Autonomy?

[meekerdb]

My friend Vic Stenger has written a blog on free will, mostly in response to Sam Harris

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-stenger/free-will-is-an-illusion_b_1562533.html?ref=science
(don't bother to read the comments)

Vic suggests dropping the term 'free will' and using the term 'autonomy' to refer to the social/legal concept of acting free of coercion.

And Jerry Coyne has also commented.

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/victor-stenger-and-janna-levin-on-our-lack-of-free-will/
(do read the comments)

He is strictly a determinist and denies the implication of compatibilism that there some 'free will' (or autonomy) worth having.  But interestingly both he and Vic conclude that this implies we need to overhaul our judicial system, while Harris is not so sure.

Brent

[Joseph Knight]

While I agree about the judicial system, any system worth having should not hinge upon metaphysical conclusions regarding free will. It's bizarre (and somewhat anti-democratic) to say that we can or should argue for/against some political issue on this basis. 

The underlying assumption seems to be that the judicial system is somehow "just" in the event that we really do have free will, which is hilariously naive.

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[meekerdb]

I suppose that the idea is reform the system to reflect a purely consequentialist or utilitarian ethic.  It's partly there already, but it gets distorted a lot by ideas of purity and sacredness (to use Jonathan Haidt's terminology); like "It's just WRONG to get pleasure from drugs."

Brent

[Craig Weinberg]

I don't understand how we can change the judicial system if we don't
have free will. All we can do is exist and watch to see whether we end
up being compelled to change it or not by forces outside of our
control.

Craig

[meekerdb]

If we don't have 'free will' we will each react to events and perceptions deterministically or randomly and thereby change the judicial system or not (just like we will if we do have 'free will').

What seems strictly deterministic is that Craig will not understand how we can do without 'free will' and John K. Clark will refuse to understand what anybody means by it.

Brent

[Stathis Papaioannou]

If you want to think that, fine. If it upsets you, I'm sorry. If it
upsets you and therefore you conclude that it's not true, then your
thinking is fallacious.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Craig Weinberg]

On Jun 4, 8:57 pm, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> If you want to think that, fine. If it upsets you, I'm sorry. If it
> upsets you and therefore you conclude that it's not true, then your
> thinking is fallacious.

There's nothing upsetting about it, I just don't understand how we can
talk about deciding that we are powerless to make decisions. I'm
trying to figure out how that makes sense to anyone.

Craig

[meekerdb]

Brains are made of the same stuff as everything else (up and down quarks, electrons,
photons). We have no reason to believe that this stuff obeys different laws when it's in a
brain, from which we conclude that whatever brains do it's determined by these same laws.
I'm happy to call that 'free will' so long as your not coerced (however you want to draw
the coerced/not-coerced line). In which case, since we're not coerced, we are not
powerless, we're just deterministic (mostly).

Brent

[Stathis Papaioannou]

If it doesn't make sense to you then you can append "pseudo-" whenever
you talk about deciding something or having free will. We make
pseudo-decisions and have pseudo-free will. People who make bad
pseudo-decisions get into trouble; I did it against my pseudo-will
because he held a gun to my head; and so on.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Craig Weinberg]

If top level properties were determined by low level properties, then
there would only be one level of description. It would be like saying
that since the Taj Mahal is made of bricks, the shape of it must be
determined by the laws of masonry alone. The bottom line is that we
know for a fact that we are conscious, so that consciousness'
association with the brain and it's molecules can only mean that
molecules, or large enough groups of molecules are able to feel and
think. It is our understanding of quarks and electrons that is
primitive, not matter.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On Jun 4, 10:14 pm, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:

If it's causally efficacious (gets real people into real trouble) the
it can't be pseudo.

Craig

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> If it doesn't make sense to you then you can append "pseudo-" whenever
>> you talk about deciding something or having free will. We make
>> pseudo-decisions and have pseudo-free will. People who make bad
>> pseudo-decisions get into trouble; I did it against my pseudo-will
>> because he held a gun to my head; and so on.
>
> If it's causally efficacious (gets real people into real trouble) the
> it can't be pseudo.

An automatic pilot has pseudo-free will according to you but it is
still causally efficacious. However, if your argument is now that if
it's causally efficacious it is real then not pseudo, then that's fine
too - and compatible with determinism.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Craig Weinberg]

On Jun 4, 10:37 pm, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> If it doesn't make sense to you then you can append "pseudo-" whenever
> >> you talk about deciding something or having free will. We make
> >> pseudo-decisions and have pseudo-free will. People who make bad
> >> pseudo-decisions get into trouble; I did it against my pseudo-will
> >> because he held a gun to my head; and so on.
>
> > If it's causally efficacious (gets real people into real trouble) the
> > it can't be pseudo.
>
> An automatic pilot has pseudo-free will according to you but it is
> still causally efficacious.

An automatic pilot has no will. It's just a program implemented
technologically. Its causal efficacy is second hand by way of being
designed by people who have free will.

> However, if your argument is now that if
> it's causally efficacious it is real then not pseudo, then that's fine
> too - and compatible with determinism.

The name describes what it is - automatic pilot: A prosthetic
extension of consensus skills derived from the senses and motives of
human pilots.

Craig

[meekerdb]

Sure. Doesn't mean they have to obey different laws to do so.

> It is our understanding of quarks and electrons that is
> primitive, not matter.

???

Brent
"What is mind? No matter.
What is matter? Never mind."
--- Lady Russell (Bertrand's grandmother)

[meekerdb]

Then call it autonomy.

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 6/4/2012 7:48 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> On Jun 4, 10:37 pm, Stathis Papaioannou<stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Craig Weinberg<whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> If it doesn't make sense to you then you can append "pseudo-" whenever
>>>> you talk about deciding something or having free will. We make
>>>> pseudo-decisions and have pseudo-free will. People who make bad
>>>> pseudo-decisions get into trouble; I did it against my pseudo-will
>>>> because he held a gun to my head; and so on.
>>> If it's causally efficacious (gets real people into real trouble) the
>>> it can't be pseudo.
>> An automatic pilot has pseudo-free will according to you but it is
>> still causally efficacious.
> An automatic pilot has no will. It's just a program implemented
> technologically. Its causal efficacy is second hand by way of being
> designed by people who have free will.

And you're just a program implemented biologically, designed by random variation and
natural selection.

>
>> However, if your argument is now that if
>> it's causally efficacious it is real then not pseudo, then that's fine
>> too - and compatible with determinism.
> The name describes what it is - automatic pilot: A prosthetic
> extension of consensus skills derived from the senses and motives of
> human pilots.

Actually it can sense things humans can't (e.g. GPS signals, barometric pressure, magnetic
North,...) and it can react faster and more reliably - which is why it gets to fly the
plane. And it's not distracted by those 'free' motives the stewardess would elicit from you.

Brent

>
> Craig
>

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 12:48 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> An automatic pilot has pseudo-free will according to you but it is
>> still causally efficacious.
>
> An automatic pilot has no will. It's just a program implemented
> technologically. Its causal efficacy is second hand by way of being
> designed by people who have free will.

If it looks like it has a will but doesn't then it has pseudo-will. If
it has pseudo-will and is causally efficacious then the fact that it
is causally efficacious does not necessarily mean that its will is
pseudo-free. So we could all have pseudo-free will.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Craig Weinberg]

On Jun 4, 11:03 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:

> Sure. Doesn't mean they have to obey different laws to do so.

You are assuming that there are laws. I don't. Laws are persistent
patterns of experience. The Taj Majal is a different order of
experience than could be produced by the 'laws' of masonry alone. It
is expressed through masonry, but what is being expressed cannot arise
from it, anymore than TV shows can arise from broadcast towers and
receivers interacting.

> Then call it autonomy.

What's the difference between autonomy and the condition of having
free will? It seems euphemistic to me but otherwise I don't have a
problem with it.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On Jun 4, 11:09 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 6/4/2012 7:48 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> > On Jun 4, 10:37 pm, Stathis Papaioannou<stath...@gmail.com>  wrote:
> >> On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 12:29 PM, Craig Weinberg<whatsons...@gmail.com>  wrote:
> >>>> If it doesn't make sense to you then you can append "pseudo-" whenever
> >>>> you talk about deciding something or having free will. We make
> >>>> pseudo-decisions and have pseudo-free will. People who make bad
> >>>> pseudo-decisions get into trouble; I did it against my pseudo-will
> >>>> because he held a gun to my head; and so on.
> >>> If it's causally efficacious (gets real people into real trouble) the
> >>> it can't be pseudo.
> >> An automatic pilot has pseudo-free will according to you but it is
> >> still causally efficacious.
> > An automatic pilot has no will. It's just a program implemented
> > technologically. Its causal efficacy is second hand by way of being
> > designed by people who have free will.
>
> And you're just a program implemented biologically, designed by random variation and
> natural selection.

No, I have programs but I'm not a program. I am the sense-motive
cursor of a human lifetime. The presentation layer is primary, not the
function. Function without presentation is a disembodied metaphysical
fantasy. Random variation of what? Natural selection of what? Concrete
sense experience and motive participation. From concrete sense-motive
experience through time we get matter-energy presentations across
space, which feeds back on our sense again to give us representations,
symbols, numbers, etc. Abstract figures have no power whatsoever on
their own. It is only the concrete entities making sense of them who
have the power to change the behavior of matter and energy.

>
>
>
> >> However, if your argument is now that if
> >> it's causally efficacious it is real then not pseudo, then that's fine
> >> too - and compatible with determinism.
> > The name describes what it is - automatic pilot: A prosthetic
> > extension of consensus skills derived from the senses and motives of
> > human pilots.
>
> Actually it can sense things humans can't (e.g. GPS signals, barometric pressure, magnetic
> North,...) and it can react faster and more reliably - which is why it gets to fly the
> plane. And it's not distracted by those 'free' motives the stewardess would elicit from you.

Of course. All prosthetics can potentially extend sense or motive
capacities beyond human levels. (See also, the Six Million Dollar Man
and Bionic Woman). It doesn't mean that Steve Austin's bionic parts
have replaced him. If he had a bionic head, he wouldn't be Steve
Austin anymore.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

On Jun 5, 12:07 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 12:48 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> An automatic pilot has pseudo-free will according to you but it is
> >> still causally efficacious.
>
> > An automatic pilot has no will. It's just a program implemented
> > technologically. Its causal efficacy is second hand by way of being
> > designed by people who have free will.
>
> If it looks like it has a will but doesn't then it has pseudo-will.

It only looks like it has a will if you interpret it that way. It
doesn't look that way to me. No more than Bugs Bunny is a pseudo-
rabbit that has a pseudo-appetite for pseudo-carrots. It could be said
that way figuratively, and that is the sense in which any simulation
or emulation 'exists' but literally, Bugs Bunny is a shared audio-
visual text: A recurring part of our direct personal and indirect
cultural sense experience.

> If
> it has pseudo-will and is causally efficacious then the fact that it
> is causally efficacious does not necessarily mean that its will is
> pseudo-free. So we could all have pseudo-free will.

It doesn't have pseudo-will, it has only what we project on it. We do
have pseudo-free will as well as authentic free will though. The
authenticity of our free will is directly proportionate to its
interiority. What we feel as being most internal, most 'us' is where
our freedom is most directly expressed. The further out we get, the
more our will is diluted by considerations external to our inner-most
sensibilities. For instance, like in cartoons of conscience as a devil
and angel on our shoulder, the person has free will to listen to one
or the other or neither. We have all kinds of semantic momentum,
subconscious agendas, unconscious drives, etc which are 'us' on one
level but not under our control on another.

Craig

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 1:28 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> If it looks like it has a will but doesn't then it has pseudo-will.
>
> It only looks like it has a will if you interpret it that way. It
> doesn't look that way to me. No more than Bugs Bunny is a pseudo-
> rabbit that has a pseudo-appetite for pseudo-carrots. It could be said
> that way figuratively, and that is the sense in which any simulation
> or emulation 'exists' but literally, Bugs Bunny is a shared audio-
> visual text: A recurring part of our direct personal and indirect
> cultural sense experience.

I know that according to you I'm misinterpreting the deterministically
driven entity as having free will - we've established that much if
nothing else! So if I think it has free will but I'm wrong, it has
pseudo-free will. How can we tell that its will is pseudo-free? You
said earlier that if it's causally efficacious it can't be pseudo-free
but that's obviously wrong. What other criteria can we use to decide
if the entity in question has true free will or just looks as if it
has free will to people like me?


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[John Mikes]

Stathis:

in my simplicity: "free is free" and "pseudo" means "not really". So: pseudo-free will is not free (will), only something similar. Restricted by circumstances. Or so.

I allow into my 'deterministically' constrained free will(!) a free choice from available variants. I know nothing about how to apply it: how the unknowable (hidden? not yet disclosed?) factors incluence my decision, so I say "I have a choice. Same way the less agnostics say: free will.

Please correct me if you know more.
Thanx

John M

--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 5:06 AM, John Mikes <jam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Stathis:
> in my simplicity: "free is free" and "pseudo" means "not really". So:
> pseudo-free will is not free (will), only something similar. Restricted by
> circumstances. Or so.
> I allow into my 'deterministically' constrained free will(!) a free
> choice from available variants. I know nothing about how to apply it: how
> the unknowable (hidden? not yet disclosed?) factors incluence my decision,
> so I say "I have a choice. Same way the less agnostics say: free will.
> Please correct me if you know more.
> Thanx
> John M

I think it's a matter of semantics. I could say I still have a choice
even if my actions are determined by my brain and my environment. If
my brain and/or my environment had been different, I could have chosen
differently. That is compatibilism. The incompatibilists would say
that I don't have a choice if my actions are thus determined. But the
incompatibilists still live their life making decisions like everyone
else.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[John Mikes]

Stathis, semantics is a fundamental principle as long as we 'talk in wordly terms'. Did you get a letter from God Almighty confirming that there is nothing more FOR DECISIONMAKING than your brain and your environment? Sorry to denigrate a term within your profession, but we know close to nothing about mentality, thinking in topical terms, even THAT DARN 'decisionmaking'. It may not be strictly deterministic, we MAY have SOME choice (all these words from the 'pseudo' domain) but how impressive those (so far unknowable) domains(?) or factors do influence "our brain(?)" has not been known as of yesterday.

 

(I am still hung up on your use of the number of people you are:

"...if my actions are determined by my brain and my environment..."

who is the 'you' discussing with 'your brain'? Are you compatible with you?

but that is an old hat).

