatable the highly dense strings of musical info passing through us all the time (if I remain quiet and thoughtless enough, and my local universe doesn't interrupt, including my analytical thinking, I'll begin to hear it). Contrary to Tom Waits, who is a much better song writer than yours truly, I do not believe that "the muse just happens to strike you when you get lucky". For this cowboy, it's more a problem, to create the conditions that make surprise possible: for me when my analytical faculties are weakened sufficiently.

Yes, I would subscribe to "every symphony/song exists" outside of time or is pre-established. But they are infinite. And they fork infinitely into new songs. I want my musical redundancy pure and free and the problem is all the functional, analytical noise, and biological need's stuff in the way ;)

After I've gone fishing, then the formal theory and craft becomes central; and you discover: Funny, "I" did that, would've never crossed "my" mind...

I've never solved a NP-Complete problem though :)

[Bruno Marchal]

On 13 Aug 2012, at 17:55, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:

When this cowboy has to write a score, there are always the constraints of what client/audience expect; even if they expect breaking a set of conventions.

But the actual writing, the 1p experience of it, is out of my control. If I am afforded conditions to be allowed to be open for surprise, this control loss is ecstatic and overwhelming, in the sense that I can't keep up with the seemingly "foreign?!" streams of notes and melodies filling my head. Kind of like, when you start dreaming and you're sort of conscious that you're dreaming pre-sleep, then complex imagery/thought starts to unfold "automatically" without our control, at a rate much higher and denser than we would ever be able to code in real time, with interfaces available to us today. Mahler said to Bauer Lechner upon conducting his symphonies later in life: "I don't feel like I wrote the damned things. I feel like I'm conducting somebody else's score." And although I can't write anything close to a Mahler symphony, I feel the same towards "my" own scores.

The craft part, tools of formal music theory and so on, are only useful after this "generation" phase; serving merely to organize, make presentable, to perfume, polish and make palatable the highly dense strings of musical info passing through us all the time (if I remain quiet and thoughtless enough, and my local universe doesn't interrupt, including my analytical thinking, I'll begin to hear it). Contrary to Tom Waits, who is a much better song writer than yours truly, I do not believe that "the muse just happens to strike you when you get lucky". For this cowboy, it's more a problem, to create the conditions that make surprise possible: for me when my analytical faculties are weakened sufficiently.

Yes, I would subscribe to "every symphony/song exists" outside of time or is pre-established. But they are infinite.

Yes.

And they fork infinitely into new songs. I want my musical redundancy pure and free and the problem is all the functional, analytical noise, and biological need's stuff in the way ;)

:)

After I've gone fishing, then the formal theory and craft becomes central; and you discover: Funny, "I" did that, would've never crossed "my" mind...

OK.

I've never solved a NP-Complete problem though :)

The classical satisfiability problem of propositional logic is NP complete, so I am pretty sure you did solve some of them. When looking if p -> (q -> p) is a tautology, you do solve a NP-complete problem instantiation. There are two variables, p and q, so you will need 2^2 lines in the truth table. So that truth table algorithm is intractable if the number of variable is too big. With 64 variables you would need 2^64 lines.

NP problem are algorithmically solvable, but not necessarily tractable, and necessarily non tractable in case P ≠ NP, as almost everyone believe, but it is still a major open problem in computer science.

Bruno

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

[Stephen P. King]

On 8/13/2012 9:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 12 Aug 2012, at 20:05, Stephen P. King wrote:

Hi Roger,

    I will interleave some remarks.

On 8/11/2012 7:37 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi Stephen P. King

 

As I understand it, Leibniz's pre-established harmony is analogous to

a musical score with God, or at least some super-intelligence, as

composer/conductor.

    Allow me to use the analogy a bit more but carefully to not go too far. This "musical score", does it require work of some kind to be created itself?

 

This prevents all physical particles from colliding, instead they

all move harmoniously together*. The score was composed before the

Big Bang-- my own explanation is like Mozart God or that intelligence

could hear the whole (symphony) beforehand in his head.

    I argue that the Pre-Established Harmony (PEH) requires solving an NP-Complete computational problem that has an infinite number of variables. Additionally, it is not possible to maximize or optimize more than one variable in a multivariate system. Unless we are going to grant God the ability to contradict mathematical facts, which, I argue, is equivalent to granting violations of the basis rules of non-contradiction, then God would have to run an eternal computation prior to the creation of the Universe. This is absurd! How can the existence of something have a beginning if it requires an an infinite problem to be solved first?
    Here is the problem: Computations require resources to run,

That makes sense, but you should define what you mean by resources, as put in this way, people might think you mean "primitively physical resource".

Dear Bruno,

    "A bounded Turing machine has been used to model specific computations using the number of state transitions and alphabet size to quantify the computational effort required to solve a particular problem." Let us supposed that the states are physical as defined in your resent post:

    "This define already a realm in which all universal number exists, and all their behavior is accessible from that simple theory: it is sigma_1 complete, that is the arithmetical version of Turing-complete. Note that such a theory is very weak, it has no negation, and cannot prove that 0 ≠ 1, for example. Of course, it is consistent and can't prove that 0 = 1 either. yet it emulates a UD through the fact that all the numbers representing proofs can be proved to exist in that theory.

    Now, in that realm, due to the first person indeterminacy, you are multiplied into infinity. More precisely, your actual relative computational state appears to be proved to exist relatively to basically all universal numbers (and some non universal numbers too), and this infinitely often.

    So when you decide to do an experience of physics, dropping an apple, for example, the first person indeterminacy dictates that what you will  feel to be experienced is given by a statistic on all computations (provably existing in the theory above) defined with respect to all universal numbers.
    So if comp is correct, and if some physical law is correct (like 'dropped apples fall'), it can only mean that the vast majority of computation going in your actual comp state compute a state of affair where you see the apple falling. If you want, the reason why apple fall is that it happens in the majority of your computational extensions, and this has to be verified in the space of all computations. Everett confirms this very weird self-multiplication (weird with respect to the idea that we are unique and are living in a unique reality). This translated the problem of "why physical laws" into a problem of statistics in computer science, or in number theory."

    And you also wrote:

"...from the first person points of view, it does look like many universal system get relatively more important role. Some can be geographical, like the local chemical situation on earth (a very special universal system), or your parents, but the point is that their stability must be justified by the "winning universal system" emerging from the competition of all universal numbers going through your actual state. The apparent winner seems to be the quantum one, and it has already the shape of a universal system which manage to eliminate abnormal computations by a process of destructive interferences. But to solve the mind body problem we have to justify this destructive interference processes through the solution of the arithmetical or combinatorial measure problem."

    Does the measure cover an infinite or finite subset of the universals? Does the subset have to be representable as a Boolean algebra? A physical state might be one that maximally exists in universal numbers, but this does not really answer anything. The body problem is still open. But the body problem vanishes if we follow Pratt's prescription! By making physical events and abstract/mental/immaterial states the Stone dual of each other, neither is primitive in the absolute sense. They both emerge from the underlying primitive []<>.

and if resources are not available then there is no way to claim access to the information that would be in the solution that the computation would generate. WE might try to get around this problem the way that Bruno does by stipulating that the "truth" of the solution gives it existence, but the fact that some mathematical statement or sigma_1 sentence is true (in the prior sense) does not allow it to be considered as accessible for use for other things. For example, we could make valid claims about the content of a meteor that no one has examined but we cannot have any certainty about those claims unless we actually crack open the rock and physically examine its contents.
    The state of the universe as "moving harmoniously together" was not exactly what the PEH was for Leibniz. It was the synchronization of the simple actions of the Monads. It was a coordination of the percepts that make up the monads such that, for example, my monadic percept of living in a world that you also live in is synchronized with your monadic view of living in a world that I also live in such that we can be said to have this email chat. Remember, Monads (as defined in the Monadology) have no windows and cannot be considered to either "exchange" substances nor are embedded in a common medium that can exchange excitations. The entire "common world of appearances" emerges from and could be said to supervene upon the synchronization of internal (1p subjective) Monadic actions.

    I argue that the only way that God could find a solution to the NP-Complete problem is to make the creation of the universe simulataneous with the computations so that the universe itself is the computer that is finding the solution.   <snip>

Even some non universal machine can solve NP-complete problem.

    Yes, of course. But they cannot solve it in zero computational steps. Leibniz' PEH, to be consistent with his requirement, would have to do the impossible. I am porposing a way to solve this impossibility.

[Bruno Marchal]

It covers the whole UD* (the entire execution of the UD, contained in a tiny constructive part of arithmetical truth). It is infinite. This follows easily from the first person indeterminacy invariance (cf step seven).

Does the subset have to be representable as a Boolean algebra?

This is ambiguous. I would say "yes" if by subset you mean the initial segment of UD*.

A physical state might be one that maximally exists

... from the local first person points of view, of those dropping the apple and trying to predict what they will feel. But there is no physical state, only physical experience, which are not definable in any third person point of view. A physical state, with comp, is not an object.

in universal numbers, but this does not really answer anything.

Indeed, it is *the* problem, which comp formulate mathematically (even arithmetically).

The body problem is still open.

But a big part is solved.

But the body problem vanishes if we follow Pratt's prescription!

Explain how you derive F= ma in Pratt. I don't see any shadow of this, nor even an awareness that to solve the body problem in that setting. Pratt shows something interesting, not that the body problem has vanished. Or write a paper showing this. None of the ten problem on consciousness exposed in Michael Tye book are even addressed, not to mention the body problem itself.

By making physical events and abstract/mental/immaterial states the Stone dual of each other, neither is primitive in the absolute sense. They both emerge from the underlying primitive []<>.

With wich "[]<>"?

With comp, the universal arithmetical being already got the answer, and answered it.

[]p = Bp & Dt

<>p = Dp V Bf

Bp = the sigma_1 complete arithmetical Beweisbar predicate (Gödel 1931)

Dp = ~B~p

Then we get for the sigma_1 p:   []p -> p, p -> []<>p, and all we need to show that p -> []<>p. It is just my incompetence which provides us to know if this gives quantum mechanics or not. But the theory is there. Comp gave no choice in this matter (pun included!).

and if resources are not available then there is no way to claim access to the information that would be in the solution that the computation would generate. WE might try to get around this problem the way that Bruno does by stipulating that the "truth" of the solution gives it existence, but the fact that some mathematical statement or sigma_1 sentence is true (in the prior sense) does not allow it to be considered as accessible for use for other things. For example, we could make valid claims about the content of a meteor that no one has examined but we cannot have any certainty about those claims unless we actually crack open the rock and physically examine its contents.
    The state of the universe as "moving harmoniously together" was not exactly what the PEH was for Leibniz. It was the synchronization of the simple actions of the Monads. It was a coordination of the percepts that make up the monads such that, for example, my monadic percept of living in a world that you also live in is synchronized with your monadic view of living in a world that I also live in such that we can be said to have this email chat. Remember, Monads (as defined in the Monadology) have no windows and cannot be considered to either "exchange" substances nor are embedded in a common medium that can exchange excitations. The entire "common world of appearances" emerges from and could be said to supervene upon the synchronization of internal (1p subjective) Monadic actions.