 

JM

 

--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 6:55 AM, John Mikes <jam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Stathis, semantics is a fundamental principle as long as we 'talk in wordly
> terms'. Did you get a letter from God Almighty confirming that there is
> nothing more FOR DECISIONMAKING than your brain and your environment? Sorry
> to denigrate a term within your profession, but we know close to nothing
> about mentality, thinking in topical terms, even THAT DARN 'decisionmaking'.
> It may not be strictly deterministic, we MAY have SOME choice (all these
> words from the 'pseudo' domain) but how impressive those (so far unknowable)
> domains(?) or factors do influence "our brain(?)" has not been known as of
> yesterday.
>
> (I am still hung up on your use of the number of people you are:
> "...if my actions are determined by my brain and my environment..."
> who is the 'you' discussing with 'your brain'? Are you compatible with you?
> but that is an old hat).

Other than brain and environment, what else is there?

As for choice and determinism: I do exactly what I want to do, and if
I wanted do something else, I would do that. I consider that choice,
whether my behaviour is determined or random. In fact, I don't see
what "choice" could possibly mean if not this.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't understand how we can change the judicial system if we don't have free will. All we can do is exist and watch to see whether we end up being compelled to change it or not by forces outside of our control.

And so it goes, one group screams cries and jumps up and down insisting that we do have free will and another group is just as insistent that we do not. But neither group can stop yelling for one second to ask what "free will"  is supposed to mean. I humbly suggest that we first decide what "free will" is, and only then would it be fruitful to debate the question of whether people have this interesting property or not; until then it's just a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

  John K Clark

 

[John Mikes]

Dear Stathis

 

let me try to explain myself in a less "1st p. vocabulary".  As I explained I carry an 'agnostic' worldview, because over the past millennia the information what humanity gathered about "the world" increased steadily and we have so far no indication of having reached omniscience. So I believe you when asking out loud: "what ELSE is there?" and I have no answer of course. 2 trivial e.g.,-s:

# Before Volta there was no hint to 'electrical' (whatever that is) phenomena but after his observation a branch of developing physics speaks a lot of such. #The Flat Earth was also a notion (even the Bible speaks about "the 4 corners" of it) and newer information developed a different cosmology over the past centuries.

And so on, why not getting new information in mentality questions as well? or factors (even so far unknown 'domains') that may influence whatever we do  know/think/choose? 

 

And may I throw back your term: the "choice" you ask about is a PSEUDO - choice, not choosing from ANYTHING (haphazardly), but within the given  possibilities (potentials) - in the unlimited complexity of which currently we know only a portion. More we know than yesterday or 1000 - 10,000 years ago, but believably less than we may learn hereafter. (I.e. in my agnosticism).

(And you left untouched my question about  W H O  is discussing with YOUR brain - and how?)

 

John Mikes Ph.D., D.Sc. 

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 7:29 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 6:55 AM, John Mikes <jam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Stathis, semantics is a fundamental principle as long as we 'talk in wordly
> terms'. Did you get a letter from God Almighty confirming that there is

> nothing more FOR DECISIONMAKING than your brain and your ------------- > environment? Sorry to denigrate a term within your profession, but we -----

 > know close to nothing about mentality, thinking in topical terms, even ------> THAT DARN 'decisionmaking'.

> It may not be strictly deterministic, we MAY have SOME choice (all these
> words from the 'pseudo' domain) but how impressive those (so far unknowable)
> domains(?) or factors do influence "our brain(?)" has not been known as of yesterday.
>
> (I am still hung up on your use of the number of people you are:
> "...if my actions are determined by my brain and my environment..."
> who is the 'you' discussing with 'your brain'? Are you compatible with you?
> but that is an old hat).

Other than brain and environment, what else is there?

As for choice and determinism: I do exactly what I want to do, and if
I wanted do something else, I would do that. I consider that choice,
whether my behaviour is determined or random. In fact, I don't see
what "choice" could possibly mean if not this.

--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Bruno Marchal]

OK. Perhaps we should always make at least precise if we talk about compatibilist free will (c-free-will) or non comptatibilist free will (nc-free-will). People defending nc-free-will should say so.

In comp, c-free-will is rather easy to define, and even a variety of ways, and computer science theorem justifies a role, and plausibly a "darwinian selectable role" for some of the possible definitions. 

About nc-free-will, I have not any idea (yet?) about what it could mean. I tend to agree with John on this.

Bruno

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

[Bruno Marchal]

John,

On 14 Jun 2012, at 23:05, John Mikes wrote:

Dear Stathis

 

let me try to explain myself in a less "1st p. vocabulary".  As I explained I carry an 'agnostic' worldview, because over the past millennia the information what humanity gathered about "the world" increased steadily and we have so far no indication of having reached omniscience. So I believe you when asking out loud: "what ELSE is there?" and I have no answer of course. 2 trivial e.g.,-s:

# Before Volta there was no hint to 'electrical' (whatever that is) phenomena but after his observation a branch of developing physics speaks a lot of such. #The Flat Earth was also a notion (even the Bible speaks about "the 4 corners" of it) and newer information developed a different cosmology over the past centuries.

And so on, why not getting new information in mentality questions as well? or factors (even so far unknown 'domains') that may influence whatever we do  know/think/choose? 

 

And may I throw back your term: the "choice" you ask about is a PSEUDO - choice, not choosing from ANYTHING (haphazardly), but within the given  possibilities (potentials) - in the unlimited complexity of which currently we know only a portion. More we know than yesterday or 1000 - 10,000 years ago, but believably less than we may learn hereafter. (I.e. in my agnosticism).

(And you left untouched my question about  W H O  is discussing with YOUR brain - and how?)

John, I think science is always agnostic. We just don't know the truth. What we can do is to propose and develop plausibility feelings but nothing more. I think Stathis was just reasoning in some determinist theory background, like QM-without-collapse or comp. 

The art of science is the art of reasoning in theories, without ever believing them. Only refuting them, sometimes, with luck.

Bruno

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

[meekerdb]

It seems pretty clear.  It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm and have them implemented in the physical realm.  That entails that physics is not closed, i.e. some physical events happen for a purpose but without an antecedent physical cause.  This not meaningless because with sufficient experimental resolution it could be tested.  If we could follow in detail the workings of a subject's brain and we found that there were physically uncaused events that led to actions and decisions and these events almost always contributed to the realization of express plans, values, and desires of the subject then we would have say that was evidence for nc-free-will.

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Jun 2012, at 18:17, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/15/2012 8:43 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 14 Jun 2012, at 18:21, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't understand how we can change the judicial system if we don't have free will. All we can do is exist and watch to see whether we end up being compelled to change it or not by forces outside of our control.

And so it goes, one group screams cries and jumps up and down insisting that we do have free will and another group is just as insistent that we do not. But neither group can stop yelling for one second to ask what "free will"  is supposed to mean. I humbly suggest that we first decide what "free will" is, and only then would it be fruitful to debate the question of whether people have this interesting property or not; until then it's just a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

OK. Perhaps we should always make at least precise if we talk about compatibilist free will (c-free-will) or non comptatibilist free will (nc-free-will). People defending nc-free-will should say so.

In comp, c-free-will is rather easy to define, and even a variety of ways, and computer science theorem justifies a role, and plausibly a "darwinian selectable role" for some of the possible definitions. 

About nc-free-will, I have not any idea (yet?) about what it could mean. I tend to agree with John on this.

It seems pretty clear.  It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm and have them implemented in the physical realm. 

OK. In the spirit realm I get an headache, and decide to take an aspirin.

That entails that physics is not closed, i.e. some physical events happen for a purpose but without an antecedent physical cause. 

How can you know that. It is like invoking the spirit each time we were wrong on a level of complexity. 

I think I see what you try to conceive, though. Nice try.

This not meaningless because with sufficient experimental resolution it could be tested. 

How? Machines cannot know their level of substitution. Spirits might be arithmetical cyber pirates.

If we could follow in detail the workings of a subject's brain and we found that there were physically uncaused events that led to actions and decisions and these events almost always contributed to the realization of express plans, values, and desires of the subject then we would have say that was evidence for nc-free-will.

I see your point, so you are right, in some sense. It is a bit far stretched in the comp setting, but it makes sense. But at the meta-level you need now to provide a theory of those spirits, and how they manage to influence the physical happening, etc. For a c-compatibilist, you will will have to explain how the spirit itself is a c or not c free will entity, unless you use "spirit" as a gap explanation meaning that we can't ask about that by definition. 

Machines cannot distinguish 'spirit' for 'more complex than me'.

Bruno

Brent

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[meekerdb]

On 6/15/2012 11:00 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 15 Jun 2012, at 18:17, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/15/2012 8:43 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 14 Jun 2012, at 18:21, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't understand how we can change the judicial system if we don't have free will. All we can do is exist and watch to see whether we end up being compelled to change it or not by forces outside of our control.

And so it goes, one group screams cries and jumps up and down insisting that we do have free will and another group is just as insistent that we do not. But neither group can stop yelling for one second to ask what "free will"  is supposed to mean. I humbly suggest that we first decide what "free will" is, and only then would it be fruitful to debate the question of whether people have this interesting property or not; until then it's just a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

OK. Perhaps we should always make at least precise if we talk about compatibilist free will (c-free-will) or non comptatibilist free will (nc-free-will). People defending nc-free-will should say so.

In comp, c-free-will is rather easy to define, and even a variety of ways, and computer science theorem justifies a role, and plausibly a "darwinian selectable role" for some of the possible definitions. 

About nc-free-will, I have not any idea (yet?) about what it could mean. I tend to agree with John on this.

It seems pretty clear.  It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm and have them implemented in the physical realm. 

OK. In the spirit realm I get an headache, and decide to take an aspirin.

That entails that physics is not closed, i.e. some physical events happen for a purpose but without an antecedent physical cause. 

How can you know that. It is like invoking the spirit each time we were wrong on a level of complexity. 

I think I see what you try to conceive, though. Nice try.

This not meaningless because with sufficient experimental resolution it could be tested. 

How? Machines cannot know their level of substitution. Spirits might be arithmetical cyber pirates.

I don't think it's required that a brain be able to know itself; only that other brains and machines be able to know it at the required level.

If we could follow in detail the workings of a subject's brain and we found that there were physically uncaused events that led to actions and decisions and these events almost always contributed to the realization of express plans, values, and desires of the subject then we would have say that was evidence for nc-free-will.

I see your point, so you are right, in some sense. It is a bit far stretched in the comp setting, but it makes sense. But at the meta-level you need now to provide a theory of those spirits, and how they manage to influence the physical happening, etc.

I don't think physics is causally open in this way, so, until there is evidence it is, I see no reason to worry about formulating a theory of the spirit realm.  Others however have formed theories, also know as religions, and some of those have even been experimentally tested.  So far the evidence has gone against them.  But it's good to keep an open mind and think about how theories might be tested.

For a c-compatibilist, you will will have to explain how the spirit itself is a c or not c free will entity, unless you use "spirit" as a gap explanation meaning that we can't ask about that by definition.

Yes, I take it that's John point.  Either the spirit actions are determined by antecedent spirit states or they are not, and hence random, and we're back to where we started.  But first, we're not quite back to where we started, we'd have evidence for a spirit realm, which is why people like to believe in free-will; dualism goes with various religious ideas of an afterlife.  Second, the spirit might be inherently purposeful the way QM is inherently random.  Metaphysically the question is whether events can be both non-deterministic and non-random.  Is there a third category of "purposeful" or "teleological"; or are those just higher level appearances.

Machines cannot distinguish 'spirit' for 'more complex than me'.

But does that prevent a machine from testing whether a different machine which is not more complex is nomologically closed.  Are you saying that if a machine (brain) seemed to be nomologically open and purposeful we should not regard it as evidence for a spirit realm but instead say that our level of test resolution was not fine enough?

Brent

[John Mikes]

Bruno, you are an exception; "you think" and I think you are right. BUT: listen to the "SCIENTISTS" who argue in statement-style (such and such LAWS postulate, ...you cannot violate some other LAWS... not to mention the "IT  IS WELL KNOWN THAT"  argumentations in conventional scientific caves. Nobody admits agnosticism when it comes to math-supported figments. Then everybody has a firm and unshakable knowledge about his/her theory.

I have to eliminate high blood pressure that does rise by statements like:

There is my brain and my environment, what else gives? Not on this list!

I like to go one tiny little step further than your agnosticism

 "we don't believe" - yet  accept a "belief system" within which one thinks. It carries a vocabulary (semantics, if you like) and a worldview - even if agnostic.

What I do not over-value is the 'human logic' (I hope I use it myself) definitely NOT governing Nature, not even if the majority observations in certain domains seem to identify(?) 'laws', said sacrosanct in "science/technology" 

As I say:  A L M O ST .

Thanks for your remark

John M

[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Jun 2012, at 21:49, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/15/2012 11:00 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 15 Jun 2012, at 18:17, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/15/2012 8:43 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 14 Jun 2012, at 18:21, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't understand how we can change the judicial system if we don't have free will. All we can do is exist and watch to see whether we end up being compelled to change it or not by forces outside of our control.

And so it goes, one group screams cries and jumps up and down insisting that we do have free will and another group is just as insistent that we do not. But neither group can stop yelling for one second to ask what "free will"  is supposed to mean. I humbly suggest that we first decide what "free will" is, and only then would it be fruitful to debate the question of whether people have this interesting property or not; until then it's just a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

OK. Perhaps we should always make at least precise if we talk about compatibilist free will (c-free-will) or non comptatibilist free will (nc-free-will). People defending nc-free-will should say so.

In comp, c-free-will is rather easy to define, and even a variety of ways, and computer science theorem justifies a role, and plausibly a "darwinian selectable role" for some of the possible definitions. 

About nc-free-will, I have not any idea (yet?) about what it could mean. I tend to agree with John on this.

It seems pretty clear.  It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm and have them implemented in the physical realm. 

OK. In the spirit realm I get an headache, and decide to take an aspirin.

That entails that physics is not closed, i.e. some physical events happen for a purpose but without an antecedent physical cause. 

How can you know that. It is like invoking the spirit each time we were wrong on a level of complexity. 

I think I see what you try to conceive, though. Nice try.

This not meaningless because with sufficient experimental resolution it could be tested. 

How? Machines cannot know their level of substitution. Spirits might be arithmetical cyber pirates.

I don't think it's required that a brain be able to know itself; only that other brains and machines be able to know it at the required level.