    I argue that the only way that God could find a solution to the NP-Complete problem is to make the creation of the universe simulataneous with the computations so that the universe itself is the computer that is finding the solution.   <snip>

Even some non universal machine can solve NP-complete problem.

    Yes, of course. But they cannot solve it in zero computational steps.

? 

Leibniz' PEH, to be consistent with his requirement, would have to do the impossible. I am porposing a way to solve this impossibility.

?

To be sure I am still not knowing if you have a theory, and what you mean by "solve" in this setting.

Bruno

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

[Roger]

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

BRUNO:  This "musical score", does it require work of some kind to be created itself?

 

ROGER:  A Turing Machine (tapes with holes in them) would not be able to see the future,

only intuition and other abilities might do that.  So it could not create itself.

 

BRUNO:  I argue that the Pre-Established Harmony (PEH) requires solving an NP-Complete computational problem that has an infinite number of variables. Additionally, it is not possible to maximize or optimize more than one variable in a multivariate system. Unless we are going to grant God the ability to contradict mathematical facts, which, I argue, is equivalent to granting violations of the basis rules of non-contradiction, then God would have to run an eternal computation prior to the creation of the Universe. This is absurd! How can the existence of something have a beginning if it requires an an infinite problem to be solved first?

Here is the problem: Computations require resources to run,

That makes sense, but you should define what you mean by resources, as put in this way, people might think you mean "primitively physical resource".

and if resources are not available then there is no way to claim access to the information that would be in the solution that the computation would generate. WE might try to get around this problem the way that Bruno does by stipulating that the "truth" of the solution gives it existence, but the fact that some mathematical statement or sigma_1 sentence is true (in the prior sense) does not allow it to be considered as accessible for use for other things. For example, we could make valid claims about the content of a meteor that no one has examined but we cannot have any certainty about those claims unless we actually crack open the rock and physically examine its contents.
The state of the universe as "moving harmoniously together" was not exactly what the PEH was for Leibniz. It was the synchronization of the simple actions of the Monads. It was a coordination of the percepts that make up the monads such that, for example, my monadic percept of living in a world that you also live in is synchronized with your monadic view of living in a world that I also live in such that we can be said to have this email chat. Remember, Monads (as defined in the Monadology) have no windows and cannot be considered to either "exchange" substances nor are embedded in a common medium that can exchange excitations. The entire "common world of appearances" emerges from and could be said to supervene upon the synchronization of internal (1p subjective) Monadic actions.

I argue that the only way that God could find a solution to the NP-Complete problem is to make the creation of the universe simulataneous with the computations so that the universe itself is the computer that is finding the solution. <snip>

Even some non universal machine can solve NP-complete problem.

ROGER:  Your idea of incremental creation could possibly work, not sure.

 

But at least to my mind, the universe has to be a miracle from a physics

(deterministic) point of view. No first physical cause. But that overlooks

intelligence, which to my mind is nonphysical.

 

To me, life is also a mirtacle as was painting the Mona Lisa. 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Bruno Marchal

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-13, 09:19:40

Subject: Re: pre-established harmony

[Roger]

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

I think that your soul is your identity in the form of point of view. 

As we grow up we begin to define or find ourselves not out of any great

insight but pragmatically, out of choosing what tribe we belong to.

We define ourselves socially and culturally. We wear their indian

feathers or display their tattoes and are only friendly to our own tribe

or gang. So a liberal won't listen to a conservative and vice versa.

It greatly simplifies thinking and speaking, and is a dispeller of

doubt and tells us with some apparent certainty on who we are.

 

So Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Bruno Marchal

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-12, 10:47:23

Subject: Re: the unitary mind vs the modular brain

[Roger]

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

Guitar Cowboy describes my own limited-ability process of composing music.

I decide on what audience and what mood, and the rest - at least

the melody-- just pops into my head. Or not.  If it hasn't come

within a few minutes, you can't force things.

 

Mozart, if you look at his manuscripots, simply and rapidly wrote down

his pieces rapidly with nary an erase.

 

And so following Penrose and my own experiences as in

the above, and because I believe that the supremem monad

is Plato's One, I am most of the timne time a Platonist 

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Bruno Marchal

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-13, 12:08:51

Subject: Re: pre-established harmony

On 13 Aug 2012, at 17:55, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:

When this cowboy has to write a score, there are always the constraints of what client/audience expect; even if they expect breaking a set of conventions.

But the actual writing, the 1p experience of it, is out of my control. If I am afforded conditions to be allowed to be open for surprise, this control loss is ecstatic and overwhelming, in the sense that I can't keep up with the seemingly "foreign?!" streams of notes and melodies filling my head. Kind of like, when you start dreaming and you're sort of conscious that you're dreaming pre-sleep, then complex imagery/thought starts to unfold "automatically" without our control, at a rate much higher and denser than we would ever be able to code in real time, with interfaces available to us today. Mahler said to Bauer Lechner upon conducting his symphonies later in life: "I don't feel like I wrote the damned things. I feel like I'm conducting somebody else's score." And although I can't write anything close to a Mahler symphony, I feel the same towards "my" own scores.

The craft part, tools of formal music theory and so on, are only useful after this "generation" phase; serving merely to organize, make presentable, to perfume, polish and make palatable the highly dense strings of musical info passing through us all the time (if I remain quiet and thoughtless enough, and my local universe doesn't interrupt, including my analytical thinking, I'll begin to hear it). Contrary to Tom Waits, who is a much better song writer than yours truly, I do not believe that "the muse just happens to strike you when you get lucky". For this cowboy, it's more a problem, to create the conditions that make surprise possible: for me when my analytical faculties are weakened sufficiently.

Yes, I would subscribe to "every symphony/song exists" outside of time or is pre-established. But they are infinite.

Yes.

And they fork infinitely into new songs. I want my musical redundancy pure and free and the problem is all the functional, analytical noise, and biological need's stuff in the way ;)

:)

After I've gone fishing, then the formal theory and craft becomes central; and you discover: Funny, "I" did that, would've never crossed "my" mind...

OK.

I've never solved a NP-Complete problem though :)

The classical satisfiability problem of propositional logic is NP complete, so I am pretty sure you did solve some of them. When looking if p -> (q -> p) is a tautology, you do solve a NP-complete problem instantiation. There are two variables, p and q, so you will need 2^2 lines in the truth table. So that truth table algorithm is intractable if the number of variable is too big. With 64 variables you would need 2^64 lines.

NP problem are algorithmically solvable, but not necessarily tractable, and necessarily non tractable in case P 锟斤拷 NP, as almost everyone believe, but it is still a major open problem in computer science.

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

[Roger]

Hi John Clark

 

 

1) I can experiencre redness (a qualitative property) while computers cannot,

all they can know are 0s and 1s.

 

2) One can use methods such as statistics to infer something in a

practical or logical sense, eg if a bottle of wine has a french label

one can infer that it might well be an excellent wine. A computer could do that.

 

But one cannot tell other than by tasting it if a wine is truly a good vintage or not.

A computer can't do that.

 

And any creative act comes out of the blue if it is truly creative (new).

Improved jazs would be a good example of that. I believe that

John Coltrane's solos came out of the Platonic world. 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: John Clark

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-12, 13:24:42

Subject: Re: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model

� John K Clark �

�

[Bruno Marchal]

On 14 Aug 2012, at 13:36, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

BRUNO:  This "musical score", does it require work of some kind to be created itself?

? I did not write this.

 

ROGER:  A Turing Machine (tapes with holes in them) would not be able to see the future,

only intuition and other abilities might do that.  So it could not create itself.

A Turing machine is not a tape with holes in them. 

When you say "cannot create itself", I am not sure if anything can create itself. But amoeba and Turing machine can reproduce itself.

 

BRUNO:  I argue that the Pre-Established Harmony (PEH) requires solving an NP-Complete computational problem that has an infinite number of variables. Additionally, it is not possible to maximize or optimize more than one variable in a multivariate system. Unless we are going to grant God the ability to contradict mathematical facts, which, I argue, is equivalent to granting violations of the basis rules of non-contradiction, then God would have to run an eternal computation prior to the creation of the Universe. This is absurd! How can the existence of something have a beginning if it requires an an infinite problem to be solved first?
Here is the problem: Computations require resources to run,

Here you are quoting Stephen, not me.

That makes sense, but you should define what you mean by resources, as put in this way, people might think you mean "primitively physical resource".

Yes, that's from me.

and if resources are not available then there is no way to claim access to the information that would be in the solution that the computation would generate. WE might try to get around this problem the way that Bruno does by stipulating that the "truth" of the solution gives it existence, but the fact that some mathematical statement or sigma_1 sentence is true (in the prior sense) does not allow it to be considered as accessible for use for other things. For example, we could make valid claims about the content of a meteor that no one has examined but we cannot have any certainty about those claims unless we actually crack open the rock and physically examine its contents.
The state of the universe as "moving harmoniously together" was not exactly what the PEH was for Leibniz. It was the synchronization of the simple actions of the Monads. It was a coordination of the percepts that make up the monads such that, for example, my monadic percept of living in a world that you also live in is synchronized with your monadic view of living in a world that I also live in such that we can be said to have this email chat. Remember, Monads (as defined in the Monadology) have no windows and cannot be considered to either "exchange" substances nor are embedded in a common medium that can exchange excitations. The entire "common world of appearances" emerges from and could be said to supervene upon the synchronization of internal (1p subjective) Monadic actions.

I argue that the only way that God could find a solution to the NP-Complete problem is to make the creation of the universe simulataneous with the computations so that the universe itself is the computer that is finding the solution. <snip>

Even some non universal machine can solve NP-complete problem.

ROGER:  Your idea of incremental creation could possibly work, not sure.

If comp is true, nothing is created. All there is comes from the consequence of addition and multiplication of numbers, and what is psychological, physical, theological are numbers dreams. But such dreams obeys laws constrained by computer science.

 

But at least to my mind, the universe has to be a miracle from a physics

(deterministic) point of view. No first physical cause. But that overlooks

intelligence, which to my mind is nonphysical.

With comp even matter is not "physical". This is still mainly ignore, so you might be interested in reading my papers on my URL.

 

To me, life is also a mirtacle as was painting the Mona Lisa. 

Miracle might exist, from inside arithmetic, at the epistemological level, but to invoke them when searching an explanation is not convincing if you don't explain them too.

Bruno

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[Roger]

Hi Stephen P. King

 

Leibniz' best possible world is a conjecture

based on L's two worlds of logic:

 

1) There is logic that is either always true or false, called the logic of reason or necessity.

        One could call this "theory"

 

2) The logic of contingency, also called the logic of "fact", experimental result, 

     or praxis, which can be true or false -- depending on the perfection  of the entity

    or the time of occurrence. "actuality"

 

Most people who acccuse God of injustice or unfairness by a supposedly loving God

confuse theory with actuality. Earthquakes do occur because the world has imperfections

or  cracks ior the cointinental plaes don't fit perfectly together.

 

And any fact must be that way for a reason, the reason also may be contingent, etc.

up the line.

 

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Stephen P. King

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-12, 14:05:46

Subject: Re: pre-established harmony

[Bruno Marchal]

On 14 Aug 2012, at 14:42, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

I think that your soul is your identity in the form of point of view. 

I agree. I use almost that exact definition.

As we grow up we begin to define or find ourselves not out of any great

insight but pragmatically, out of choosing what tribe we belong to.

We define ourselves socially and culturally. We wear their indian

feathers or display their tattoes and are only friendly to our own tribe

or gang. So a liberal won't listen to a conservative and vice versa.

It greatly simplifies thinking and speaking, and is a dispeller of

doubt and tells us with some apparent certainty on who we are.

OK, but that is not the root of the first person self, which can still exist even when completely amnesic.

If not you make the first person "I" a social construct, which it is not.

Bruno

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

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 9:29 AM, Roger <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:

Hi John Clark

 

 

1) I can experiencre redness (a qualitative property) while computers cannot,

all they can know are 0s and 1s.

This statement suggests to me that you are not familiar with the levels of abstraction that are common in computer programming.  Your statement is equivalent to saying: "The human brain can't tell good wine from bad, it is made of atoms, and all atoms are aware of are inter-atomic forces."  It ignores the cell structures, the inter-neuronal connections, the large scale structures of the brain.  All the neurons know are 1's and 0's (are my neighbors firing or not?) yet the very complex large scale structures of neurons can be aware of much more intricate patterns.  The same is true of computer programs.  A computer program might be able to tell if a picture is of a man or woman, this certainly requires more than just knowing 1's and 0's.

While at its most fundamental level, a computer program manipulates and compares 1's and 0's, you can build any system on top of this.  Consider that redness does not course its way down your optic nerve.  All your brain receives is a digital flickering of electrical pulses from nerve cells, not unlike a Morse code sent down a telegraph wire.  At some level of description, the input of redness to your brain is nothing but 0's and 1's.

Google's self driving cars know to stop at a red light and go on green.  Can you be so certain that these cars cannot see some kind of difference between red and green?  Even though the experience might be quite different from our experience of it, the car (if it had reflection and intelligence) might similarly struggle to explain how red is different from green, or how it can know they are fundamentally different.

Jason

[Roger]

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

IMHO Intelligence is the ability to  make deliberate free choices.

One could lie if one chose to.

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Bruno Marchal

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-12, 05:24:48

Subject: Re: Positivism and intelligence

[Roger]

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

IMHO One way of describing the subconscious might be along Freudian lines. The context of a conscious thought,

as in peripheral vision, just out of focus.

 

As in dreams, this context might be in the form of a fuzzy myth, an unclear story, say as presented

by a fortune-teller.  This is how they do their work.

 

Meaning comes from context and stories are a frequent form of meaning. 

We live by myths. Our minds read the tea leaves of memory.

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Bruno Marchal

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-12, 05:30:57

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

That is already self-consciousness, which ask for one more loop of self-awareness. Like the K4 reasoners in Smullyan Forever Undecided, or any L锟絙ian machine (universal machine believe correctly that they are universal). Robinson arithmetic is conscious (the person defined by Robinson arithmetic, to be sure), and Peano Arithmetic is already self-conscious (but still disconnected, without further memories). I think currently, but I can change my mind on this later.

Then it would be conscious according to Bruno.

OK.

Bruno

Brent

The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian

process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian evolution

is the key to any form of creative process.

Cheers

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[Roger]

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

For what it's worth, Leibniz differentiated between ordinary perception

(which would include sentience or awareness) and self-awareness, which he called

apperception.

 

    

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

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Time: 2012-08-12, 04:15:11

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

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[Roger]

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

Well, I feel like Daniel must have felt when before the Giant.

And I can't even find a rock to sling.

 

Nevertheless, as I see it, computers are imprisoned by language (computer code).

Like our social selves.  But like Kierkegaard, I believe that ultimate truth

is subjective (can, like meaning, only be experienced).  Life

cannot truly be expressed or experienced in code.

 

 

 

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

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Time: 2012-08-12, 05:13:01

Subject: Re: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model

On 11 Aug 2012, at 12:47, Roger wrote:

Hi Alberto G. Corona

 

Agreed. Computers are quantitative instruments and so cannot have a self or

feelings, which are qualitative. And intution is non-computable IMHO.

Computer have a notion of self. I can explain someday (I already have, and it is the base of all I am working on).

Better, they can already prove that their self has a qualitative components. They can prove to herself and to us, that their qualitative self, which is the knower, is not  nameable.  Machines, like PA or ZF,  can already prove that intuition is non-computable by themselves.

You confuse the notion of machine before and after G锟斤拷del, I'm afraid. You might study some good book on theoretical computer science. Today we have progressed a lot in the sense that we are open to the idea that we don't know what machine are capable of, and we can prove this if we bet we are machine (comp).

Bruno

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

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From: Alberto G. Corona

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Time: 2012-08-11, 04:08:29

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

The Dennet conception is made to avoid an agent in the first place because i so, it whould be legitimate to question what is the agent made of an thus going trough an infinite regression.

The question of the agent is the vivid intuition for which there are ingenious evolutionary explanations which i may subscribe. But a robot would implement such computations and still I deeply doubt about his internal notion oof self, his quialia etc. The best response to many questions for the shake of avooiding premature dogmatic closeness is to say "we don't know"

El 11/08/2012 07:57, "Stephen P. King" <step...@charter.net> escribi :
>
> Hi Roger,
>

> 锟斤拷 I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony?

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

[Roger]

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

Dennet refers to the self as "the center of narrative gravity".

But if I were reading a novel, the protagonist, not my self, would be

"the center of narrative gravity".   His pains would be my pains, his

joys, my joys. At least, that's what happens to me when I read a novel,

and that's why I keep reading.

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Bruno Marchal

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Time: 2012-08-12, 04:01:49

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

On 10 Aug 2012, at 14:53, Roger wrote:

Hi Russell Standish

 

But Dennet has no agent to react to all of those signals.

To perceive. To judge. To cause action.

 

To do those, an agent has to be unified and singular -- a point of focus--

and there's no propect for such in current neuroscience/neurophilosophy.

I insist. The self is what computer science handles the best.

I agree with you that it is immaterial, and beyond space and time, which are construct of souls

 

Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say

contradictory.

It is factually contradictory. Leibniz is coherent as he seems to recognize changing his mind on that issue.

Different theories are not necessarily contradictory, when they are not mixed together. On the contrary Leibniz is rather very coherent in each of its different approach, but some followers mix them.

That agent or soul or self you have is your

monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling

agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and

neurophilosophy.

But not in computer science, which is indeed not very well known by neuroscientists.

Bruno

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/10/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Russell Standish

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Time: 2012-08-10, 08:04:44

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:10:43PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote:
>
> >
> >It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or
> >unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the
> >total.
>
> This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point
> which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including
> mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts,
> you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea
> of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be
> realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have
> stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think
> that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'.
>

With due respect to your salvia experiences, which I dare not follow,
I'm still more presuaded by the likes of Daniel Dennett, and his
"pandemonia" theory of the mind. In that idea, many subconscious
process, working disparately, solve different aspects of the problems
at hand, or provide different courses of action. The purpose of
consciousness is to select from among the course of action
presented by the pandemonium of subconscious processes - admittedly
consciousness per se may not be necessary for this role - any unifying
(aka reductive) process may be sufficient.

The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian
process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian evolution
is the key to any form of creative process.

Cheers

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Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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[Roger]

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

Memory may be physical, but the experience of memory is not physical.

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Bruno Marchal

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 12:00:54

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

On 10 Aug 2012, at 18:18, meekerdb wrote:

On 8/10/2012 3:10 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts, you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'.

I have never supposed that asleep=unconscious.  When one is asleep, one is still perceptive; just trying whispering a sleeping person's name near them.  This is quite different from being unconscious due to a concussion.

OK.

But I think we remain conscious after concussion, except that the first person go through amnesia or sequence of amnesia, and also that the notion of you can momentarily change a lot, and this followed by amnesia. 

I agree that being unconscious might be a combination of loss of all bodily control plus a loss of memory. 

I am not sure. It is conceivable that we can remain conscious and lost all memories. But I thought before that we were still obliged to have a short term memory of the immediate conscious experience itself, so that consciousness implies a short term memory of elementary time events, but I am no more sure about this.

Like Brouwer I related strongly consciousness with subjective time, but I am relinquishing that link since more recently. That's just more doubts and foods for thought!

But that seems an unlikely coincidence.  Rather it is evidence that memory is physical

?

and that consciousness requires memory.

The conscious feeling of identity requires memory, but I am not sure that consciousness needs more "memory" than the minimal number of flip-flop needed to get a universal system, to which I begin to think has already a disconnected form of consciousness. Again, it is not the system itself which is conscious it is the abstract person it represents, or can represent.

Bruno

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

[Roger]

Hi Jason Resch

 

You got it right. Descartes never troubled to explain how two completely different substances--

mind and body-- could interact. And Leibniz was too hard to understand.

And it was also easy to follow Newton, because bodies acted "as if" they transferred energy or momentum.

 

In Descartes' model, God was external to the mind/body issue, being essentially left out.

So using the Descartes model, God (or some Cosmic Mind), who actually did these adjustments,

could be left out of the universe. And mind was then treated as material.