I agree, except when you have to bet on the level, in case you accept a digital brain;

If we could follow in detail the workings of a subject's brain and we found that there were physically uncaused events that led to actions and decisions and these events almost always contributed to the realization of express plans, values, and desires of the subject then we would have say that was evidence for nc-free-will.

I see your point, so you are right, in some sense. It is a bit far stretched in the comp setting, but it makes sense. But at the meta-level you need now to provide a theory of those spirits, and how they manage to influence the physical happening, etc.

I don't think physics is causally open in this way, so, until there is evidence it is, I see no reason to worry about formulating a theory of the spirit realm.  Others however have formed theories, also know as religions, and some of those have even been experimentally tested.  So far the evidence has gone against them.  But it's good to keep an open mind and think about how theories might be tested.

OK.

For a c-compatibilist, you will will have to explain how the spirit itself is a c or not c free will entity, unless you use "spirit" as a gap explanation meaning that we can't ask about that by definition.

Yes, I take it that's John point.  Either the spirit actions are determined by antecedent spirit states or they are not, and hence random, and we're back to where we started.  But first, we're not quite back to where we started, we'd have evidence for a spirit realm, which is why people like to believe in free-will; dualism goes with various religious ideas of an afterlife.  Second, the spirit might be inherently purposeful the way QM is inherently random.  Metaphysically the question is whether events can be both non-deterministic and non-random.  Is there a third category of "purposeful" or "teleological"; or are those just higher level appearances.

It will depend on what you mean by "random", and "inherently purposeful". You need some non-comp theory, and none exists today, they are only pointing to non-comp, without explicit precision why they make comp false.

Machines cannot distinguish 'spirit' for 'more complex than me'.

But does that prevent a machine from testing whether a different machine which is not more complex is nomologically closed.  Are you saying that if a machine (brain) seemed to be nomologically open and purposeful we should not regard it as evidence for a spirit realm but instead say that our level of test resolution was not fine enough?

A defender of comp might well say that indeed. To bring spirit in front of complexity would be like introducing a filling gap explanation.

Bruno

Brent

Bruno

Brent

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Jun 2012, at 23:03, John Mikes wrote:

Bruno, you are an exception; "you think" and I think you are right. BUT: listen to the "SCIENTISTS" who argue in statement-style (such and such LAWS postulate, ...you cannot violate some other LAWS... not to mention the "IT  IS WELL KNOWN THAT"  argumentations in conventional scientific caves. Nobody admits agnosticism when it comes to math-supported figments. Then everybody has a firm and unshakable knowledge about his/her theory.

I was talking of course of ideal science. It is alas true that some scientists confuse philosophy and science, and believes that science has "proven" that "there is a primitive physical universe" and things like that. But those are scientists in a world which has separate science and religion, meaning that in religion they allow the lack of rigor, and thus in science too, when they interpret it in term of application to the notion of reality. But this does not concern the ideal "science", or "greek sciences". It concerns the incorrect practice of science in some obscurantist era. Keep in mind that I tend to consider that science has not yet begun, except some flashes during antiquity.

Bruno

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

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012  meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> It seems pretty clear.  It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm and have them implemented in the physical realm. 

Physical realm mental realm spirit realm or idiot realm (sorry, that last was redundant) things happen for a reason or things do not happen for a reason. 

> If we could follow in detail the workings of a subject's brain and we found that there were physically uncaused events

Then they were random.

> that led to actions and decisions

Random events are just as capable of creating actions and decisions as caused events are.

> and these events almost always contributed to the realization of express plans

If the plans were announced before the event and it always happened then you would have a very hard time convincing anyone that the event really was "physically uncaused", few get that lucky so its statistically much more likely the plans caused the event. And if not and you really were astronomically lucky it would still remain true that even God does things for a reason or He does not.

 John K Clark

[meekerdb]

On 6/16/2012 10:49 AM, John Clark wrote:

> and these events almost always contributed to the realization of express plans

If the plans were announced before the event and it always happened then you would have a very hard time convincing anyone that the event really was "physically uncaused", few get that lucky so its statistically much more likely the plans caused the event.

That was Bruno's point that he would sooner suppose that we had just not looked closely enough, or at a low enough level, to detect the physical chain of causation.  I don' believe in this spirit theory anyway; I was just trying to show it was a testable theory.  Of course if you take Bruno's view then you risk making materialism an untestable theory, since no matter what result you can say,"Well it must be due to a deeper physical phenomenon."

Brent

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Jun 15, 2012, at 7:05 AM, John Mikes <jam...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Stathis
>
> let me try to explain myself in a less "1st p. vocabulary". As I explained I carry an 'agnostic' worldview, because over the past millennia the information what humanity gathered about "the world" increased steadily and we have so far no indication of having reached omniscience. So I believe you when asking out loud: "what ELSE is there?" and I have no answer of course. 2 trivial e.g.,-s:
> # Before Volta there was no hint to 'electrical' (whatever that is) phenomena but after his observation a branch of developing physics speaks a lot of such. #The Flat Earth was also a notion (even the Bible speaks about "the 4 corners" of it) and newer information developed a different cosmology over the past centuries.
> And so on, why not getting new information in mentality questions as well? or factors (even so far unknown 'domains') that may influence whatever we do know/think/choose?

No possible scientific discovery would make a difference to the debate on free will insofar as it is just a matter of semantics.

> And may I throw back your term: the "choice" you ask about is a PSEUDO - choice, not choosing from ANYTHING (haphazardly), but within the given possibilities (potentials) - in the unlimited complexity of which currently we know only a portion. More we know than yesterday or 1000 - 10,000 years ago, but believably less than we may learn hereafter. (I.e. in my agnosticism).

Can you have a choice if your actions are determined or random? That's the question. The answer is a question of taste. The reality of living your life and making choices or pseudo-choices has nothing to do with the answer.

> (And you left untouched my question about W H O is discussing with YOUR brain - and how?)

I am, the entity generated by my brain or whatever is generating my consciousness. And that too is independent of the question of free will.

Stathis Papaioannou

[meekerdb]

On 6/16/2012 6:12 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> On Jun 15, 2012, at 7:05 AM, John Mikes<jam...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear Stathis
>>
>> let me try to explain myself in a less "1st p. vocabulary". As I explained I carry an 'agnostic' worldview, because over the past millennia the information what humanity gathered about "the world" increased steadily and we have so far no indication of having reached omniscience. So I believe you when asking out loud: "what ELSE is there?" and I have no answer of course. 2 trivial e.g.,-s:
>> # Before Volta there was no hint to 'electrical' (whatever that is) phenomena but after his observation a branch of developing physics speaks a lot of such. #The Flat Earth was also a notion (even the Bible speaks about "the 4 corners" of it) and newer information developed a different cosmology over the past centuries.
>> And so on, why not getting new information in mentality questions as well? or factors (even so far unknown 'domains') that may influence whatever we do know/think/choose?
> No possible scientific discovery would make a difference to the debate on free will insofar as it is just a matter of semantics.

Hmm. You did not appreciate my hypothetical test in which it was found that physically
uncaused events in the brain led to purposeful actions and decisions? Of course that
would not *prove* contra causal free will, but I think it would be considered evidence for
it, since it would be contrary to both all extant theories of physical determinism and
randomness.

Brent

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 2:17 AM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> It seems pretty clear.  It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm
> and have them implemented in the physical realm.  That entails that physics
> is not closed, i.e. some physical events happen for a purpose but without an
> antecedent physical cause.  This not meaningless because with sufficient
> experimental resolution it could be tested.  If we could follow in detail
> the workings of a subject's brain and we found that there were physically
> uncaused events that led to actions and decisions and these events almost
> always contributed to the realization of express plans, values, and desires
> of the subject then we would have say that was evidence for nc-free-will.

How would that be non-compatibilist free will? The processes in the
spiritual realm would still either be determined or random, and we
would still have to decide whether they were consistent with what we
wanted to call "free will" or not.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Stephen P. King]

On 6/16/2012 4:06 PM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/16/2012 10:49 AM, John Clark wrote:

> and these events almost always contributed to the realization of express plans

If the plans were announced before the event and it always happened then you would have a very hard time convincing anyone that the event really was "physically uncaused", few get that lucky so its statistically much more likely the plans caused the event.

That was Bruno's point that he would sooner suppose that we had just not looked closely enough, or at a low enough level, to detect the physical chain of causation.  I don' believe in this spirit theory anyway; I was just trying to show it was a testable theory.  Of course if you take Bruno's view then you risk making materialism an untestable theory, since no matter what result you can say,"Well it must be due to a deeper physical phenomenon."

Hi,

    Is this not exactly the point where we enter the abyss of the unfalsifiable? This is why this is a metaphysical (before physics) discussion. At what point does a limit impose itself or are we allowing for infinite regress???

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

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

[meekerdb]

On 6/16/2012 8:34 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 2:17 AM, meekerdb<meek...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> It seems pretty clear. It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm
>> and have them implemented in the physical realm. That entails that physics
>> is not closed, i.e. some physical events happen for a purpose but without an
>> antecedent physical cause. This not meaningless because with sufficient
>> experimental resolution it could be tested. If we could follow in detail
>> the workings of a subject's brain and we found that there were physically
>> uncaused events that led to actions and decisions and these events almost
>> always contributed to the realization of express plans, values, and desires
>> of the subject then we would have say that was evidence for nc-free-will.
> How would that be non-compatibilist free will?

It's not compatible with physical determinism. I'm sure what spiritual determinism would
mean.

> The processes in the
> spiritual realm would still either be determined or random,

Would it? Or is that just an assumption? Is it necessary that there be laws that
determine everything not random by antecedent states? It's not so clear to me.

> and we
> would still have to decide whether they were consistent with what we
> wanted to call "free will" or not.

Well Sam Harris says that's what everybody who believes in 'free will' thinks it means.
Personally, I'm a compatibilist; but I understand the problem people have with
compatibilism. If your actions are determined by something outside of you then they are
not an expression of your 'free will', but under determinism every one of your actions can
be traced back to causes outside of you - even to before your birth. They conclude from
this that determinism precludes 'free will'. I conclude that 'free will' is an
approximate social concept which depends on our ignorance.

Brent

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 2:25 PM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

>> The processes in the
>> spiritual realm would still either be determined or random,
>
>
> Would it? Or is that just an assumption?  Is it necessary that there be laws
> that determine everything not random by antecedent states?  It's not so
> clear to me.

Can you give an example of something neither determined nor random?


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Bruno Marchal]

You might say so, but it is still "real", for saying it is not real
because it is a higher level notion depending on our ignorance, would
make matter and physical realities also unreal, because they might
also be approximate social concepts depending on our ignorance (and
most plausibly is, assuming digital mechanism).

Bruno


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

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jun 16, 2012  meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> I don' believe in this spirit theory anyway; I was just trying to show it was a testable theory.

I have never understood why things are supposed to become less self-contradictory in the "spirit world" than in our world or how spirit theory is somehow fundamentally different from physical theory. If "spirit" caused X and X caused Y then both X and Y came into existence by a deterministic process. As for spirit itself there are only two possibilities, spirit came into existence for a reason or it did not, and you can say exactly the same thing about an electron.   

> Of course if you take Bruno's view then you risk making materialism an untestable theory, since no matter what result you can say,"Well it must be due to a deeper physical phenomenon."

I don't see why it *MUST* be due to a deeper physical phenomenon; nearly every physicists alive says some things have no cause and I can think of no obvious reason why what they say MUST be untrue, so I'm pretty sure they're probably right.  I said I couldn't think of a reason but of course I could believe in mystical crap for no reason whatsoever, lots and lots of people do exactly that, but apparently something has caused me not to follow them and embrace the unreasoned life . And testable or not of one thing I am certain, materialism is true or it is not; although I may never know which it MUST nevertheless be true that everything happens for a reason or it does not. And I really don't think any of this is rocket science.

  John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

On 17 Jun 2012, at 16:54, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Jun 16, 2012  meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> I don' believe in this spirit theory anyway; I was just trying to show it was a testable theory.

I have never understood why things are supposed to become less self-contradictory in the "spirit world" than in our world or how spirit theory is somehow fundamentally different from physical theory. If "spirit" caused X and X caused Y then both X and Y came into existence by a deterministic process. As for spirit itself there are only two possibilities, spirit came into existence for a reason or it did not, and you can say exactly the same thing about an electron.   

Spirit and matter are data we want to explain. We have the appearance of both and we try to relate them in a consistent way. 

We can perhaps agree that consciousness-here-and-now is the only truth we know which seems undoubtable, so it might be more easy to explain the illusion of matter to consciousness than the illusion of consciousness to a piece of matter.

If we accept that mind is basically information handling/computation, then a mind is confronted to the first person indeterminacy and the illusion of matter has to be recovered from that.

The spirit realm is just arithmetic, with comp, given that you can prove in arithmetic the existence of all dreams (assuming comp), and that physics is only the way some dreamers see some (sharable, first person plural) deep (long) computations.

> Of course if you take Bruno's view then you risk making materialism an untestable theory, since no matter what result you can say,"Well it must be due to a deeper physical phenomenon."

I don't see why it *MUST* be due to a deeper physical phenomenon; nearly every physicists alive says some things have no cause

You might provide references. The "collective hallucination" of the collapse of the wave has, in his time, resuscitated that idea, but it does not make any sense, and is not necessary, as Everett showed.

and I can think of no obvious reason why what they say MUST be untrue,

They are not even wrong. Event without reason might exist but cannot be invoked to explain anything. To invoke them as such is just equivalent with "I dunno and will never know". The "will ever know" is too much. It means "don't ask".

Now first person appearance of randomness can have a reason, like in the self-duplication, or with incompressibility.

so I'm pretty sure they're probably right.  I said I couldn't think of a reason but of course I could believe in mystical crap for no reason whatsoever, lots and lots of people do exactly that, but apparently something has caused me not to follow them and embrace the unreasoned life. And testable or not of one thing I am certain, materialism is true or it is not; although I may never know which it MUST nevertheless be true that everything happens for a reason or it does not. And I really don't think any of this is rocket science.

We can know things, like if mechanism is true then materialism is false (or true in an trivial epinoumenic sense, which means contradicting occam).

As I said, it is more easy to explain the illusion of matter to consciousness than the illusion of consciousness to matter. And comp makes just this utterly precise, when you take the time to do the reasoning.

Bruno

  John K Clark

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at  Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> We can perhaps agree that consciousness-here-and-now is the only truth we know which seems undoubtable, so it might be more easy to explain the illusion of matter to consciousness than the illusion of consciousness to a piece of matter.