 

At the time of Descartes and Leibniz, there was a fork in the

road, and science took the more convenient path of Newton and Descartes (materialism),

which works quite well if you gloss over the unsolved mind/body problem ---

until you look for a self or a God or a Cosmic Mind. Not there, as in Dennet's materialism.

 

No wonder scientists are mostly atheists, since God doesn't fit into their model

of the universe. While in Leibniz, God is necessary. for the universe

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Jason Resch

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 14:53:26

Subject: Re: pre-established harmony

As I understand it, the锟絃eibniz's锟絩ational for advocating the pre-established harmony idea was Newton's discovery of conservation of momentum. 锟紻escartes knew that energy was conserved, but not momentum. 锟絋his would have permitted a non-physical mind to alter the trajectories of particles in the mind so long as the speed of the particles remained unchanged. 锟絅ewton's revelation however was that in order for the motion of one particle to be changed, another physical particle must have an equal and opposite change in momentum. 锟絋his does not permit a non physical force to change the motion of particles, and hence Leibniz concluded that the mental world does not affect the physical word, or vice versa. 锟絉ather, they were made to agree beforehand (you might think of it as a bunch of souls watching a pre-recorded movie of the physical world, but this pre-recorded movie also agrees with the intentions of the souls watching it).

In Monadology, published in 1714, Leibniz wrote 锟紻escartes recognized that souls cannot impart any force to bodies, because there is always the same quantity of force in matter. Nevertheless he was of opinion that the soul could change the direction of bodies. But that is because in his time it was not known that there is a law of nature which affirms also the conservation of the same total direction in matter. Had Descartes noticed this he would have come upon my system of pre-established harmony.�

Jason

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 6:37 AM, Roger <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:

Hi Stephen P. King

�

As I understand it, Leibniz's pre-established harmony is analogous to

a musical score with God, or at least some super-intelligence, as

composer/conductor.

�

This prevents all physical particles from colliding, instead they

all move harmoniously together*. The score was composed before the

Big Bang-- my own explanation is like Mozart God or that intelligence

could hear the whole (symphony) beforehand in his head.

�

I suppose that this accords with Leibniz's锟絙elief that God,

whoc is good, constructed the锟絙est possible world where

as a miniomum, that least physics is obeyed.� Hence

Voltaire's 锟絝oolish criticism of Leibniz in Candide that how

could� the volcanic or earthquake disaster in Lisbon be

part of the most perfect world ?

�

Thus, because physics must be obeyed, sometimes crap happens.

�

* As a related and possibly explanatory锟絧oint, L's universe

completely is nonlocal.

�

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Stephen P. King

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 01:56:41

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

Hi Roger,

锟斤拷� I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony?


On 8/10/2012 8:53 AM, Roger wrote:

Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say

contradictory. That agent or soul or self you have is your

monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling

agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and

neurophilosophy.

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

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

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[Roger]

Hi Jason Resch

 

I realize that animals can think to some extent,

I was just using Leibniz' simplified model.

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Jason Resch

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 18:23:30

Subject: Re: Leibniz on the unconscious

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 5:14 PM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

On 8/11/2012 5:13 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi meekerdb

�

Leibniz seems to be the first philosopher (and one of the few)锟絫o discuss the

unconscious, which was necessary, since like God (or some Cosmic intelligence), it is锟絘n

integral part of his metaphysical system.�

�

In Leibniz's metaphysics, the lowest or "bare naked" monads (as in rocks)锟絘re unconscious bodies.

Leibniz ways that they are very drowsy or asleep. They lie in darkness.

�

Animals can feel but not think.

And your evidence for this is?

Here is some disproof:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYZnsO2ZgWo

Jason

�

[Roger]

Hi Jason Resch

 

No, the artificial man does not have a conscious self (subjectivity)  to

experience (to feel) the world. You could show a movie of happenings

in his mind, but there'd be nobody there to watch it. 

 

Only a monad can do that.

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Jason Resch

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 15:01:41

Subject: Re: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model

Roger,

You say computers are锟斤拷quantitative锟斤拷instruments which cannot have a self or feelings, but might you be attributing things at the wrong level? 锟斤拷For example, a computer can simulate some particle interactions, a sufficiently big computer could simulate the behavior of any arbitrarily large amount of matter. 锟斤拷The matter in the simulation could be arranged in the form of a human being sitting in a room.

Do you think this simulated human made of simulated matter, all run within the computer not have a self, feelings, and intuition? 锟斤拷After all, we are made up of material which lacks feelings, nonetheless, we have feelings. 锟斤拷Where do you believe these feelings originate?

Jason

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 5:47 AM, Roger <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:

Hi Alberto G. Corona

锟斤拷

Agreed. Computers are quantitative instruments and so cannot have a self or

feelings, which are qualitative.锟斤拷And intution is non-computable IMHO.

锟斤拷

锟斤拷

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Alberto G. Corona

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 04:08:29

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

The Dennet conception is made to avoid an agent in the first place because i so, it whould be legitimate to question what is the agent made of an thus going trough an infinite regression.

The question of the agent is the vivid intuition for which there are ingenious evolutionary explanations which i may subscribe. But a robot would implement such computations and still I deeply doubt about his internal notion oof self, his quialia etc. The best response to many questions for the shake of avooiding premature dogmatic closeness is to say "we don't know"

El 11/08/2012 07:57, "Stephen P. King" <step...@charter.net> escribi :
>

> Hi Roger,
>
> 锟斤拷 I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony?
>
>
>
> On 8/10/2012 8:53 AM, Roger wrote:
>>
>> Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say
>> contradictory. That agent or soul or self you have is your
>> monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling
>> agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and
>> neurophilosophy.
>
>
>
> --
> Onward!
>
> Stephen
>
> "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
> ~ Francis Bacon
>

> --
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[Roger]

Hi meekerdb

 

Excellent point. My only answer is that the self or agent has to be a monad.

 

because only monads can perceive (although indirectly).

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: meekerdb

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 18:22:55

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

On 8/11/2012 6:00 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi meekerdb

 

 

No, the agent is not part of the material world, it is nonmaterial.

It has no extension and so is outside of spacetime.

Mind itself is such (as Descartes observed).

Maybe.  But wherever 'the agent' is, it is a non-explanation of agency.  If you're going to explain something you have to explain it in terms of something else that is better understood.  So to 'explain' mind as being an immaterial agent is vacuous.

Brent

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: meekerdb

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-10, 15:16:55

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

On 8/10/2012 5:53 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi Russell Standish

 

But Dennet has no agent to react to all of those signals.

To perceive. To judge. To cause action.

If he had an agent he would have failed to explain anything -  he would have just pushed the problem off into the "agent".

 

To do those, an agent has to be unified and singular -- a point of focus--

and there's no propect for such in current neuroscience/neurophilosophy.

But that's Dennett's point.  Humans aren't that way.  They may do something because of X and yet think they did it because of Y.  This is blatant in split brain experiments where the subjects brain on one side makes a reasonable decision based on the information available to it; while the other side, which doesn't have that information, confabulates a completely different story about the decision.  This is most obvious in split brain patients, but it happens to the rest of us too.  There is only one action because a physical body can't do two different things at the same time; but that doesn't mean the person is not of two minds.

Brent

 

Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say

contradictory. That agent or soul or self you have is your

monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling

agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and

neurophilosophy.

--

[Roger]

Hi meekerdb

 

 

No, except in case anyone's interested, there is a hybrid,

which might have a future, the Rat Brain Robot

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QPiF4-iu6g

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: meekerdb

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 11:55:23

Subject: Re: The question of self. Dennet is here expanded through the use ofLeibniz and Kant

On 8/11/2012 3:33 AM, Roger wrote:

The question of self. Dennet is here expanded through the use of Leibniz's monads

as Kant's categories with self as a supercategory logically including all of Kant's

categories.

�

Dennet has painted himself into a corner by following锟絫he锟絤aterialistic view of mind.

Do you agree with Dennett that we can make a machine that has a mind?

Brent

[Roger]

Hi meekerdb

 

Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so everything could function."

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: meekerdb

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 18:14:45

Subject: Re: Leibniz on the unconscious

On 8/11/2012 5:13 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi meekerdb

 

Leibniz seems to be the first philosopher (and one of the few) to discuss the

unconscious, which was necessary, since like God (or some Cosmic intelligence), it is an

integral part of his metaphysical system. 

 

In Leibniz's metaphysics, the lowest or "bare naked" monads (as in rocks) are unconscious bodies.

Leibniz ways that they are very drowsy or asleep. They lie in darkness.

 

Animals can feel but not think.

And your evidence for this is?

Man has conscious thought, feelings, and body intelligence.

And these are non-local (universal), since they (the entire universe) are reflected in man's perceptions,

which are only given to us indirectly, since substances cannot act on one another.

?

 

This suggest a possible mechanism of myth construction, since all of

man's unconscious thoughts are nonlocal, although to a limited extent.

 

These perceptions (including possibly elepathy) however are limited in scope in man,

since they may be darkened by ignorance and lack of intgelligence and

are always distorted to some exxtent. Only the supreme monad has

perfect vision of everything. Knows all. Does all.

Brent
Peter: What would you say if I told you there was Master of all we see, a Creator of the universe, who watches and judges everything we do.
Curls: I'd say you were about to take up a collection.
    --- Johnny Hart, in B.C.

[Roger]

Hi meekerdb

 

You're right, random shapes do not show evidence of intelligence.

But the carbon atom, being highly unlikely, does.

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so everything could function."

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: meekerdb

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 18:20:16

Subject: Re: Positivism and intelligence

On 8/11/2012 5:56 AM, Roger wrote:

 

Positivism seems to rule out native intelligence.

I can't see how knowledge could be created on a blank

slate without intelligence.  

Or for that matter, how the incredibly unnatural structure

of the carbon atom could have been created somehow

somewhere by mere chance.  Fred Hoyle as I recall said

that it was very unlikely that it was created by chance.

 

All very unlikely things in my opinion show evidence of

intelligence.

How likely is the shape of Japan?

In order to extract energy from disorder

as life does shows that, like Maxwell's Demon,

some intelligence is required to sort things out.

Life extracts energy by increasing disorder.

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 8/14/2012 10:22 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi Jason Resch

 

No, the artificial man does not have a conscious self (subjectivity)  to

experience (to feel) the world.

And you know this how?

You could show a movie of happenings

in his mind, but there'd be nobody there to watch it.

I don't think you can show a movie in a mind.  But you could emulate a mind watching a movie.

 

Only a monad can do that.

And a monad is?  a place holder word for 'we don't know'?

Brent

[meekerdb]

Oh. Monads.  Well I'm glad we didn't leave the explanation in terms of something poorly understood like 'agency'.

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 8/14/2012 10:38 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi meekerdb

 

 

No,

Why not?

except in case anyone's interested, there is a hybrid,

which might have a future, the Rat Brain Robot

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QPiF4-iu6g

So the neurons of a rat's brain can constitute a mind, but computer chips with the same functionality can't?

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 8/14/2012 10:42 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi meekerdb

 

Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so everything could function."

And I'd say why can't everything just function by itself?  If "God" is just a placeholder word for "whatever it is that makes things work" it doesn't add much. 

Brent

[Stephen P. King]

On 8/14/2012 6:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 14 Aug 2012, at 07:26, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 8/13/2012 9:19 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 12 Aug 2012, at 20:05, Stephen P. King wrote:

snip

    I argue that the Pre-Established Harmony (PEH) requires solving an NP-Complete computational problem that has an infinite number of variables. Additionally, it is not possible to maximize or optimize more than one variable in a multivariate system. Unless we are going to grant God the ability to contradict mathematical facts, which, I argue, is equivalent to granting violations of the basis rules of non-contradiction, then God would have to run an eternal computation prior to the creation of the Universe. This is absurd! How can the existence of something have a beginning if it requires an an infinite problem to be solved first?
    Here is the problem: Computations require resources to run,

That makes sense, but you should define what you mean by resources, as put in this way, people might think you mean "primitively physical resource".

Dear Bruno,

    "A bounded Turing machine has been used to model specific computations using the number of state transitions and alphabet size to quantify the computational effort required to solve a particular problem." Let us supposed that the states are physical as defined in your resent post:

    "This define already a realm in which all universal number exists, and all their behavior is accessible from that simple theory: it is sigma_1 complete, that is the arithmetical version of Turing-complete. Note that such a theory is very weak, it has no negation, and cannot prove that 0 ≠ 1, for example. Of course, it is consistent and can't prove that 0 = 1 either. yet it emulates a UD through the fact that all the numbers representing proofs can be proved to exist in that theory.

    Now, in that realm, due to the first person indeterminacy, you are multiplied into infinity. More precisely, your actual relative computational state appears to be proved to exist relatively to basically all universal numbers (and some non universal numbers too), and this infinitely often.

    So when you decide to do an experience of physics, dropping an apple, for example, the first person indeterminacy dictates that what you will  feel to be experienced is given by a statistic on all computations (provably existing in the theory above) defined with respect to all universal numbers.
    So if comp is correct, and if some physical law is correct (like 'dropped apples fall'), it can only mean that the vast majority of computation going in your actual comp state compute a state of affair where you see the apple falling. If you want, the reason why apple fall is that it happens in the majority of your computational extensions, and this has to be verified in the space of all computations. Everett confirms this very weird self-multiplication (weird with respect to the idea that we are unique and are living in a unique reality). This translated the problem of "why physical laws" into a problem of statistics in computer science, or in number theory."

    And you also wrote:

"...from the first person points of view, it does look like many universal system get relatively more important role. Some can be geographical, like the local chemical situation on earth (a very special universal system), or your parents, but the point is that their stability must be justified by the "winning universal system" emerging from the competition of all universal numbers going through your actual state. The apparent winner seems to be the quantum one, and it has already the shape of a universal system which manage to eliminate abnormal computations by a process of destructive interferences. But to solve the mind body problem we have to justify this destructive interference processes through the solution of the arithmetical or combinatorial measure problem."

    Does the measure cover an infinite or finite subset of the universals?

[BM]

It covers the whole UD* (the entire execution of the UD, contained in a tiny constructive part of arithmetical truth). It is infinite. This follows easily from the first person indeterminacy invariance (cf step seven).

Dear Bruno,

    Please think about what I am writing here. My words might be wrong, but please try to understand what I am saying.

    OK, the UD* would span all of "time" (the partly ordered sequence of events that are 1p content) is "implied" by that "tiny constructable part" of arithmetically true statements (not truth! Truth is not an object that is accessible nor should be considered or inferred or implied to be). This makes the UD* an eternal process that can be considered to by operating the combinators (or numbers to state is crudely) over and over and over again in a concurrent fashion. The 1p indeterminacy emerges from the span of this process, the UD*. We cannot consistently argue that it is not available in its entirety for any one piece of the UD for the purpose of assigning truth valuations, unless we are going consider the medium on which the UD is running is co-existent with the UD. This is exactly why I argue that a physical world (that is a common delusion of a mutually non-contradictory collection of 1p's) is and must be considered to be on the same ontological plane as the combinators.
    Since the physical worlds cannot be considered to be ontologically primitive (since they require the UD*) then neither can the combinators, as they have no distinguishably (or availability for truth valuations), be considered to be ontologically primitive. Both have to be considered as existing on the same ontological level. Your proposition that we can have a consistent immaterial basis for all existence is simply inconsistent and thus wrong.

Does the subset have to be representable as a Boolean algebra?

[BM]

This is ambiguous. I would say "yes" if by subset you mean the initial segment of UD*.

    We can only make a claim that the sentence that is making that claim is true if and only if that subset can be identified in contradistinction with the rest of the UD*. This is equivalent to locating a single number within an infinite class of numbers. Given that it is a fact that the integers have a measure of zero in 2^aleph_0, then it follows that the initial segment of the UD* has a measure of zero as well. A measure simply does not exist that would select the correct segment and thus we cannot make that claim. It is only as you wrote initially, "this is ambiguous". An ambiguous sentence is not the same as a true (or false!) statement. My claim is that the Boolean Representation criterion is true if and only if there exist a physical implementation of the segment of the UD*.

A physical state might be one that maximally exists

[BM]

... from the local first person points of view, of those dropping the apple and trying to predict what they will feel. But there is no physical state, only physical experience, which are not definable in any third person point of view. A physical state, with comp, is not an object.

    There is no 3p unless there is a Boolean Representation and there cannot be a Boolean Representation without a collection of mutually non-contradictory 1p observations. The 1p indeterminacy must have "room" to put all of the copies out first and then compared to each other (solving the NP-Complete problem) and then and only then can we say that there is a true sentence. Truth is not something that we can access without work. Work is a physical action.

in universal numbers, but this does not really answer anything.

[BM]

Indeed, it is *the* problem, which comp formulate mathematically (even arithmetically).

    I am not the person that knows or even has the capacity to write this up in a formal way, but I do understand it. Mathematical objects are not "symbols" in my mind, they are objects that I can "feel". This is the curse and the blessing of dyslexia.

The body problem is still open.

[BM]

But a big part is solved.

    Yes, but what I am telling you is that all of it can be solved by using Pratt's methodology!

But the body problem vanishes if we follow Pratt's prescription!

[BM]

Explain how you derive F= ma in Pratt. I don't see any shadow of this, nor even an awareness that to solve the body problem in that setting. Pratt shows something interesting, not that the body problem has vanished. Or write a paper showing this. None of the ten problem on consciousness exposed in Michael Tye book are even addressed, not to mention the body problem itself.

    I understand your complaint, but you realize that you are saying that because no one has written up a paper that you can read that 'shows a derivation of F=ma' that there is no solution.

By making physical events and abstract/mental/immaterial states the Stone dual of each other, neither is primitive in the absolute sense. They both emerge from the underlying primitive []<>.

[BM]

With which "[]<>"?

    You know what I mean, my existence theory. Existence is that which is necessarily possible, the sum of all that exists. You know what this is because you use it implicitly with your UD* argument! All of the expressiong of the UD*, those aspects that it represents must either exist on their own or be represented by other things. Representations, such as numbers, can represent only themselves only when they are physical patterns of physical stuff. They are not free-floating meaningfulness.

With comp, the universal arithmetical being already got the answer, and answered it.

[]p = Bp & Dt

<>p = Dp V Bf

    Do the p refer to something or are they empty symbols?

Bp = the sigma_1 complete arithmetical Beweisbar predicate (Gödel 1931)

Dp = ~B~p

Then we get for the sigma_1 p:   []p -> p, p -> []<>p, and all we need to show that p -> []<>p. It is just my incompetence which provides us to know if this gives quantum mechanics or not. But the theory is there. Comp gave no choice in this matter (pun included!).

    I agree, but the very fact that there is a string of symbols "  []p -> p, p -> []<>p " and that string has a truthful meaning, such that p -> []<>p, is because there is a physical world that emerges from the computations that implement us. Let me illustrate the idea with a picture of an piece of art by MC Escher.



    The physical implementation of the picture itself is part of the implied meaning of this picture.

and if resources are not available then there is no way to claim access to the information that would be in the solution that the computation would generate. WE might try to get around this problem the way that Bruno does by stipulating that the "truth" of the solution gives it existence, but the fact that some mathematical statement or sigma_1 sentence is true (in the prior sense) does not allow it to be considered as accessible for use for other things. For example, we could make valid claims about the content of a meteor that no one has examined but we cannot have any certainty about those claims unless we actually crack open the rock and physically examine its contents.
    The state of the universe as "moving harmoniously together" was not exactly what the PEH was for Leibniz. It was the synchronization of the simple actions of the Monads. It was a coordination of the percepts that make up the monads such that, for example, my monadic percept of living in a world that you also live in is synchronized with your monadic view of living in a world that I also live in such that we can be said to have this email chat. Remember, Monads (as defined in the Monadology) have no windows and cannot be considered to either "exchange" substances nor are embedded in a common medium that can exchange excitations. The entire "common world of appearances" emerges from and could be said to supervene upon the synchronization of internal (1p subjective) Monadic actions.

    I argue that the only way that God could find a solution to the NP-Complete problem is to make the creation of the universe simulataneous with the computations so that the universe itself is the computer that is finding the solution.   <snip>

Even some non universal machine can solve NP-complete problem.

    Yes, of course. But they cannot solve it in zero computational steps. 

?

   No computation can solve an NP-Complete problem (or perform any computation) in zero steps. A simple and often forgotten fact.

Leibniz' PEH, to be consistent with his requirement, would have to do the impossible. I am porposing a way to solve this impossibility.

?

    Do you understand Pratt's proposal? His ratmec paper http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf was just a crude sketch of an idea... He discussed some open problems in the Chu_k scheme, but I have some ideas of my own and have found ideas from others that solve most of those.

To be sure I am still not knowing if you have a theory, and what you mean by "solve" in this setting.