If consciousness is more fundamental than matter then it's difficult to explain why it's easy to find examples of matter without consciousness but nobody has yet found a single example of consciousness without matter. Yeah yeah I know, it's all just a illusion, but why only that illusion? Why is the "illusion" always that matter effects consciousness and consciousness effects matter if one is more fundamental than the other?

>> I don't see why it *MUST* be due to a deeper physical phenomenon; nearly every physicists alive says some things have no cause

> You might provide references.

Why? I think it would have been pompous and downright condescending to do so, you will certainly have no trouble finding such references without my help. But if I had said "many physicist think it is a logical necessity that every event must have a cause" then THAT would indeed need references!   

 

> Event without reason might exist but cannot be invoked to explain anything.

To say that X happened not for any physical reason and not because of God but for no reason whatsoever is a explanation and it might even be true, but the trouble is it might not be and if you assume its true and give up there is no hope of ever finding the true reason if there is one. So there is the possibility we could spend eternity looking for something that does not exist.

> To invoke them as such is just equivalent with "I dunno and will never know".

These answers to a question are all different:

1) I dunno.  (What is the capital of Wyoming?)
2) I dunno and may never know.  (Is the Goldbach Conjecture true?)
3) I dunno and will never know.  (What are the first hundred digits of Chaitin's Omega Constant?) 

4) Although meaningful the question has no answer.  (Why is there something rather than nothing?)

And either a chain of "why" question is infinitely long or it is not and you eventually come to a "why" question that cannot be answered because there is no reason behind it.

 John K Clark

[meekerdb]

No, not that I know to be such; but believers in contra causal free will think that at least some of their actions are.  But they would qualify that by "not determined by *antecedent physical* states".  I don't know whether they would allow that psychological states must be either deterministic or random.  My point is that "determined by *antecedent* states" and "random" is not a logically exhaustive classification.  There is even an interpretation of QM (mostly associated with Henry Stapp) that looks at "random" events as "caused by future states".

Brent

[meekerdb]

I don't know whether you actually misunderstand or you just gloss over the distinction for rhetorical purposes, but the question is not whether things happen for a reason or don't happen for a reason.  "X or not-X." is tautologically true.  The question is whether the reason has to be prior physical states.  People who believe in a spirit world think not and my point is that this is testable in principle.  You may object that if a person in physical state X on one occasion takes action A1 and on another occasion takes action A2, it just randomness.  But if A1 and A2 and Ai...all tend to acheiving a prior stated goal of that person it is hard to maintain they are just random.

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

On 17 Jun 2012, at 19:35, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at  Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> We can perhaps agree that consciousness-here-and-now is the only truth we know which seems undoubtable, so it might be more easy to explain the illusion of matter to consciousness than the illusion of consciousness to a piece of matter.

If consciousness is more fundamental than matter then it's difficult to explain why it's easy to find examples of matter without consciousness but nobody has yet found a single example of consciousness without matter.

This is debatable. nobody has found, nor can found, example of primitive matter. It is a metaphysical hypothesis brought by Aristotle (and of course it is a popular extrapolation among animals)

Now, it is easy, when assuming comp, to have example of consciousnes without *primitive* matter, like all experiences emerging from the arithmetical computations.

Yeah yeah I know, it's all just a illusion, but why only that illusion? Why is the "illusion" always that matter effects consciousness and consciousness effects matter if one is more fundamental than the other?

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

So in arithmetic we can explain why numbers believe in consciousness and matter. In physics, we cannot unless we abandon comp and introduce special non turing emulable, nor first person recoverable, special infinities.

>> I don't see why it *MUST* be due to a deeper physical phenomenon; nearly every physicists alive says some things have no cause

> You might provide references.

Why? I think it would have been pompous and downright condescending to do so, you will certainly have no trouble finding such references without my help.

I don't find them. I can think only about the wave collapse, and perhaps the big bang. But I don't see this being said explicitly by physicists. 

It is a bit problematical for a computationalist, for the notion of "cause" is a rather fuzzy high level notion.

But if I had said "many physicist think it is a logical necessity that every event must have a cause" then THAT would indeed need references!   

 

> Event without reason might exist but cannot be invoked to explain anything.

To say that X happened not for any physical reason and not because of God but for no reason whatsoever is a explanation and it might even be true, but the trouble is it might not be and if you assume its true and give up there is no hope of ever finding the true reason if there is one. So there is the possibility we could spend eternity looking for something that does not exist.

> To invoke them as such is just equivalent with "I dunno and will never know".

These answers to a question are all different:

1) I dunno.  (What is the capital of Wyoming?)
2) I dunno and may never know.  (Is the Goldbach Conjecture true?)
3) I dunno and will never know.  (What are the first hundred digits of Chaitin's Omega Constant?) 

This one, you can know, if you are patient enough. But you will not know it and also know that you know it, so you can still doubt. Chaitin's constant can be computed *in the limit*. Its decimal will stabilize, you just don't know when.

4) Although meaningful the question has no answer.  (Why is there something rather than nothing?)

OK, but the question can be reduced to "why there are natural numbers obeying addition and multiplication law".

And either a chain of "why" question is infinitely long or it is not and you eventually come to a "why" question that cannot be answered because there is no reason behind it.

But this can be (and should be) accepted for the initial axioms of a theory, not for what we want to explain. A physical event without a cause or a reason does not make much sense to me (and makes no sense with comp).

Bruno 

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

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012  meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

>>Can you give an example of something neither determined nor random?

> No, not that I know to be such

What a surprise.

>but believers in contra causal free will think that at least some of their actions are.

In other words believers in contra causal free will (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) believe that nothing caused them to do it and being masters of doublethink simultaneously believe that nothing didn't cause them to do it, in still other words believers in "contra causal free will" believe in the power of gibberish.

> I don't know whether they would allow that psychological states must be either deterministic or random.

What do you mean you don't know! If they did it because they wanted to then it's deterministic.

> There is even an interpretation of QM (mostly associated with Henry Stapp) that looks at "random" events as "caused by future states".

Fine, but if it's caused then it's not random. Maybe things we believe are random are really caused but the causes are very strange, however just because humans find them weird does not make them one bit less mechanical. Perhaps last month you had no choice and you just had to spend good money to see the movie "John Carter on Mars", you were forced into it because a hundred years from now your great great great granddaughter will buy an ice cream cone at a movie called "Mars on John Carter". But I don't understand how any of this is supposed to make the "free will" noise less idiotic.

  John K Clark

[meekerdb]

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 17 Jun 2012, at 19:35, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at  Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> We can perhaps agree that consciousness-here-and-now is the only truth we know which seems undoubtable, so it might be more easy to explain the illusion of matter to consciousness than the illusion of consciousness to a piece of matter.

If consciousness is more fundamental than matter then it's difficult to explain why it's easy to find examples of matter without consciousness but nobody has yet found a single example of consciousness without matter.

This is debatable. nobody has found, nor can found, example of primitive matter. It is a metaphysical hypothesis brought by Aristotle (and of course it is a popular extrapolation among animals)

And almost all numbers have not been found.

Now, it is easy, when assuming comp, to have example of consciousnes without *primitive* matter, like all experiences emerging from the arithmetical computations.

Yeah yeah I know, it's all just a illusion, but why only that illusion? Why is the "illusion" always that matter effects consciousness and consciousness effects matter if one is more fundamental than the other?

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

So in arithmetic we can explain why numbers believe in consciousness and matter. In physics, we cannot unless we abandon comp and introduce special non turing emulable, nor first person recoverable, special infinities.

>> I don't see why it *MUST* be due to a deeper physical phenomenon; nearly every physicists alive says some things have no cause

> You might provide references.

Why? I think it would have been pompous and downright condescending to do so, you will certainly have no trouble finding such references without my help.

I don't find them. I can think only about the wave collapse, and perhaps the big bang. But I don't see this being said explicitly by physicists. 

It is a bit problematical for a computationalist, for the notion of "cause" is a rather fuzzy high level notion.

But if I had said "many physicist think it is a logical necessity that every event must have a cause" then THAT would indeed need references!   

 

> Event without reason might exist but cannot be invoked to explain anything.

To say that X happened not for any physical reason and not because of God but for no reason whatsoever is a explanation and it might even be true, but the trouble is it might not be and if you assume its true and give up there is no hope of ever finding the true reason if there is one. So there is the possibility we could spend eternity looking for something that does not exist.

> To invoke them as such is just equivalent with "I dunno and will never know".

These answers to a question are all different:

1) I dunno.  (What is the capital of Wyoming?)
2) I dunno and may never know.  (Is the Goldbach Conjecture true?)
3) I dunno and will never know.  (What are the first hundred digits of Chaitin's Omega Constant?) 

This one, you can know, if you are patient enough. But you will not know it and also know that you know it, so you can still doubt. Chaitin's constant can be computed *in the limit*. Its decimal will stabilize, you just don't know when.

4) Although meaningful the question has no answer.  (Why is there something rather than nothing?)

OK, but the question can be reduced to "why there are natural numbers obeying addition and multiplication law".

And either a chain of "why" question is infinitely long or it is not and you eventually come to a "why" question that cannot be answered because there is no reason behind it.

But this can be (and should be) accepted for the initial axioms of a theory, not for what we want to explain. A physical event without a cause or a reason does not make much sense to me (and makes no sense with comp).

Bruno 

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

[1Z]

On Jun 5, 3:27 am, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:

> If top level properties were determined by low level properties, then
> there would only be one level of description.

Doens't follow. Forest-level descriptions may be convenient.

[1Z]

On Jun 5, 3:14 am, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 6/4/2012 6:54 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> > On Jun 4, 8:57 pm, Stathis Papaioannou<stath...@gmail.com>  wrote:
>
> >> If you want to think that, fine. If it upsets you, I'm sorry. If it
> >> upsets you and therefore you conclude that it's not true, then your
> >> thinking is fallacious.
> > There's nothing upsetting about it, I just don't understand how we can
> > talk about deciding that we are powerless to make decisions. I'm
> > trying to figure out how that makes sense to anyone.
>
> Brains are made of the same stuff as everything else (up and down quarks, electrons,
> photons). We have no reason to believe that this stuff obeys different laws when it's in a
> brain, from which we conclude that whatever brains do it's determined

insamuch as it is determined

>by these same laws.
> I'm happy to call that 'free will' so long as your not coerced (however you want to draw
> the coerced/not-coerced line).  In which case, since we're not coerced, we are not
> powerless, we're just deterministic (mostly).
>
> Brent

[1Z]

On Jun 5, 3:48 am, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:

> An automatic pilot has no will. It's just a program implemented
> technologically. Its causal efficacy is second hand by way of being
> designed by people who have free will.

How did anything acquire causal efficacy before humans evolved?

[1Z]

On Jun 14, 5:21 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I don't understand how we can change the judicial system if we don't have
> > free will. All we can do is exist and watch to see whether we end up being
> > compelled to change it or not by forces outside of our control.
>
> And so it goes, one group screams cries and jumps up and down insisting
> that we do have free will and another group is just as insistent that we do
> not. But neither group can stop yelling for one second to ask what "free
> will"  is supposed to mean.

And a third group does nothing but ask and ask again, although the
question has been answered over and over again.

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 4:04 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 > This is debatable. nobody has found, nor can found, example of primitive matter.

Unlike the proton and neutron nobody has found any experimental evidence that the electron has a inner structure, that it is made of parts.   

> Now, it is easy, when assuming comp, to have example of consciousnes without *primitive* matter,

But then its odd that in the "illusion" we live our lives in consciousness is ALWAYS linked with matter.

>  consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me,

In the "illusion" my body is always linked with my consciousness but a rock is not unless the rock interacts with my body, a very odd illusion if consciousness is more fundamental than matter, and odd the illusion is so persistent and universal.  

>>  3) I dunno and will never know.  (What are the first hundred digits of Chaitin's Omega Constant?) 

> This one, you can know, if you are patient enough. But you will not know it and also know that you know it

True in a way. It's very unlikely but a random number generator could spit it out but it would not do you any good because you'd have no way of knowing it is Chaitin's Omega Constant.

> Chaitin's constant can be computed *in the limit*. Its decimal will stabilize, you just don't know when.

It can't be computed in a finite number of years. To calculate the first 100 digits of Chaitin's constant you'd need to feed all programs that can be expressed in 100 bits or less into a Turing Machine and see how many of them stop and how many of then do not. Some of them will never stop but the only way to know how many is to wait a infinite number of years and then see how many programs are still running. So you'd need to be infinitely patient, in other words you'd need to be dead.

>> Although meaningful the question has no answer.  (Why is there something rather than nothing?)

> OK, but the question can be reduced to "why there are natural numbers obeying addition and multiplication law"

Lawrence Krauss in his book "A Universe From Nothing" says that someday something close to that might actually be possible. 

 

> A physical event without a cause or a reason does not make much sense to me (and makes no sense with comp).

Of course it doesn't make sense, it's in the nature of the beast. If it made sense that would mean you knew the reason behind it but if it's truly random there is no reason behind it. It doesn't make sense that X came to be, that is to say you don't understand it because there is nothing to understand, X came to be for no reason.

  John K Clark

[1Z]

On Jun 15, 5:17 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 6/15/2012 8:43 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On 14 Jun 2012, at 18:21, John Clark wrote:
>
> >> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com
> >> <mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> >>     > I don't understand how we can change the judicial system if we don't have free
> >>     will. All we can do is exist and watch to see whether we end up being compelled to
> >>     change it or not by forces outside of our control.
>
> >> And so it goes, one group screams cries and jumps up and down insisting that we do have
> >> free will and another group is just as insistent that we do not. But neither group can

> >> stop yelling for one second to ask what "free will"  is supposed to mean. I humbly
> >> suggest that we first decide what "free will" is, and only then would it be fruitful to
> >> debate the question of whether people have this interesting property or not; until then
> >> it's just a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
>
> > OK. Perhaps we should always make at least precise if we talk about compatibilist free
> > will (c-free-will) or non comptatibilist free will (nc-free-will). People defending
> > nc-free-will should say so.
>
> > In comp, c-free-will is rather easy to define, and even a variety of ways, and computer
> > science theorem justifies a role, and plausibly a "darwinian selectable role" for some
> > of the possible definitions.
>
> > About nc-free-will, I have not any idea (yet?) about what it could mean. I tend to agree
> > with John on this.
>

> It seems pretty clear.  It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm and have them
> implemented in the physical realm.

No: it;'s the ability to have made a difference but still rational
decision under the
same circumstances. What you are talking about is a third kind of FW,
a kind
that is not just incompatibilist but supernatural to boot. But there
are naturalistic
libertarians.

[1Z]

On Jun 16, 6:49 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 15, 2012  meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > It seems pretty clear.  It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit
> > realm and have them implemented in the physical realm.
>
> Physical realm mental realm spirit realm or idiot realm (sorry, that last
> was redundant) things happen for a reason or things do not happen for a
> reason.

Thins happen for:
a reason and a cause
or
a reason but not cause
or
no reason but a cause
or
no reason and no cause.

> If the plans were announced before the event and it always happened then
> you would have a very hard time convincing anyone that the event really was
> "physically uncaused", few get that lucky so its statistically much more
> likely the plans caused the event.

So what caused the plans?

[1Z]

On Jun 17, 7:28 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:

> No, not that I know to be such; but believers in contra causal free will think that at
> least some of their actions are.

Does anyone describe themselves as a believer in Contra Causal Free
Will? People do
describe themselves as incompatibilist libertarians, and all they need
to believe
is that some of their actions are not entirely determined, and that
whatever random
element was involved was not fatal to their rationality, and their
ownership
of the action. A tertium datur is not needed. People who rush to the
conclusion
that it is, have generally rushed through the arguments about
randomness being
the Mind-Killer.

[Stephen P. King]

On 6/18/2012 11:51 AM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 17 Jun 2012, at 19:35, John Clark wrote:

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at  Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> We can perhaps agree that consciousness-here-and-now is the only truth we know which seems undoubtable, so it might be more easy to explain the illusion of matter to consciousness than the illusion of consciousness to a piece of matter.

If consciousness is more fundamental than matter then it's difficult to explain why it's easy to find examples of matter without consciousness but nobody has yet found a single example of consciousness without matter.

This is debatable. nobody has found, nor can found, example of primitive matter. It is a metaphysical hypothesis brought by Aristotle (and of course it is a popular extrapolation among animals)

And almost all numbers have not been found.

  Hi Brent,

    Umm, almost none? Could you point to a single report of an instance of a number being found and not just a representation of a number? It has never happend! All we think we know about numbers is strictly taken from our ability to understand the significance of representations of numbers. For example, this 5 is not really a number; it is a symbolic representation defined in terms of a pattern of pixels on your computer's monitor or other output. It is not actually a number!

Now, it is easy, when assuming comp, to have example of consciousnes without *primitive* matter, like all experiences emerging from the arithmetical computations.

Yeah yeah I know, it's all just a illusion, but why only that illusion? Why is the "illusion" always that matter effects consciousness and consciousness effects matter if one is more fundamental than the other?

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

    Do you realize that you are asking Bruno the same question here that I have been asking him for a long time now? Exactly how do computations have any form of causal efficacy upon each other within an immaterialist scheme? Might it be that 'subjective agreement" between streams of thought is just another form of what computer science denotes as bisimulation (except that it is not a timeless platonic version of it)?

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 12:38 PM, 1Z <peter...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Thins happen for:

a reason and a cause
or
a reason but not cause
or
no reason but a cause
or
no reason and no cause.

The dictionary on my Mac says a reason is a cause. It also says a cause is a reason. What on are you saying?

> So what caused the plans?

I have no idea, but I do know something caused the plans or something did not cause the plans. Not profound perhaps but true nevertheless.

  John K Clark

 

[meekerdb]

On 6/18/2012 9:36 AM, 1Z wrote:
>>> About nc-free-will, I have not any idea (yet?) about what it could mean. I tend to agree
>>> > > with John on this.
>> >
>> > It seems pretty clear. It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm and have them
>> > implemented in the physical realm.
> No: it;'s the ability to have made a difference but still rational
> decision under the
> same circumstances.

What does 'same circumstances' mean? Does it mean the same physical state down to the
lowest level, or does it just mean the same at the level of description of a police report?

Brent

[meekerdb]

On 6/18/2012 9:50 AM, 1Z wrote:
>
> On Jun 17, 7:28 pm, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> No, not that I know to be such; but believers in contra causal free will think that at
>> least some of their actions are.
> Does anyone describe themselves as a believer in Contra Causal Free
> Will? People do
> describe themselves as incompatibilist libertarians, and all they need
> to believe
> is that some of their actions are not entirely determined, and that
> whatever random
> element was involved was not fatal to their rationality, and their
> ownership
> of the action.

I don't see that as contrary to compatibilism which holds that 'free will' is compatible
with determinism (but not that determinism is necessarily true). Of course an otherwise
deterministic intelligence may make a random choice as part of a rational strategy. Does
libertarian free will *require* that some actions be random?

Brent

[1Z]

On Jun 18, 6:02 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 12:38 PM, 1Z <peterdjo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Thins happen for:
> > a reason and a cause
> > or
> > a reason but not cause
> > or
> > no reason but a cause
> > or
> > no reason and no cause.
>
> The dictionary on my Mac says a reason is a cause. It also says a cause is
> a reason. What on are you saying?

That causes are not reasons, although loose an popular language allows
the one word to be substituted for the other in some contexts.

[1Z]

On Jun 18, 6:03 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 6/18/2012 9:36 AM, 1Z wrote:
>
> >>> About nc-free-will, I have not any idea (yet?) about what it could mean. I tend to agree
> >>> >  >  with John on this.
>
> >> >  It seems pretty clear.  It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm and have them
> >> >  implemented in the physical realm.
> > No: it;'s the ability to have made a difference but still rational
> > decision under the
> > same circumstances.
>
> What does 'same circumstances' mean?  Does it mean the same physical state down to the
> lowest level, or does it just mean the same at the level of description of a police report?
>
> Brent
>

Good question. If you get very fine grained, then FW does start to
look random or even "contra
causal". I think for FW to be feasible we need to mean external
circumstances but not internal
states. I call that the doughnut theory.

[1Z]

On Jun 18, 6:22 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 6/18/2012 9:50 AM, 1Z wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Jun 17, 7:28 pm, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net>  wrote:
>
> >> No, not that I know to be such; but believers in contra causal free will think that at
> >> least some of their actions are.
> > Does anyone describe themselves as a believer in Contra Causal Free
> > Will?  People do
> > describe themselves as incompatibilist libertarians, and all they need
> > to believe
> > is that some of their actions are not entirely determined, and that
> > whatever random
> > element was involved was not fatal to their rationality, and their
> > ownership
> > of the action.
>
> I don't see that as contrary to compatibilism which holds that 'free will' is compatible
> with determinism

Well, incompatibilism is incompatible with determinism because
incompatibilist libertarians
think that if all their actions are determined, they have not FW.

>(but not that determinism is necessarily true).  Of course an otherwise
> deterministic intelligence may make a random choice as part of a rational strategy.  Does
> libertarian free will *require* that some actions be random?

Yes, or at least some elements of some actions.

[meekerdb]

OK, that comports with my understanding that 'free will' is social/legal level concept just meaning roughly "not coerced", where there are degrees of coercion.  And it basically a code phrase for assigning praise or blame.  This is illustrated by the current debate over U.S. immigration policy.  It seems wrong to deport people who were brought here as children - not of their free will - and have grown up as U.S. residents.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 1:31 PM, 1Z <peter...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> causes are not reasons

I see. Well, how would the world be different if causes WERE reasons? No I take it back, I don't see.

  John K Clark

[1Z]

On Jun 18, 6:46 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 1:31 PM, 1Z <peterdjo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > causes are not reasons
>
> I see. Well, how would the world be different if causes WERE reasons?

It means that if someone gets struck by lightning, God really does
hate them.

Reasons are aims and intentions in the minds of intelligent agents
which explain
and justify their actions. If you want to promote causes to reasons,
you are going
to need a lot more intelligent agents.

[1Z]

On Jun 18, 6:44 pm, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 6/18/2012 10:34 AM, 1Z wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jun 18, 6:03 pm, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net>  wrote:
> >> On 6/18/2012 9:36 AM, 1Z wrote:
>
> >>>>> About nc-free-will, I have not any idea (yet?) about what it could mean. I tend to agree
> >>>>>>   >    with John on this.
> >>>>>   It seems pretty clear.  It's an ability to make decisions in a spirit realm and have them
> >>>>>   implemented in the physical realm.
> >>> No: it;'s the ability to have made a difference but still rational
> >>> decision under the
> >>> same circumstances.
> >> What does 'same circumstances' mean?  Does it mean the same physical state down to the
> >> lowest level, or does it just mean the same at the level of description of a police report?
>
> >> Brent
>
> > Good question. If you get very fine grained, then FW does start to
> > look random or even "contra
> > causal".  I think for FW to be feasible we need to mean external
> > circumstances but not internal
> > states. I call that the doughnut theory.
>
> OK, that comports with my understanding that 'free will' is social/legal level concept
> just meaning roughly "not coerced", where there are degrees of coercion.

I'm not sure about "comporting with". The requirement to be able to
have done
otherwise is supposed to be explicitly incompatibilist.

[meekerdb]

Compatibilist allow that one could do otherwise if determinism is not true and so one's actions could be random.

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

Brent, Stephen,

On 18 Jun 2012, at 18:55, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 11:51 AM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

They interfere statistically by the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic). 

And it remains to be seen if that defines a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought. 

    Do you realize that you are asking Bruno the same question here that I have been asking him for a long time now? Exactly how do computations have any form of causal efficacy upon each other within an immaterialist scheme?

By the embedding of a large part of the constructive computer science in arithmetic. 

There is a universal diophantine polynomial (I will say more on this on the FOAR list soon). Once you have a universal system, you get them all (with CT). I might identify a notion of cause with the notion of universal (or not) machine. Some existing number relation implements all the possible relations between all possible universal machine.

You have to study the detail of Gödel's proof, or study Kleene's predicate, which translate computer science in arithmetic. For the non materialist, the problem is not to get interactions, the problem is not having too much of them.

Keep in mind I submit a problem, for the computationalist. Not a solution., but precise problems. You can use the arithmetical quantization to test test the quantum tautologies.

We will see if there is or not some winning topological quantum computer on the border of numberland, as seen from inside all computations.

Bruno

Might it be that 'subjective agreement" between streams of thought is just another form of what computer science denotes as bisimulation (except that it is not a timeless platonic version of it)?--

Onward!

Stephen

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

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

[meekerdb]

On 6/18/2012 2:13 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Brent, Stephen,

On 18 Jun 2012, at 18:55, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 11:51 AM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

They interfere statistically by the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic).

That still seems very vague.  I can suppose that many computations go thru the same or similar sequences which later branch and so have indeterminant futures.  But is that 'interference'?  And why should it produce any "me", "not me" boundary?

And it remains to be seen if that defines a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought. 

    Do you realize that you are asking Bruno the same question here that I have been asking him for a long time now? Exactly how do computations have any form of causal efficacy upon each other within an immaterialist scheme?

By the embedding of a large part of the constructive computer science in arithmetic. 

There is a universal diophantine polynomial (I will say more on this on the FOAR list soon). Once you have a universal system, you get them all (with CT). I might identify a notion of cause with the notion of universal (or not) machine. Some existing number relation implements all the possible relations between all possible universal machine.

You have to study the detail of Gödel's proof, or study Kleene's predicate, which translate computer science in arithmetic. For the non materialist, the problem is not to get interactions, the problem is not having too much of them.

Exactly.  It's the problem of having proved too much.  To say all computations can exist and if consciousness is computation then all conscious thoughts will exist is true but meaningless - like tautologies are.

Brent

[Jason Resch]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 10:20 AM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012  meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

>>Can you give an example of something neither determined nor random?

> No, not that I know to be such

What a surprise.

I can provide an example of something that is neither random nor determined*

* (from certain perspectives)

Cursor movements when controlling a VM.  While a super-intelligent AI program running in the VM could come up with theories about the mouse movements, even possibly learning some rudimentary rules about acceleration and inertia from the movements of the cursor, or theorize they are controlled by diurnal creatures, such an AI could never truly predict when and where the mouse pointer will be moved next.

Similarly, when one plays a computer game, from the perspective of the AI characters in the game, your character is controlled by an indeterminable process whose total information and description can never be fully known to those characters within the simulation.  Chalmers mentions this as a possibility for concretely realizing dualism: http://consc.net/papers/matrix.html

There is little difference, that I can see, between Brent's proposed spirit world intervening in the physical world, and brains in vats intervening in a virtual world, and there is nothing impossible about the latter scenario.  From the perspective of those in the virtual world, the actions of entities would be neither random nor determined.

Jason

 

>but believers in contra causal free will think that at least some of their actions are.

In other words believers in contra causal free will (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) believe that nothing caused them to do it and being masters of doublethink simultaneously believe that nothing didn't cause them to do it, in still other words believers in "contra causal free will" believe in the power of gibberish.

> I don't know whether they would allow that psychological states must be either deterministic or random.

What do you mean you don't know! If they did it because they wanted to then it's deterministic.

> There is even an interpretation of QM (mostly associated with Henry Stapp) that looks at "random" events as "caused by future states".

Fine, but if it's caused then it's not random. Maybe things we believe are random are really caused but the causes are very strange, however just because humans find them weird does not make them one bit less mechanical. Perhaps last month you had no choice and you just had to spend good money to see the movie "John Carter on Mars", you were forced into it because a hundred years from now your great great great granddaughter will buy an ice cream cone at a movie called "Mars on John Carter". But I don't understand how any of this is supposed to make the "free will" noise less idiotic.

  John K Clark

--

[Stephen P. King]

On 6/18/2012 5:13 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Brent, Stephen,

On 18 Jun 2012, at 18:55, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 11:51 AM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

They interfere statistically by the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic).

Hi Bruno,

    You seem to have an exact metric for this "measure" of "the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic)". What I need to understand is the reasoning behind your choice of set theory and arithmetic axioms; after all there are many mutually-exclusive and yet self-consistent choices that can be made. Do you see a 1p feature that would allow you to known that preference is not biased?

And it remains to be seen if that defines a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought.

    If it does not have "subjective argeement" with other mutually exclusive then there would be a big problem. No?

    Do you realize that you are asking Bruno the same question here that I have been asking him for a long time now? Exactly how do computations have any form of causal efficacy upon each other within an immaterialist scheme?

By the embedding of a large part of the constructive computer science in arithmetic.

    What "part" is not embedded?

There is a universal diophantine polynomial (I will say more on this on the FOAR list soon). Once you have a universal system, you get them all (with CT). I might identify a notion of cause with the notion of universal (or not) machine. Some existing number relation implements all the possible relations between all possible universal machine.