    Bruno, I have a disability. I cannot write up a theory in a formal way, just as a mute person cannot speak. It takes me several hours just to write posts like this one as I have to go over it over and over to fix typographical and grammatical errors and I still miss many! But if people like you and me work together we can work of the solution and thus have a formal theory. Honestly, I am not interested in getting credit. I simply want the problem solved and implemented. I am motivated by the things that it will allow, many of which will make our world a better place.

[Stephen P. King]

Dear Roger,

    It was not Bruno that wrote what you are attributing to him below. It was me. I think that he might appreciate that you make attributions correctly. Let me fix the attributions.

On 8/14/2012 7:36 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

Stephen P. King:  This "musical score", does it require work of some kind to be created itself?

 

ROGER:  A Turing Machine (tapes with holes in them) would not be able to see the future,

only intuition and other abilities might do that.  So it could not create itself.

    It does not "locally" create itself, but it does participate in the process that does create it, thus in a sense it does indeed create itself. This is the most important point of Bruno's work, as he hows us a proof of concept of a theory that allows us to understand that the physical world is not an ontologically primitive entity.

Stephen P. King:  I argue that the Pre-Established Harmony (PEH) requires solving an NP-Complete computational problem that has an infinite number of variables. Additionally, it is not possible to maximize or optimize more than one variable in a multivariate system. Unless we are going to grant God the ability to contradict mathematical facts, which, I argue, is equivalent to granting violations of the basis rules of non-contradiction, then God would have to run an eternal computation prior to the creation of the Universe. This is absurd! How can the existence of something have a beginning if it requires an an infinite problem to be solved first?

Here is the problem: Computations require resources to run,

BRUNO: That makes sense, but you should define what you mean by resources, as put in this way, people might think you mean "primitively physical resource".

Stephen P. King:

and if resources are not available then there is no way to claim access to the information that would be in the solution that the computation would generate. WE might try to get around this problem the way that Bruno does by stipulating that the "truth" of the solution gives it existence, but the fact that some mathematical statement or sigma_1 sentence is true (in the prior sense) does not allow it to be considered as accessible for use for other things. For example, we could make valid claims about the content of a meteor that no one has examined but we cannot have any certainty about those claims unless we actually crack open the rock and physically examine its contents.
The state of the universe as "moving harmoniously together" was not exactly what the PEH was for Leibniz. It was the synchronization of the simple actions of the Monads. It was a coordination of the percepts that make up the monads such that, for example, my monadic percept of living in a world that you also live in is synchronized with your monadic view of living in a world that I also live in such that we can be said to have this email chat. Remember, Monads (as defined in the Monadology) have no windows and cannot be considered to either "exchange" substances nor are embedded in a common medium that can exchange excitations. The entire "common world of appearances" emerges from and could be said to supervene upon the synchronization of internal (1p subjective) Monadic actions.

I argue that the only way that God could find a solution to the NP-Complete problem is to make the creation of the universe simulataneous with the computations so that the universe itself is the computer that is finding the solution. <snip>

BRUNO:

Even some non universal machine can solve NP-complete problem.

ROGER:  Your idea of incremental creation could possibly work, not sure.

    It is just a conjecture. It "works" only if it can explain features and phenomena in a way that is better than other alternative ontological theories.

 ROGER:

But at least to my mind, the universe has to be a miracle from a physics

(deterministic) point of view. No first physical cause. But that overlooks

intelligence, which to my mind is nonphysical.

 

To me, life is also a mirtacle as was painting the Mona Lisa.

    I agree! Our experience of a world is itself a miracle. It is sad that it is taken for granted.

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Bruno Marchal

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-13, 09:19:40

Subject: Re: pre-established harmony

On 12 Aug 2012, at 20:05, Stephen P. King wrote:

Hi Roger,

    I will interleave some remarks.

On 8/11/2012 7:37 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi Stephen P. King

 

As I understand it, Leibniz's pre-established harmony is analogous to

a musical score with God, or at least some super-intelligence, as

composer/conductor.

    Allow me to use the analogy a bit more but carefully to not go too far. This "musical score", does it require work of some kind to be created itself?

This prevents all physical particles from colliding, instead they

all move harmoniously together*. The score was composed before the

Big Bang-- my own explanation is like Mozart God or that intelligence

could hear the whole (symphony) beforehand in his head.

    I argue that the Pre-Established Harmony (PEH) requires solving an NP-Complete computational problem that has an infinite number of variables. Additionally, it is not possible to maximize or optimize more than one variable in a multivariate system. Unless we are going to grant God the ability to contradict mathematical facts, which, I argue, is equivalent to granting violations of the basis rules of non-contradiction, then God would have to run an eternal computation prior to the creation of the Universe. This is absurd! How can the existence of something have a beginning if it requires an an infinite problem to be solved first?
    Here is the problem: Computations require resources to run,

That makes sense, but you should define what you mean by resources, as put in this way, people might think you mean "primitively physical resource".

and if resources are not available then there is no way to claim access to the information that would be in the solution that the computation would generate. WE might try to get around this problem the way that Bruno does by stipulating that the "truth" of the solution gives it existence, but the fact that some mathematical statement or sigma_1 sentence is true (in the prior sense) does not allow it to be considered as accessible for use for other things. For example, we could make valid claims about the content of a meteor that no one has examined but we cannot have any certainty about those claims unless we actually crack open the rock and physically examine its contents.
    The state of the universe as "moving harmoniously together" was not exactly what the PEH was for Leibniz. It was the synchronization of the simple actions of the Monads. It was a coordination of the percepts that make up the monads such that, for example, my monadic percept of living in a world that you also live in is synchronized with your monadic view of living in a world that I also live in such that we can be said to have this email chat. Remember, Monads (as defined in the Monadology) have no windows and cannot be considered to either "exchange" substances nor are embedded in a common medium that can exchange excitations. The entire "common world of appearances" emerges from and could be said to supervene upon the synchronization of internal (1p subjective) Monadic actions.

    I argue that the only way that God could find a solution to the NP-Complete problem is to make the creation of the universe simulataneous with the computations so that the universe itself is the computer that is finding the solution.   <snip>

Even some non universal machine can solve NP-complete problem. 

Bruno

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

[Stephen P. King]

On 8/14/2012 10:45 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi Stephen P. King

 

Leibniz' best possible world is a conjecture

based on L's two worlds of logic:

 

1) There is logic that is either always true or false, called the logic of reason or necessity.

        One could call this "theory"

 

2) The logic of contingency, also called the logic of "fact", experimental result, 

     or praxis, which can be true or false -- depending on the perfection  of the entity

    or the time of occurrence. "actuality"

 

Most people who acccuse God of injustice or unfairness by a supposedly loving God

confuse theory with actuality. Earthquakes do occur because the world has imperfections

or  cracks ior the cointinental plaes don't fit perfectly together.

 

And any fact must be that way for a reason, the reason also may be contingent, etc.

up the line.

 

 Dear Roger,

    The "best possible world" that we have is only the one that is mutually consistent for the collections of mutually interacting (and thus communicating) observers (which we are a member of). All other features and valuations are not any kind of optimum other than the result of our collective choices. This is how free will is compatible with a deterministic physical universe.

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[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:

On 8/14/2012 10:45 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi Stephen P. King

 

Leibniz' best possible world is a conjecture

based on L's two worlds of logic:

 

1) There is logic that is either always true or false, called the logic of reason or necessity.

        One could call this "theory"

 

2) The logic of contingency, also called the logic of "fact", experimental result, 

     or praxis, which can be true or false -- depending on the perfection  of the entity

    or the time of occurrence. "actuality"

 

Most people who acccuse God of injustice or unfairness by a supposedly loving God

confuse theory with actuality. Earthquakes do occur because the world has imperfections

or  cracks ior the cointinental plaes don't fit perfectly together.

 

And any fact must be that way for a reason, the reason also may be contingent, etc.

up the line.

 

"Everything that is possible demands to exist." -- Leibniz

If everything possible exists (in Plato's heaven / the omniscient mind of God) then so do all universes, all possible histories, all possible observations and experiences, all points of view, all traces of the execution of all programs, etc.  Thus, if God is omniscient, he can't help the fact that bad things happen.

Jason

[Craig Weinberg]

On Saturday, August 11, 2012 3:01:41 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:

Roger,

You say computers are quantitative instruments which cannot have a self or feelings, but might you be attributing things at the wrong level?  For example, a computer can simulate some particle interactions, a sufficiently big computer could simulate the behavior of any arbitrarily large amount of matter.  The matter in the simulation could be arranged in the form of a human being sitting in a room.

Does that mean that if I carefully scooped some salt or iron filings into a cymatic pattern, that we should have an expectation of a sound being produced automatically?
 

Do you think this simulated human made of simulated matter, all run within the computer not have a self, feelings, and intuition?

The simulated human won't even have an 'it'-ness. The simulation only exists for us because it is designed specifically to exploit our expectations. There is no simulation, just millions of little salt scoopers.
 

 After all, we are made up of material which lacks feelings, nonetheless, we have feelings.

That's like saying that a photograph is made up of pixels which lack image. Since the nature of consciousness is privacy, we are not the best judge of non-human consciousness. There is no reason to trust our naive realism in assuming that non-humans lack proto-feelings.

"Complex behavior is not confined to metazoans. Both amoebae and ciliates show purposive coordinated behaviour, as do individual human cells, such as macrophages. The multi-nucleate slime mould Physarum polycephalum can solve shortest path mazes and demonstrate a memory of a rhythmic series of stimuli, apparently using a biological clock to predict the next pulse (Nakagaki et. al. 2000, Ball 2008)." - http://www.dhushara.com/cosfcos/cosfcos2.html

 

 Where do you believe these feelings originate?

Feelings may not originate, but like the colors of the spectrum are accessed privately but have no public origination. As long as we assume that experience is something which occurs as the product of a mechanism, then we are limited to making sense of the universe as a meaningless mechanism of objects. If we think of time and space as the experiential cancellations, I think we have a better chance of understanding how it all fits together.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On Tuesday, August 14, 2012 2:25:31 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

So the neurons of a rat's brain can constitute a mind, but computer chips with the same functionality can't?

Brent

It's begging the question to say the computer chips have 'the same functionality' as a rat's brain and then presume to claim that demonstrates functional equivalence.

The whole question is what is meant by functionality. Do the computer chips metabolize oxygen? Do they produce antibodies to rat viruses? Again I point to my cymatics example. I can generate cymatic patterns on a monitor screen using computer chips without there being any sound associated with their production at all. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that any computer chip could ever have 'the same function' as a living cell. Function is a transactional relation, it is necessary but not sufficient to assure awareness.