    Universality (of computations) requires the existence of an equivalence class (modulo diffeomorphisms) of physical systems over which that computation is functionally equivalent. No? If not, how is universality defined? Over a purely abstract set? What defines the axioms for that set?

You have to study the detail of Gödel's proof, or study Kleene's predicate, which translate computer science in arithmetic. For the non materialist, the problem is not to get interactions, the problem is not having too much of them.

    Correct! You get an infinite regress of "interactions"! Way too many! In fact, I bet that you get at least a aleph_1 cardinal infinity. But what about the continuum hypothesis? Do you take it as true or false in your sets? If you take it as false then you obtain a very interesting thing in the number theory; it looks like all arithmetics are non-standard in some infinite limit! You have to have a means to necessitate a limit to finite sets. The requirement of Boolean satisfyability exactly gives us this "rule".

Keep in mind I submit a problem, for the computationalist. Not a solution., but precise problems. You can use the arithmetical quantization to test test the quantum tautologies.

We will see if there is or not some winning topological quantum computer on the border of numberland, as seen from inside all computations.

    What physical experiment will measure this effect? If there is no physical effect correlated with the difference, then this idea is literally a figment of someone's imagination and nothing more. The physical implementation of a quantum computer is a physical event. I thought that your idea that computations are independent of all physicality was completely and causally independent from such. =-O

    My argument is that a computational simulation is nothing more than "vaporware" (a figment of someone's imagination) until and unless there exists a plenum of physical systems that all can implement the "best possible version" of that simulation. When we recall that Wolfram defines the "real thing" as the "best possible simulation, we reach a conclusion. This "plenum" is the trace or action (???I am not sure???)  of (on?) an equivalence class of spaces that are diffeomorphic to each *other under some ordering*. I am not certain of the wording of the first part of this, but I am absolutely certain of the latter part, "an equivalence class of spaces that are diffeomorphic to each *other under some ordering*" I am unassailably certain of.

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

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

[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jun 2012, at 00:08, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 2:13 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Brent, Stephen,

On 18 Jun 2012, at 18:55, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 11:51 AM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

They interfere statistically by the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic).

That still seems very vague.  I can suppose that many computations go thru the same or similar sequences which later branch and so have indeterminant futures.  But is that 'interference'? 

Sure. Of course a priori it is not wave like, for the probabilities add only, untilm you take the self-reference constraint into account, which leads to the arithmetical quantization, which imposes a quantum logic on the consistent extensions.

And why should it produce any "me", "not me" boundary?

It does not. "personal identity" is an illusion due to disconnected memories, and correct self-reference. The me/not me is just explained by the diagonalisation: if Dx gives xx, DD gives DD.

And it remains to be seen if that defines a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought. 

    Do you realize that you are asking Bruno the same question here that I have been asking him for a long time now? Exactly how do computations have any form of causal efficacy upon each other within an immaterialist scheme?

By the embedding of a large part of the constructive computer science in arithmetic. 

There is a universal diophantine polynomial (I will say more on this on the FOAR list soon). Once you have a universal system, you get them all (with CT). I might identify a notion of cause with the notion of universal (or not) machine. Some existing number relation implements all the possible relations between all possible universal machine.

You have to study the detail of Gödel's proof, or study Kleene's predicate, which translate computer science in arithmetic. For the non materialist, the problem is not to get interactions, the problem is not having too much of them.

Exactly.  It's the problem of having proved too much.  To say all computations can exist and if consciousness is computation then all conscious thoughts will exist is true but meaningless - like tautologies are.

It is not tautological because we can test if there are too much computations and if they obey quantum logic or not, so it is certainly not tautological. You forget that the laws of physics are given by the statistics on those computations.

Bruno

Brent

Keep in mind I submit a problem, for the computationalist. Not a solution., but precise problems. You can use the arithmetical quantization to test test the quantum tautologies.

We will see if there is or not some winning topological quantum computer on the border of numberland, as seen from inside all computations.

Bruno

Might it be that 'subjective agreement" between streams of thought is just another form of what computer science denotes as bisimulation (except that it is not a timeless platonic version of it)?--

Onward!

Stephen

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

[R AM]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 5:56 AM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

There is little difference, that I can see, between Brent's proposed spirit world intervening in the physical world, and brains in vats intervening in a virtual world, and there is nothing impossible about the latter scenario.  From the perspective of those in the virtual world, the actions of entities would be neither random nor determined.

But in that case, physics would not be closed.

And, it would be a mistery why spirits that cause violations in physical law are attached to complex structures like human brains, and not, let's say, rocks or dead bodies.

 

Jason

[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jun 2012, at 08:01, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 5:13 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Brent, Stephen,

On 18 Jun 2012, at 18:55, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 11:51 AM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

They interfere statistically by the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic).

Hi Bruno,

    You seem to have an exact metric for this "measure" of "the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic)".

Not at all. I only reduce the mind-body problem (including the body problem) into the problem of finding that metric. UDA must be seen as a proof of existence of that "metric" from the comp hypothesis. Then AUDA gives the logic of observable which is a step toward that metric isolation.

What I need to understand is the reasoning behind your choice of set theory and arithmetic axioms;

I don't use set theory. Only elementary arithmetic. At the ontological level.

At the meta-level I use all the math I need, like any scientist in any part of science.

after all there are many mutually-exclusive and yet self-consistent choices that can be made. Do you see a 1p feature that would allow you to known that preference is not biased?

As I said, I use arithmetic because natiural numbers are taught in high school, but any (Turing) universal will do. the point is that neither the laws of consciousness, nor the laws of matter depend on the choice of the basic initial system, so I use the one that everybody knows. Sometimes I use the combinators or the lambda algebra. I don't use geometrical or physical system because that would be both a treachery, in our setting, and it would also be confusing for the complete derivation of the physical laws.

And it remains to be seen if that defines a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought.

    If it does not have "subjective argeement" with other mutually exclusive then there would be a big problem. No?

No. It would be a refutation of comp+classical theory of knowledge (by UDA). That would be a formidable result. 

But the evidences available now, is that the physics derived from arithmetic, through comp+ usual definition of knowledge, is similar to the empirical physics (AUDA). 

    Do you realize that you are asking Bruno the same question here that I have been asking him for a long time now? Exactly how do computations have any form of causal efficacy upon each other within an immaterialist scheme?

By the embedding of a large part of the constructive computer science in arithmetic.

    What "part" is not embedded?

The non elementary, second order, or analytical part. It is not embedded in the number relations, but it appears in the mind of the universal numbers as tool to accelerate the self-study. It is epistemological.

There is a universal diophantine polynomial (I will say more on this on the FOAR list soon). Once you have a universal system, you get them all (with CT). I might identify a notion of cause with the notion of universal (or not) machine. Some existing number relation implements all the possible relations between all possible universal machine.

    Universality (of computations) requires the existence of an equivalence class (modulo diffeomorphisms) of physical systems over which that computation is functionally equivalent. No?

?

If not, how is universality defined? Over a purely abstract set? What defines the axioms for that set?

You don't need set. You can define "universal" in arithmetic. I am starting an explanation of this on the FOAR list.

You have to study the detail of Gödel's proof, or study Kleene's predicate, which translate computer science in arithmetic. For the non materialist, the problem is not to get interactions, the problem is not having too much of them.

    Correct! You get an infinite regress of "interactions"! Way too many! In fact, I bet that you get at least a aleph_1 cardinal infinity. But what about the continuum hypothesis? Do you take it as true or false in your sets?

I don't care at all. 

If you take it as false then you obtain a very interesting thing in the number theory; it looks like all arithmetics are non-standard in some infinite limit! You have to have a means to necessitate a limit to finite sets. The requirement of Boolean satisfyability exactly gives us this "rule".

? (unclear).

Keep in mind I submit a problem, for the computationalist. Not a solution., but precise problems. You can use the arithmetical quantization to test test the quantum tautologies.

We will see if there is or not some winning topological quantum computer on the border of numberland, as seen from inside all computations.

    What physical experiment will measure this effect?

Well, here the physical events is the discovery of quantum computations in nature. That is what remain to be seen in the arithmetical physics. But we have already the quantization and a quantum logic.

If there is no physical effect correlated with the difference, then this idea is literally a figment of someone's imagination and nothing more. The physical implementation of a quantum computer is a physical event. I thought that your idea that computations are independent of all physicality was completely and causally independent from such. =-O

    My argument is that a computational simulation is nothing more than "vaporware" (a figment of someone's imagination) until and unless there exists a plenum of physical systems that all can implement the "best possible version" of that simulation.

Arithmetic implements all computations already. And UDA explain that the physical emerges from that, and evidence are that the comp arithmetical physics can implement the quantum computations. They are just not primitive.

When we recall that Wolfram defines the "real thing" as the "best possible simulation, we reach a conclusion. This "plenum" is the trace or action (???I am not sure???)  of (on?) an equivalence class of spaces that are diffeomorphic to each *other under some ordering*. I am not certain of the wording of the first part of this, but I am absolutely certain of the latter part, "an equivalence class of spaces that are diffeomorphic to each *other under some ordering*" I am unassailably certain of.

Wolfralm is unaware of consciousness and first person indeterminacy.

Bruno

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

[Bruno Marchal]

On 18 Jun 2012, at 18:32, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 4:04 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 > This is debatable. nobody has found, nor can found, example of primitive matter.

Unlike the proton and neutron nobody has found any experimental evidence that the electron has a inner structure, that it is made of parts.   

The primitive matter I talk about is the idea of primary matter in the Aristotle sense (simplified). If I say that electron is not primitive, I don't mean it is made of part, almost the contrary, that it is a mathematical reality, or that it is reducible to a non physical mathematical or theological reality, an invariant in our sharable computations.

> Now, it is easy, when assuming comp, to have example of consciousnes without *primitive* matter,

But then its odd that in the "illusion" we live our lives in consciousness is ALWAYS linked with matter.

In REM sleep, the night, clearly consciousness is related to appearance of matter, and the day, we can agree on stable patterns, apparantly consistent pattern. The physicist measure numbers, infer relations, extrapolate, and publish about those relations of numbers. That consciousness is always related to matter can be explained through evolution, and long computation (and the derivation of physics from arithmetic). The point is not the non existence of matter, but of primitive (not "atomic", but conceptually irreducible) matter.

>  consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me,

In the "illusion" my body is always linked with my consciousness but a rock is not unless the rock interacts with my body, a very odd illusion if consciousness is more fundamental than matter, and odd the illusion is so persistent and universal.  

Yes, but it is odd in a sufficiently precise way as to make comp testable. That's the point. The physics appears already rather weird, but is it more weird than QM? Oddness, weirdness is subjective and cultural.

>>  3) I dunno and will never know.  (What are the first hundred digits of Chaitin's Omega Constant?) 

> This one, you can know, if you are patient enough. But you will not know it and also know that you know it

True in a way. It's very unlikely but a random number generator could spit it out but it would not do you any good because you'd have no way of knowing it is Chaitin's Omega Constant.

I can run all programs and wait. This will give me all correct decimal in the limit, but I will never be sure on almost all decimals.

> Chaitin's constant can be computed *in the limit*. Its decimal will stabilize, you just don't know when.

It can't be computed in a finite number of years.

Each initial segment can. But not in an ascertainable way.

To calculate the first 100 digits of Chaitin's constant you'd need to feed all programs that can be expressed in 100 bits or less into a Turing Machine and see how many of them stop and how many of then do not. Some of them will never stop but the only way to know how many is to wait a infinite number of years and then see how many programs are still running. So you'd need to be infinitely patient, in other words you'd need to be dead.

Only to be sure of the decimals obtained. If I relax that constraints, then I need only to be *very patient*. The non computable, but well defined Buzzy Beaver function (BB) bounds the time needed to wait. Of course it grows *very* fast. But I don't need an *infinite* time to get the 100 first digits correct. Any time bigger than BB(100) will do.

>> Although meaningful the question has no answer.  (Why is there something rather than nothing?)

> OK, but the question can be reduced to "why there are natural numbers obeying addition and multiplication law"

Lawrence Krauss in his book "A Universe From Nothing" says that someday something close to that might actually be possible. 

You mean? Deriving addition and multiplication from physics? That is impossible. You can't derive them from anything which does not postulate them implicitly. Physics already assume + and * (or R and trigonometric functions, which are a way to (re)define the integers in analysis, by sin(2*PI*x) = 0; for example).

 

> A physical event without a cause or a reason does not make much sense to me (and makes no sense with comp).

Of course it doesn't make sense, it's in the nature of the beast.

So we agree on this. It is gibberish.

If it made sense that would mean you knew the reason behind it but if it's truly random there is no reason behind it. It doesn't make sense that X came to be, that is to say you don't understand it because there is nothing to understand, X came to be for no reason.

Here it looks like it makes sense, after all. Why do you use "gibberish" to condemn free will, and not to condemn event without cause?

Bruno

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

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 1Z <peter...@yahoo.com> wrote:

>> how would the world be different if causes WERE reasons?

> if someone gets struck  by lightning, God really does hate them.

I pray to God you're joking.

> Reasons are aims and intentions in the minds of intelligent agents which explain and justify their actions. If you want to promote causes to reasons, you are going to need a lot more intelligent agents.

So the difference between intelligent agents and other complex things like cells or computers or redwood trees or galaxies is that intelligent agents do things because of reasons but other mechanical things do things because of causes; and the difference between causes and reasons is that reasons do things to intelligent agents but causes do things to other mechanical things. And around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows.

And when you say "the reason the street's wet is that it's raining" you are implying that asphalt is an intelligent agent.

 John K Clark

[meekerdb]

On 6/19/2012 12:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 19 Jun 2012, at 00:08, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 2:13 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Brent, Stephen,

On 18 Jun 2012, at 18:55, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 11:51 AM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

They interfere statistically by the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic).

That still seems very vague.  I can suppose that many computations go thru the same or similar sequences which later branch and so have indeterminant futures.  But is that 'interference'? 

Sure. Of course a priori it is not wave like, for the probabilities add only, untilm you take the self-reference constraint into account, which leads to the arithmetical quantization, which imposes a quantum logic on the consistent extensions.

To quick for me. Is this spelled out somewhere.

And why should it produce any "me", "not me" boundary?

It does not. "personal identity" is an illusion due to disconnected memories,

But they are not 'disconnected'.  It's their connectedness that is essential to the 'illusion'.

and correct self-reference. The me/not me is just explained by the diagonalisation: if Dx gives xx, DD gives DD.

Again, does not explain it to me.

Brent

And it remains to be seen if that defines a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought. 

    Do you realize that you are asking Bruno the same question here that I have been asking him for a long time now? Exactly how do computations have any form of causal efficacy upon each other within an immaterialist scheme?

By the embedding of a large part of the constructive computer science in arithmetic. 

There is a universal diophantine polynomial (I will say more on this on the FOAR list soon). Once you have a universal system, you get them all (with CT). I might identify a notion of cause with the notion of universal (or not) machine. Some existing number relation implements all the possible relations between all possible universal machine.

You have to study the detail of Gödel's proof, or study Kleene's predicate, which translate computer science in arithmetic. For the non materialist, the problem is not to get interactions, the problem is not having too much of them.

Exactly.  It's the problem of having proved too much.  To say all computations can exist and if consciousness is computation then all conscious thoughts will exist is true but meaningless - like tautologies are.

It is not tautological because we can test if there are too much computations and if they obey quantum logic or not, so it is certainly not tautological. You forget that the laws of physics are given by the statistics on those computations.

Bruno

Brent

Keep in mind I submit a problem, for the computationalist. Not a solution., but precise problems. You can use the arithmetical quantization to test test the quantum tautologies.

We will see if there is or not some winning topological quantum computer on the border of numberland, as seen from inside all computations.

Bruno

Might it be that 'subjective agreement" between streams of thought is just another form of what computer science denotes as bisimulation (except that it is not a timeless platonic version of it)?--

Onward!

Stephen

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

[meekerdb]

On 6/19/2012 3:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> Lawrence Krauss in his book "A Universe From Nothing" says that someday something close
>> to that might actually be possible.
>
> You mean? Deriving addition and multiplication from physics? That is impossible.

I'd say that depends on what you mean by 'derive'. Certainly the idea of addition and
multiplication occurs to humans, and even to some animals, through evolutionary processes.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 11:56 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I can provide an example of something that is neither random nor determined*

* (from certain perspectives)

Of course it's not random or determined *FROM CERTAIN PERSPECTIVES*!  I've said over and over that there are only 2 meanings to the phrase "free will" that are not gibberish, and one of them is the inability to always predict what you will do next even in a stable environment and even if such a prediction would be easy to make by someone else who has a different perspective. And I have also said that it is unfortunate that nobody except me has either meaning in mind when they make the "free will" noise and prefer circularity and gibberish. 

  John K Clark  




 

[Craig Weinberg]

On Tuesday, June 19, 2012 11:20:32 AM UTC-4, John K Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 11:56 PM, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I can provide an example of something that is neither random nor determined*

* (from certain perspectives)

Of course it's not random or determined *FROM CERTAIN PERSPECTIVES*! 

Are you assuming that it is possible to have any other kind of perspective? An omniscient voyeur who sees all possible perspectives without participating in any of them in any way?
 

I've said over and over that there are only 2 meanings to the phrase "free will" that are not gibberish, and one of them is the inability to always predict what you will do next even in a stable environment

Why does my free will depend on someone else's ability to predict it? Just because what I say is not surprising doesn't mean that I am not generating my own words voluntarily and freely.
 

and even if such a prediction would be easy to make by someone else who has a different perspective. And I have also said that it is unfortunate that nobody except me has either meaning in mind when they make the "free will" noise and prefer circularity and gibberish. 

  John K Clark  




 

Cursor movements when controlling a VM.  While a super-intelligent AI program running in the VM could come up with theories about the mouse movements, even possibly learning some rudimentary rules about acceleration and inertia from the movements of the cursor, or theorize they are controlled by diurnal creatures, such an AI could never truly predict when and where the mouse pointer will be moved next.

Similarly, when one plays a computer game, from the perspective of the AI characters in the game, your character is controlled by an indeterminable process whose total information and description can never be fully known to those characters within the simulation.  Chalmers mentions this as a possibility for concretely realizing dualism: http://consc.net/papers/matrix.html

There is little difference, that I can see, between Brent's proposed spirit world intervening in the physical world, and brains in vats intervening in a virtual world, and there is nothing impossible about the latter scenario.  From the perspective of those in the virtual world, the actions of entities would be neither random nor determined.

Jason

 

>but believers in contra causal free will think that at least some of their actions are.

In other words believers in contra causal free will (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) believe that nothing caused them to do it and being masters of doublethink simultaneously believe that nothing didn't cause them to do it, in still other words believers in "contra causal free will" believe in the power of gibberish.

> I don't know whether they would allow that psychological states must be either deterministic or random.

What do you mean you don't know! If they did it because they wanted to then it's deterministic.

> There is even an interpretation of QM (mostly associated with Henry Stapp) that looks at "random" events as "caused by future states".

Fine, but if it's caused then it's not random. Maybe things we believe are random are really caused but the causes are very strange,

But not strange enough to be ordinary 'free will' apparently...that is the one thing that cannot exist or be named. Hard to prohibit the existence of something unless you know precisely what it is you are prohibiting....and if you know what free will is supposed to be, then it is hardly incomprehensible noise.

however just because humans find them weird does not make them one bit less mechanical.

Perhaps just because you find non-mechanical free will intolerable doesn't make it one bit less real?
 

Perhaps last month you had no choice and you just had to spend good money to see the movie "John Carter on Mars", you were forced into it because a hundred years from now your great great great granddaughter will buy an ice cream cone at a movie called "Mars on John Carter". But I don't understand how any of this is supposed to make the "free will" noise less idiotic.

What does it matter how much sense free will makes if you have no free will to determine your own opinion about it?

Craig
 

[1Z]

On Jun 19, 3:59 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 1Z <peterdjo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> how would the world be different if causes WERE reasons?
>
> > > if someone gets struck  by lightning, God really does hate them.
>
> I pray to God you're joking.

Causes=reasons is *your* idea. I'm just stating the consequence.

> > Reasons are aims and intentions in the minds of intelligent agents which
> > explain and justify their actions. If you want to promote causes to
> > reasons, you are going to need a lot more intelligent agents.
>
> So the difference between intelligent agents and other complex things like
> cells or computers or redwood trees or galaxies is that intelligent agents
> do things because of reasons but other mechanical things do things because
> of causes;

Sufficiently advanced AIs and non human animals may count
as intelligent agents too.

> and the difference between causes and reasons is that reasons do
> things to intelligent agents but causes do things to other mechanical
> things.

No. Causes do, reasons explain.

>And around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows.

You seem to be alleging that "intelligent agent" and "reason" have
been defined in a mutually circular way. They haven't been.

> And when you say "the reason the street's wet is that it's raining" you are
> implying that asphalt is an intelligent agent.

No, that's a deviant use of "reason", which you have based
you whole argument on. It is as if you are insisting that ships
really are female because they are called "she".

[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jun 2012, at 17:00, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/19/2012 12:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 19 Jun 2012, at 00:08, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 2:13 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Brent, Stephen,

On 18 Jun 2012, at 18:55, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 11:51 AM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

They interfere statistically by the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic).

That still seems very vague.  I can suppose that many computations go thru the same or similar sequences which later branch and so have indeterminant futures.  But is that 'interference'? 

Sure. Of course a priori it is not wave like, for the probabilities add only, untilm you take the self-reference constraint into account, which leads to the arithmetical quantization, which imposes a quantum logic on the consistent extensions.

To quick for me. Is this spelled out somewhere.

In most of my papers. I think I describe the quantization in sane04. You have to study a bit of mathematical logic. The quantization of p is given mainly by [] <> p, with the [] p = Bp & Dt, and B Gödel's provability predicate. You have to restrict p to the sigma_1 propositions. We can come back on this.

And why should it produce any "me", "not me" boundary?

It does not. "personal identity" is an illusion due to disconnected memories,

But they are not 'disconnected'.  It's their connectedness that is essential to the 'illusion'.

 I was talking about the memories of different individuals.

and correct self-reference. The me/not me is just explained by the diagonalisation: if Dx gives xx, DD gives DD.

Again, does not explain it to me.

It makes possible to have program defined in term of their own code. It solves the conceptual difficulties described by Descartes and Driesch about life. I used it to implement "planarias" (self-regenerating programs, or collection of programs). It explains self-reference at least in the technical sense that it provides the tools to handle self-reproduction, and self-reference. It is *the* tool in proving the arithmetical completeness of the logic of self-reference G and G*.  It gives a precise mathematical notion of self, defined relatively to a universal number/machine/probable-neighboor. 

You can use it to show that there is no possible algorithm for the stopping problem. Just define the following "duplicator D"

Dx = if stop(xx) then continue, else stop.

Then "stop" fails on DD:

DD = if stop(DD) then continue, else stop.

I can give a more formal view with the phi_i, or with the W_i, but the basic idea is very simple. It starts the whole subject on (arithmetical) self-reference.

A good introductory paper is 

SMORYNSKI, C., 1981, Fifty Years of Self-Reference in Arithmetic, Notre Dame Journal 

of Formal Logic, Vol. 22, n° 4, pp. 357-374. 

Bruno

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

[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jun 2012, at 17:11, meekerdb wrote:

> On 6/19/2012 3:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> Lawrence Krauss in his book "A Universe From Nothing" says that
>>> someday something close to that might actually be possible.
>>
>> You mean? Deriving addition and multiplication from physics? That
>> is impossible.
>
> I'd say that depends on what you mean by 'derive'. Certainly the
> idea of addition and multiplication occurs to humans, and even to
> some animals, through evolutionary processes.

I meant derive by a logical deduction.

Like we can derive exponentiation from addition and multiplication,
but it is a *very* difficult problem which took seventy years to be
solved (mainly by Davis, Robinson, and Matiyasevich).

Bruno

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

[John Clark]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 6:01 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> Unlike the proton and neutron nobody has found any experimental evidence that the electron has a inner structure, that it is made of parts.   

> The primitive matter I talk about is the idea of primary matter in the Aristotle sense

Aristotle was a great logician but a dreadful physicist.

> If I say that electron is not primitive, I don't mean it is made of part, almost the contrary, that it is a mathematical reality, or that it is reducible to a non physical mathematical or theological reality, an invariant in our sharable computations.

I don't know what that means. What experiment would I need to perform, what would a electron need to do to prove it was "primitive".

>> To calculate the first 100 digits of Chaitin's constant you'd need to feed all programs that can be expressed in 100 bits or less into a Turing Machine and see how many of them stop and how many of then do not. Some of them will never stop but the only way to know how many is to wait a infinite number of years and then see how many programs are still running. So you'd need to be infinitely patient, in other words you'd need to be dead.

> Only to be sure of the decimals obtained.

Well yeah, it's easy to calculate Chaitin's constant  if you don't mind getting it wrong.

> If I relax that constraints, then I need only to be *very patient*. The non computable, but well defined Buzzy Beaver function (BB) bounds the time needed to wait. Of course it grows *very* fast. But I don't need an *infinite* time to get the 100 first digits correct. Any time bigger than BB(100) will do.

If we wait a googoplex to the googoplex power years some 100 bit programs will still be running, some of them could be Busy Beaver programs but others could just be very long finite programs. And in the same 1962 paper where Rado introduced the idea of the beaver he proved that a general algorithm to tell if a program is a Busy Beaver or not does not exist. It's true that if you knew the numerical value of Chaitin's Constant then you would know that if a 100 bit program had not stopped after a Turing Machine had run n number of finite operations then it never will; but the trouble is you don't know Chaitin's Constant and never can, so you can never know how big n is. So even though they have been running for a googoplex to the googoplex power years one of those programs could stop 5 seconds from now.

And a Busy Beaver program grows faster than any computable function but to my knowledge it has not been proven that all non-computable functions grow as fast as the Busy Beaver.

> Lawrence Krauss in his book "A Universe From Nothing" says that someday something close to that might actually be possible. 

> You mean? Deriving addition and multiplication from physics?

No, Krauss talks about deriving physics from addition and multiplication, or at least from logic; he talks about proving that in the multiverse only certain fundamental laws of physics are logically self consistent.  He even talks about the distant dream of showing that "something" is consistent but "nothing" is not.

> That is impossible.

I think both Krauss and I would give the same response to that, maybe.

> Why do you use "gibberish" to condemn free will, and not to condemn event without cause?

Because the meaning of "a event without a cause" is clear and no circularity is involved. Even the meaning of the question "what caused a event without a cause?" is clear, although it is a stupid question because the answer is so obvious.  But the meaning of "free will" is anything but clear and circularity abounds. And "why do we have free will?" is not a stupid question, its not smart and its not stupid and even though it contains a question mark it's not even a question, it's just a sequence of ASCII characters.

  John K Clark

[Stephen P. King]

On 6/19/2012 5:39 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 19 Jun 2012, at 08:01, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 5:13 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Brent, Stephen,

On 18 Jun 2012, at 18:55, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 11:51 AM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

They interfere statistically by the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic).

Hi Bruno,

    You seem to have an exact metric for this "measure" of "the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic)".

Not at all. I only reduce the mind-body problem (including the body problem) into the problem of finding that metric. UDA must be seen as a proof of existence of that "metric" from the comp hypothesis. Then AUDA gives the logic of observable which is a step toward that metric isolation.

Dear Bruno,

    What I fail to understand is how the currently well known and existing proofs of the non-existence of generic metrics on infinite sets that are, AFAIK, identical to your concept of computations (as strings of numbers) do not seem to impress you at all. It is as if your are willfully blind to evidence that contradicts your claims. I am sympathetic to your motivation and am interested in finding a path around this serious problem that I see in your reasoning. My point here is that this claim that "UDA must be seen as a proof of existence of that "metric" from the comp hypothesis" has no epistemological "weight" if it cannot be associated with the other aspects of mathematics. One must show how one's new idea/discovery of mathematical "objects/relations" are related to the wider universe of mathematical objects and relations; or one is risking the path of solipsism.
    I have tried to get your attention to look at various possibilities, such as the axiom of choice, non-well founded sets, the Tennenbaum theorem, etc. as possible hints to a path to the solution but you seem to be trapped in a thought, like light orbiting a black hole, endlessly repeating the same idea over and over. Would you snap out of it and see what I am trying to explain to you?

What I need to understand is the reasoning behind your choice of set theory and arithmetic axioms;

I don't use set theory. Only elementary arithmetic. At the ontological level.

    But Bruno, you are being disingenuous here. The phrase "only elementary arithmetic" is not all that is involved! in order to have a meaningful description of "only elementary arithmetic" one has to relate to a wider univerce of concepts and one must connect to the physical acts that support the experience of what numbers are.