Craig

[Stephen P. King]

Hi Jason,

    Yes, all that is necessarily possible exists. This makes existence neutral and having nothing to do with anything else. Properties arise from partitioning portions of what exists against each other. Properties, like truth values and locations, are not a priori. They are contextual and thus contingent. Existence is not contingent on anything other than raw necessary possibility.

[meekerdb]

On 8/14/2012 6:24 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Tuesday, August 14, 2012 2:25:31 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

So the neurons of a rat's brain can constitute a mind, but computer chips with the same functionality can't?

Brent

It's begging the question to say the computer chips have 'the same functionality' as a rat's brain and then presume to claim that demonstrates functional equivalence.

The whole question is what is meant by functionality. Do the computer chips metabolize oxygen? Do they produce antibodies to rat viruses?

Do they make the little cybot do the same things?

Again I point to my cymatics example. I can generate cymatic patterns on a monitor screen using computer chips without there being any sound associated with their production at all. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that any computer chip could ever have 'the same function' as a living cell. Function is a transactional relation, it is necessary but not sufficient to assure awareness.

And you know this how?

Brent

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 8:13 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, August 11, 2012 3:01:41 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:

Roger,

You say computers are quantitative instruments which cannot have a self or feelings, but might you be attributing things at the wrong level?  For example, a computer can simulate some particle interactions, a sufficiently big computer could simulate the behavior of any arbitrarily large amount of matter.  The matter in the simulation could be arranged in the form of a human being sitting in a room.

Does that mean that if I carefully scooped some salt or iron filings into a cymatic pattern, that we should have an expectation of a sound being produced automatically?

No, but it means if I replaced part of your auditory cortex with mechanical parts that provided the same electrochemical signals to the neurons that interfaced with your old auditory cortex, you would be able to hear.  At what point could I stop replacing neighboring neurons with mechanical parts?  Could I replace all but one neuron?  What happens if I replace that last one?

 

 

Do you think this simulated human made of simulated matter, all run within the computer not have a self, feelings, and intuition?

The simulated human won't even have an 'it'-ness. The simulation only exists for us because it is designed specifically to exploit our expectations. There is no simulation, just millions of little salt scoopers.

So a computer that is adding is not really adding?  You suggest that a computer is only adding if it outputs the numbers in a way humans can look at it and interpret it as addition?

 

 

 After all, we are made up of material which lacks feelings, nonetheless, we have feelings.

That's like saying that a photograph is made up of pixels which lack image. Since the nature of consciousness is privacy, we are not the best judge of non-human consciousness. There is no reason to trust our naive realism in assuming that non-humans lack proto-feelings.

Do electrons posses proto-feelings for every possible human emotion?  If not, when or where do these more complex feelings come in?

Jason

 

"Complex behavior is not confined to metazoans. Both amoebae and ciliates show purposive coordinated behaviour, as do individual human cells, such as macrophages. The multi-nucleate slime mould Physarum polycephalum can solve shortest path mazes and demonstrate a memory of a rhythmic series of stimuli, apparently using a biological clock to predict the next pulse (Nakagaki et. al. 2000, Ball 2008)." - http://www.dhushara.com/cosfcos/cosfcos2.html

 

 Where do you believe these feelings originate?

Feelings may not originate, but like the colors of the spectrum are accessed privately but have no public origination. As long as we assume that experience is something which occurs as the product of a mechanism, then we are limited to making sense of the universe as a meaningless mechanism of objects. If we think of time and space as the experiential cancellations, I think we have a better chance of understanding how it all fits together.

Craig

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 14 Aug 2012, at 16:29, Roger wrote:

Hi John Clark

 

 

1) I can experiencre redness (a qualitative property) while computers cannot,

all they can know are 0s and 1s.

That is not valid. You could say that abrain can know only potential differences and spiking neuron.

Of course you confuse level of description. In both case, brain an computer, it is a higher level entity which do the thinking.

 

2) One can use methods such as statistics to infer something in a

practical or logical sense, eg if a bottle of wine has a french label

one can infer that it might well be an excellent wine. A computer could do that.

 

But one cannot tell other than by tasting it if a wine is truly a good vintage or not.

A computer can't do that.

Actually this is already refuted. I read that some program already taste wine better than french experts.

 

And any creative act comes out of the blue if it is truly creative (new).

"new" is relative.

Improved jazs would be a good example of that. I believe that

John Coltrane's solos came out of the Platonic world. 

Google on MUSINUM to see, and perhaps download, a very impressive software composing music (melody and rhythm) from the numbers. Numbers love music, I would say. Natural numbers can be said to have been discovered in waves and music, in great part.

You must not compare humans and present machines, as the first originate from a long (deep) computational history, and the second are very recent. Better to reason from the (mathematical, abstract) definition of (digital) machine.

Bruno

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: John Clark

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-12, 13:24:42

Subject: Re: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 6:47 AM, Roger <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:

> Computers are quantitative instruments and so cannot have a self or feelings

Do you have any way of proving that isn't also true of your fellow human beings? I don't.

> intution is non-computable

Not true. Statistical laws and rules of thumb can be and are incorporated into software, and so can induction which is easier to do that deduction, even invertebrates can do induction but Euclid would stump them.

� John K Clark �

�

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[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Roger,

On 14 Aug 2012, at 17:30, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

IMHO Intelligence is the ability to  make deliberate free choices.

One could lie if one chose to.

I am OK with this. Löbian machines too. (Löbian machine = universal machine capable of knowing that they are universal). They can prove that if they never communicate a lie, they it is consistent that they can communicate a lie. That is basically Gödel's second incompleteness theorem, and it is a well known fact, already seen by Gödel in 1931 (but proved by Hilbert and Bernays rigorously later). To be sure, Gödel's statement was more general, but can be used to build a counter-example to your statement.

Bruno

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Bruno Marchal

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-12, 05:24:48

Subject: Re: Positivism and intelligence

On 11 Aug 2012, at 14:56, Roger wrote:

 

Positivism seems to rule out native intelligence.

I can't see how knowledge could be created on a blank

slate without intelligence.  

OK. But with comp intelligence emerges from arithmetic, out of space and time.

Or for that matter, how the incredibly unnatural structure

of the carbon atom could have been created somehow

somewhere by mere chance. 

Hmm... This can be explained by QM, which can be explained by comp and arithmetic.

Fred Hoyle as I recall said

that it was very unlikely that it was created by chance.

 

All very unlikely things in my opinion show evidence of

intelligence. In order to extract energy from disorder

as life does shows that, like Maxwell's Demon,

some intelligence is required to sort things out.

Not sure what you mean by intelligence here.

Bruno

 

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: meekerdb

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-10, 14:05:31

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

On 8/10/2012 7:23 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
> The modern positivist conception of free will has no
> scientific meaning. But all modern rephasings of old philosophy are
> degraded.

Or appear so because they make clear the deficiencies of the old philosophy.

> Positivist philosophy pass everithing down to what-we-know-by-science
> of the physical level,

That's not correct. Postivist philosophy was that we only know what we directly
experience and scientific theories are just ways of predicting new experiences from old
experiences. Things not directly experienced, like atoms, were merely fictions used for
prediction.

> that is the only kind of substance that they
> admit. this "what-we-know-by-science" makes positivism a moving ground, a kind
> of dictatorial cartesian blindness which states the kind of questions
> one is permitted at a certain time to ask or not.
>
> Classical conceptions of free will were concerned with the
> option ot thinking and acting morally or not, that is to have the capability to
> deliberate about the god or bad that a certain act implies for oneself

One deliberates about consequences and means, but how does one deliberate about what one
wants? Do you deliberate about whether pleasure or pain is good?

> and for others, and to act for god or for bad with this knowledge.
> Roughly speaking, Men
> have such faculties unless in slavery. Animals do not.

My dog doesn't think about what's good or bad for himself? I doubt that.

> The interesting
> parts are in the details of these statements. An yes, they are
> questions that can be expressed in more "scientific" terms. This can
> be seen in the evolutionary study of moral and law under multilevel
> selection theory:
>
> https://www.google.es/search?q=multilevel+selection&sugexp=chrome,mod=11&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
>
> which gives a positivistic support for moral, and a precise,
> materialistic notion of good and bad. And thus suddenly these three
> concepts must be sanctioned as legitimate objects of study by the
> positivistic dictators, without being burnt alive to social death, out
> of the peer-reviewed scientific magazines, where sacred words of
> Modernity resides.
>
> We are witnessing this "devolution" since slowly all the old
> philosophical and theological concepts will recover their legitimacy,
> and all their old problems will stand as problems here and now. For
> example, we will discover that what we call Mind is nothing but the
> old concepts of Soul and Spirit.

After stripping "soul" of it's immortality and acausal relation to physics.

>
> Concerning the degraded positivistic notion of free will, I said
> before that under an extended notion of evolution it is nor possible
> to ascertain if either the matter evolved the mind or if the mind
> selected the matter. So it could be said that the degraded question is
> meaningless and of course, non interesting.

But the question of their relationship is still interesting.

Brent

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 14 Aug 2012, at 18:11, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

For what it's worth, Leibniz differentiated between ordinary perception

(which would include sentience or awareness) and self-awareness, which he called

apperception.

That difference is well approximated or quasi-explained by the difference between Universality, and what I call to be short Löbianity. Universal machine might be conscious, and Löbian machine are self-conscious. They have just one reflexive loop more, and it can be shown that you cannot add a nex reflexive loop to make them different. It is basically the difference between a simple first order specification of a universal machine, and the same + some induction axiom. It is the difference between Robinson Arithmetic (successor, addition + multiplication axioms and rules) and Peano Arithmetic (the same as Robinson + the shema of induction axioms).

The induction axioms makes possible to the self to prove its own Löbianity, and to give to the machine a sort of maximal self-referential ability (well studied in mathematical logic, but not so much well known, apart from logicians).

Bruno

 

    

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Bruno Marchal

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-12, 04:15:11

Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!

On 11 Aug 2012, at 01:57, Russell Standish wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 09:36:22AM -0700, meekerdb wrote:
>> But a course of action could be 'selected', i.e. acted upon, without
>> consciousness (in fact I often do so). I think what constitutes
>> consciousness is making up a narrative about what is 'selected'.
>
> Absolutely!
>
>> The evolutionary reason for making up this narrative is to enter it
>> into memory so it can be explained to others and to yourself when
>> you face a similar choice in the future.
>
> Maybe - I don't remember Dennett ever making that point. More
> importantly, its hard to see what the necessity of the narrative is
> for forming memories. Quite primitive organisms form memories, yet I'm
> sceptical they have any form of internal narrative.
>
>> That the memory of these
>> past decisions took the form of a narrative derives from the fact
>> that we are a social species, as explained by Julian Jaynes. This
>> explains why the narrative is sometimes false, and when the part of
>> the brain creating the narrative doesn't have access to the part
>> deciding, as in some split brain experiments, the narrative is just
>> confabulated. I find Dennett's modular brain idea very plausible
>> and it's consistent with the idea that consciousness is the function
>> of a module that produces a narrative for memory. If were designing
>> a robot which I intended to be conscious, that's how I would design
>> it: With a module whose function was to produce a narrative of
>> choices and their supporting reasons for a memory that would be
>> accessed in support of future decisions. This then requires a
>> certain coherence and consistency in robots decisions - what we call
>> 'character' in a person. I don't think that would make the robot
>> necessarily conscious according to Bruno's critereon. But if it had
>> to function as a social being, it would need a concept of 'self' and
>> the ability for self-reflective reasoning. Then it would be
>> conscious according to Bruno.
>>
>> Brent
>
> IIRC, Dennett talks about feedback connecting isolated modules (as in
> talking to oneself) as being the progenitor of self-awareness (and
> perhaps even consciousness itself). Since this requires language, it
> would imply evolutionary late consciousness.
>
> I do think that self-awareness is a trick that enables efficient
> modelling of other members of the same species. Its the ability to put
> yourself in the other's shoes, and predict what they're about to do.
>
> I'm in two minds about whether one can be conscious without also being
> self-aware.

I tend to think that consciousness is far more primitive than self-
consciousness. I find plausible that a worm can experience pain, but
it might not be self-aware or self-conscious.

Bruno

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



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[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Roger,

On 14 Aug 2012, at 18:26, Roger wrote:

Hi Bruno Marchal

 

Well, I feel like Daniel must have felt when before the Giant.

And I can't even find a rock to sling.

 

Nevertheless, as I see it, computers are imprisoned by language (computer code).

Like our social selves.  But like Kierkegaard, I believe that ultimate truth

is subjective (can, like meaning, only be experienced).  Life

cannot truly be expressed or experienced in code.

No problem for comp here. We have discovered that machine, when looking inward tend to perceive, or experience many truth which are beyond words. There is a logic (S4Grz) which formalize at the meta-level that non-formalizable (at the ontological level) informal process of though. I wrote (and published) recently a paper on this, (the mystical machine, in french) but it is what I try to explain here since a long time. Machines have already a non formalizable (by themselves) intuition. Indeed self-referentally correct machine have a rich, neoplatonist-like, theology. On my url front page, you can download my paper on an arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus, made possible (and necessary in some sense) by computer science.

Bruno

 

 

 

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Bruno Marchal

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-12, 05:13:01

Subject: Re: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model

On 11 Aug 2012, at 12:47, Roger wrote:

Hi Alberto G. Corona

 

Agreed. Computers are quantitative instruments and so cannot have a self or

feelings, which are qualitative. And intution is non-computable IMHO.

Computer have a notion of self. I can explain someday (I already have, and it is the base of all I am working on).

Better, they can already prove that their self has a qualitative components. They can prove to herself and to us, that their qualitative self, which is the knower, is not  nameable.  Machines, like PA or ZF,  can already prove that intuition is non-computable by themselves.

You confuse the notion of machine before and after G　del, I'm afraid. You might study some good book on theoretical computer science. Today we have progressed a lot in the sense that we are open to the idea that we don't know what machine are capable of, and we can prove this if we bet we are machine (comp).

Bruno

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Alberto G. Corona

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 04:08:29

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

The Dennet conception is made to avoid an agent in the first place because i so, it whould be legitimate to question what is the agent made of an thus going trough an infinite regression.

The question of the agent is the vivid intuition for which there are ingenious evolutionary explanations which i may subscribe. But a robot would implement such computations and still I deeply doubt about his internal notion oof self, his quialia etc. The best response to many questions for the shake of avooiding premature dogmatic closeness is to say "we don't know"

El 11/08/2012 07:57, "Stephen P. King" <step...@charter.net> escribi :
>
> Hi Roger,
>

> 牋 I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony?

>
>
>
> On 8/10/2012 8:53 AM, Roger wrote:
>>
>> Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say
>> contradictory. That agent or soul or self you have is your
>> monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling
>> agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and
>> neurophilosophy.
>
>
>

> --
> Onward!
>
> Stephen
>
> "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
> ~ Francis Bacon
>

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 14 Aug 2012, at 18:43, Roger wrote:

 

Memory may be physical, but the experience of memory is not physical.

memory is not physical. Some memories look physical in some arithmetical situation. Keep in mind that mechanism does not allow any notion of primitive physicalness. That's the point I proved. Some people keep pretending seeing a flaw, but when asked, and when they comply, they make simple error in logic, or just assert their philosophical disbelief.

Matter is a myth. ('Matter' = primary matter).

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 14 Aug 2012, at 19:14, Roger wrote:

Hi Jason Resch

 

You got it right. Descartes never troubled to explain how two completely different substances--

mind and body-- could interact. And Leibniz was too hard to understand.

And it was also easy to follow Newton, because bodies acted "as if" they transferred energy or momentum.

 

In Descartes' model, God was external to the mind/body issue, being essentially left out.

Not in the meditation. God is needed, actually the goodness of God is needed to avoid the dream argument consequence. When you feel something real, it is real, because God will not lie to you, basically. I don't follow Descartes, on this, but his text "In search of the truth" makes me think that Descartes was himself not quite glad with this.

So using the Descartes model, God (or some Cosmic Mind), who actually did these adjustments,

could be left out of the universe. And mind was then treated as material.

 

At the time of Descartes and Leibniz, there was a fork in the

road, and science took the more convenient path of Newton and Descartes (materialism),

which works quite well if you gloss over the unsolved mind/body problem ---

until you look for a self or a God or a Cosmic Mind. Not there, as in Dennet's materialism.

 

No wonder scientists are mostly atheists, since God doesn't fit into their model

of the universe. While in Leibniz, God is necessary. for the universe

In my opinion, Descartes too, but was perhaps willingly unclear to avoid problems with the authorities.

Bruno

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Jason Resch

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 14:53:26

Subject: Re: pre-established harmony

As I understand it, the燣eibniz's爎ational for advocating the pre-established harmony idea was Newton's discovery of conservation of momentum. 燚escartes knew that energy was conserved, but not momentum. 燭his would have permitted a non-physical mind to alter the trajectories of particles in the mind so long as the speed of the particles remained unchanged. 燦ewton's revelation however was that in order for the motion of one particle to be changed, another physical particle must have an equal and opposite change in momentum. 燭his does not permit a non physical force to change the motion of particles, and hence Leibniz concluded that the mental world does not affect the physical word, or vice versa. 燫ather, they were made to agree beforehand (you might think of it as a bunch of souls watching a pre-recorded movie of the physical world, but this pre-recorded movie also agrees with the intentions of the souls watching it).

In Monadology, published in 1714, Leibniz wrote 揇escartes recognized that souls cannot impart any force to bodies, because there is always the same quantity of force in matter. Nevertheless he was of opinion that the soul could change the direction of bodies. But that is because in his time it was not known that there is a law of nature which affirms also the conservation of the same total direction in matter. Had Descartes noticed this he would have come upon my system of pre-established harmony.�

Jason

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 6:37 AM, Roger <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:

Hi Stephen P. King

�

As I understand it, Leibniz's pre-established harmony is analogous to

a musical score with God, or at least some super-intelligence, as

composer/conductor.

�

This prevents all physical particles from colliding, instead they

all move harmoniously together*. The score was composed before the

Big Bang-- my own explanation is like Mozart God or that intelligence

could hear the whole (symphony) beforehand in his head.

�

I suppose that this accords with Leibniz's燽elief that God,

whoc is good, constructed the燽est possible world where

as a miniomum, that least physics is obeyed.� Hence

Voltaire's 爁oolish criticism of Leibniz in Candide that how

could� the volcanic or earthquake disaster in Lisbon be

part of the most perfect world ?

�

Thus, because physics must be obeyed, sometimes crap happens.

�

* As a related and possibly explanatory爌oint, L's universe

completely is nonlocal.

�

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/11/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Stephen P. King

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 01:56:41

Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?

Hi Roger,

牋� I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony?

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

[Bruno Marchal]

On 14 Aug 2012, at 19:16, Roger wrote:

 

I realize that animals can think to some extent,

I am glad you say that.

Bruno

I was just using Leibniz' simplified model.

 

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: Jason Resch

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 18:23:30

Subject: Re: Leibniz on the unconscious

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 5:14 PM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

On 8/11/2012 5:13 AM, Roger wrote:

Hi meekerdb

�

Leibniz seems to be the first philosopher (and one of the few)爐o discuss the

unconscious, which was necessary, since like God (or some Cosmic intelligence), it is燼n

integral part of his metaphysical system.�

�

In Leibniz's metaphysics, the lowest or "bare naked" monads (as in rocks)燼re unconscious bodies.

Leibniz ways that they are very drowsy or asleep. They lie in darkness.

�

Animals can feel but not think.

And your evidence for this is?

Here is some disproof:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYZnsO2ZgWo

Jason

�

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 14 Aug 2012, at 19:46, Roger wrote:

Hi meekerdb

 

You're right, random shapes do not show evidence of intelligence.

But the carbon atom, being highly unlikely, does.

This is amazing. Carbon is a natural product (solution of QM) by stars. All atoms are well explained and predictable by QM, itself predictable (normally, with comp) by arithmetic. 

Bruno

 

Roger , rcl...@verizon.net

8/14/2012

Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so everything could function."

----- Receiving the following content -----

From: meekerdb

Receiver: everything-list

Time: 2012-08-11, 18:20:16

Subject: Re: Positivism and intelligence

On 8/11/2012 5:56 AM, Roger wrote:

 

Positivism seems to rule out native intelligence.

I can't see how knowledge could be created on a blank

slate without intelligence.  

Or for that matter, how the incredibly unnatural structure

of the carbon atom could have been created somehow

somewhere by mere chance.  Fred Hoyle as I recall said

that it was very unlikely that it was created by chance.

 

All very unlikely things in my opinion show evidence of

intelligence.

How likely is the shape of Japan?

In order to extract energy from disorder

as life does shows that, like Maxwell's Demon,

some intelligence is required to sort things out.

Life extracts energy by increasing disorder.

Brent

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[Bruno Marchal]

No, but it is shorter.

Bruno

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