At the meta-level I use all the math I need, like any scientist in any part of science.

    I am not sure what that means.

after all there are many mutually-exclusive and yet self-consistent choices that can be made. Do you see a 1p feature that would allow you to known that preference is not biased?

As I said, I use arithmetic because natiural numbers are taught in high school, but any (Turing) universal will do.

    Do you understand the idea that "natural numbers [as] ... taught in high school" does not have special ontological status? I am trying to get you to think of numbers in a wider context.

the point is that neither the laws of consciousness, nor the laws of matter depend on the choice of the basic initial system, so I use the one that everybody knows.

    So, does a consensus of belief grant special ontological status? What else am I to think of the implication of the phrase "... that everybody knows". Closed sets of communications are (representationally) studied in network, game and graph theory. From what I have read, finite versions of these reach equilibrium in at least log_2 N steps and once there never change again. This only illustrates the point that we have to consider open systems and those are such that they do not allow for exact closed form descriptions in math. This is a well known fact to any competent engineer.

Sometimes I use the combinators or the lambda algebra. I don't use geometrical or physical system because that would be both a treachery, in our setting, and it would also be confusing for the complete derivation of the physical laws.

    Nice excuse! LOL!

And it remains to be seen if that defines a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought.

    If it does not have "subjective argeement" with other mutually exclusive then there would be a big problem. No?

No. It would be a refutation of comp+classical theory of knowledge (by UDA). That would be a formidable result. 

But the evidences available now, is that the physics derived from arithmetic, through comp+ usual definition of knowledge, is similar to the empirical physics (AUDA).

    Exactly what does this mean? You keep repeating these words... How about finding a new set of words that has the same meaning? Truths are independent of particular representations!

    Do you realize that you are asking Bruno the same question here that I have been asking him for a long time now? Exactly how do computations have any form of causal efficacy upon each other within an immaterialist scheme?

By the embedding of a large part of the constructive computer science in arithmetic.

    What "part" is not embedded?

The non elementary, second order, or analytical part. It is not embedded in the number relations, but it appears in the mind of the universal numbers as tool to accelerate the self-study. It is epistemological.

    So exactly how are numbers embedded themselves such that this second order aspect can have some measure of the logical analogue of causal efficasy (aka significance)? You are not avoiding the "other minds" problem here! One has to explain how minds can have any influence or even synchrony with each other. Even Leibniz recognized this and postulated a "pre-established harmony" to account for it. It was a good try, but ultimately it failed for the simple reason that such a "pre-established harmony" is equivalent to the solution to an infinite NP-Complete computational problem.  You simply cannot ignore the implications of computational complexity!

There is a universal diophantine polynomial (I will say more on this on the FOAR list soon). Once you have a universal system, you get them all (with CT). I might identify a notion of cause with the notion of universal (or not) machine. Some existing number relation implements all the possible relations between all possible universal machine.

    Universality (of computations) requires the existence of an equivalence class (modulo diffeomorphisms) of physical systems over which that computation is functionally equivalent. No?

?

    Do I underestimate your ability to understand the English language? Do we need to go through the discussion of universality again? Really? OK, I will try to step though my reasoning slowly for you.


    What does computational universality means if not some form of functional equivalence between a large (possibly infinite) set of physical systems? When we study General Relativity we discover something known as the "Hole Argument". It ultimately shows the notion of "Leibniz Equivalence. If two distributions of fields are related by a smooth transformation, then they represent the same physical systems." (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-holearg/Leibniz_Equivalence.html)

    I am assuming that the readers can understand that "sets of physical systems" (as considered in the notion of computational universality) are connected to representations of physical systems by "distributions of fields" for my reasoning to be clear here. Perhaps I have not explained this and made the mistake of just assuming that it is understood that in physics we use mathematical objects to *represent* the physical objects of experience. It is how *representation* works that we seem to have differences in opinion.

    How much more do I need to explain? You claim that universality is completely separable from physical systems. I disagree.

If not, how is universality defined? Over a purely abstract set? What defines the axioms for that set?

You don't need set. You can define "universal" in arithmetic. I am starting an explanation of this on the FOAR list.

    OK, I will continue to pay attention to your posts. :-)

You have to study the detail of Gödel's proof, or study Kleene's predicate, which translate computer science in arithmetic. For the non materialist, the problem is not to get interactions, the problem is not having too much of them.

    Correct! You get an infinite regress of "interactions"! Way too many! In fact, I bet that you get at least a aleph_1 cardinal infinity. But what about the continuum hypothesis? Do you take it as true or false in your sets?

I don't care at all.

    That is why I see your thesis as ultimately a failure. You are ignoring the very thing that causes problems for your idea. You cannot just assume that some kind of number is special without justification. While it is true that a huge quantity of work has been done discovering the properties of recursively enumerable functions and integers does not by itself justify or offer a proof that they are somehow special, as Kronecker and others seem to which with their statements such as : "God made the integers; all else is the work of man." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Created_the_Integers

If you take it as false then you obtain a very interesting thing in the number theory; it looks like all arithmetics are non-standard in some infinite limit! You have to have a means to necessitate a limit to finite sets. The requirement of Boolean satisfyability exactly gives us this "rule".

? (unclear).

    Where does the existence of non-contradiction in logic obtain from? Mere or arbitrary postulation? No. It is necessary. But this necessity in the axiomatic sense that we see when we consider logic as an abstract entity does not transfer into or onto actual sets of propositions such as those that would accurately represent physical systems interacting with each other in our worlds of experience.

Keep in mind I submit a problem, for the computationalist. Not a solution., but precise problems. You can use the arithmetical quantization to test test the quantum tautologies.

We will see if there is or not some winning topological quantum computer on the border of numberland, as seen from inside all computations.

    What physical experiment will measure this effect?

Well, here the physical events is the discovery of quantum computations in nature. That is what remain to be seen in the arithmetical physics. But we have already the quantization and a quantum logic.

    Have you tried this: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=quantum+computation++photosynthesis&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C41&as_vis=1

    But how does the implementation of quantum computation in "natural" (as opposed to "man-made) systems prove your idea? So far I have shown you that there exists proofs that one cannot extract quantum logics from classical logics without serious moduli. On the other hand, we can extract plenums of classical (Boolean) logical algebras from a single quantum logical lattice (modulo sufficient dimensions). Why are you so eager to extract quantum from the classical?

If there is no physical effect correlated with the difference, then this idea is literally a figment of someone's imagination and nothing more. The physical implementation of a quantum computer is a physical event. I thought that your idea that computations are independent of all physicality was completely and causally independent from such. =-O

    My argument is that a computational simulation is nothing more than "vaporware" (a figment of someone's imagination) until and unless there exists a plenum of physical systems that all can implement the "best possible version" of that simulation.

Arithmetic implements all computations already. And UDA explain that the physical emerges from that, and evidence are that the comp arithmetical physics can implement the quantum computations. They are just not primitive.

    Your use of the word "Implements" is nonsensical. Any concept of implementation that is completely divorced from physical actions is nonsense as it cannot imply things that it is unable to by its definition.

When we recall that Wolfram defines the "real thing" as the "best possible simulation, we reach a conclusion. This "plenum" is the trace or action (???I am not sure???)  of (on?) an equivalence class of spaces that are diffeomorphic to each *other under some ordering*. I am not certain of the wording of the first part of this, but I am absolutely certain of the latter part, "an equivalence class of spaces that are diffeomorphic to each *other under some ordering*" I am unassailably certain of.

Wolfralm is unaware of consciousness and first person indeterminacy.

    So? We could equally claim that you do not understand the role of complexity in computations and thus be dismissive of your ideas, but we chose not to.

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 3:22 AM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> I don't see that as contrary to compatibilism which holds that 'free will'

> is compatible with determinism (but not that determinism is necessarily

> true).  Of course an otherwise deterministic intelligence may make a random
> choice as part of a rational strategy.  Does libertarian free will *require*
> that some actions be random?

These are the possibilities:

determinism true, free will true
determinism true, free will false
determinism false, free will true
determinism false, free will false

Now, I would say that if something is not determined, it is random.
You can think of unusual cases and they still fit into the determined
or random categories. For example, if my decisions depend on my brain
solving the halting program, I would say that is still determined,
even if it is not computable. I don't think invoking the spiritual
realm or exotic physics changes the dichotomy, although maybe the
argument comes down to semantics. In any case, the non-compatibilists
like Craig Weinberg won't be satisfied with *any* explanation of how
people make decisions: not antecedent cause, not retroactive
causation, not randomness, not manipulation by a spiritual force. It's
nonsensical.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 2:23 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Why does my free will depend on someone else's ability to predict it? Just
> because what I say is not surprising doesn't mean that I am not generating
> my own words voluntarily and freely.

Your actions are unpredictable, even if determinism is true. On the
other hand, known random behaviour such as radioactive decay is highly
predictable. Determinism is not synonymous with predictability and
randomness is not synonymous with unpredictability. And "generating
your own words voluntarily and freely" is consistent with determinism
or randomness or else it is incoherent.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[meekerdb]

I don't think random and determined are mutually exclusive, or at least not a clear analysis. Suppose we could monitor a person's physical state at a very low level (e.g. molecular) and we found that the same state did not result in the same action.  Off hand we might to tempted to say that then it must be random.  But suppose that we also observe that it is always directed toward satisfying stated objectives of that person.  So the actions are random in the sense of not fully determined, yet they may be statistically determined to fall in a few narrow categories. I think this is not only consistent with 'free will' in the social/legal/responsible sense, it exemplifies the concept.  It shows some consistency of purpose and values we refer to as 'character' that is primarily internal to the person.

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jun 2012, at 19:41, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 6:01 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> Unlike the proton and neutron nobody has found any experimental evidence that the electron has a inner structure, that it is made of parts.   

> The primitive matter I talk about is the idea of primary matter in the Aristotle sense

Aristotle was a great logician but a dreadful physicist.

> If I say that electron is not primitive, I don't mean it is made of part, almost the contrary, that it is a mathematical reality, or that it is reducible to a non physical mathematical or theological reality, an invariant in our sharable computations.

I don't know what that means. What experiment would I need to perform, what would a electron need to do to prove it was "primitive".

The electron cannot do that, but my pet amoeba cannot prove they are unicellular, despite they are.

It is just that if matter is primitive (not explainable from non material relation) then we have to make it infinite to singularize consciousness. With comp, we just abandon the idea of singularize consciousness in bodies, and then the bodies have to be explained in term of number relation.

It is more easy to understand that reversal at the epistemological level. Physical concepts are not primitive means that we can reduce them to non physical concepts, like those coming from theoretical (mathematical) computer science. It means that physics is not the fundamental science. Exactly like we can reduce biology to physics, we can reduce physics to the study of machine dreams.

>> To calculate the first 100 digits of Chaitin's constant you'd need to feed all programs that can be expressed in 100 bits or less into a Turing Machine and see how many of them stop and how many of then do not. Some of them will never stop but the only way to know how many is to wait a infinite number of years and then see how many programs are still running. So you'd need to be infinitely patient, in other words you'd need to be dead.

> Only to be sure of the decimals obtained.

Well yeah, it's easy to calculate Chaitin's constant  if you don't mind getting it wrong.

After BB(100) computation steps, the decimals will be correct. I will not know it, but they are correct.

> If I relax that constraints, then I need only to be *very patient*. The non computable, but well defined Buzzy Beaver function (BB) bounds the time needed to wait. Of course it grows *very* fast. But I don't need an *infinite* time to get the 100 first digits correct. Any time bigger than BB(100) will do.

If we wait a googoplex to the googoplex power years some 100 bit programs will still be running, some of them could be Busy Beaver programs but others could just be very long finite programs. And in the same 1962 paper where Rado introduced the idea of the beaver he proved that a general algorithm to tell if a program is a Busy Beaver or not does not exist.

That is true for all programs. There is no algorithmic way to see if a program compute the factorial function. Again, this does not change anything in the argument.

It's true that if you knew the numerical value of Chaitin's Constant then you would know that if a 100 bit program had not stopped after a Turing Machine had run n number of finite operations then it never will; but the trouble is you don't know Chaitin's Constant and never can, so you can never know how big n is. So even though they have been running for a googoplex to the googoplex power years one of those programs could stop 5 seconds from now.

Not if I waited, by chance or whatever, a time bigger than BB(100). If a decimal change after that, then we got a computable function growing more quickly than BB.

And a Busy Beaver program grows faster than any computable function but to my knowledge it has not been proven that all non-computable functions grow as fast as the Busy Beaver.

That would be false. There are many non computable predicate, with non growing values.

> Lawrence Krauss in his book "A Universe From Nothing" says that someday something close to that might actually be possible. 

> You mean? Deriving addition and multiplication from physics?

No, Krauss talks about deriving physics from addition and multiplication, or at least from logic; he talks about proving that in the multiverse only certain fundamental laws of physics are logically self consistent.  He even talks about the distant dream of showing that "something" is consistent but "nothing" is not.

OK. Nice.

> That is impossible.

I think both Krauss and I would give the same response to that, maybe.

> Why do you use "gibberish" to condemn free will, and not to condemn event without cause?

Because the meaning of "a event without a cause" is clear and no circularity is involved.

Cause is a fuzzy notion, and so "non causal" is even more fuzzy. 

Even the meaning of the question "what caused a event without a cause?" is clear, although it is a stupid question because the answer is so obvious.  But the meaning of "free will" is anything but clear and circularity abounds.

In computer science, circularity is not a problem. We can eliminate it with the second recursion theorem of Kleene. Free-will seems to me rather clear, except that some philosopher defend a contradictory notion of free-will. I gave my definition of c-free-will, and I don't see why we should reject it.

And "why do we have free will?" is not a stupid question, its not smart and its not stupid and even though it contains a question mark it's not even a question, it's just a sequence of ASCII characters.

We agree that nc-free-will does not make sense, but you have not succeeded in convincing me that all notion of free-will is non sensical.

Bruno

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

[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jun 2012, at 20:25, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/19/2012 5:39 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 19 Jun 2012, at 08:01, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 5:13 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Brent, Stephen,

On 18 Jun 2012, at 18:55, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 11:51 AM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

They interfere statistically by the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic).

Hi Bruno,

    You seem to have an exact metric for this "measure" of "the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic)".

Not at all. I only reduce the mind-body problem (including the body problem) into the problem of finding that metric. UDA must be seen as a proof of existence of that "metric" from the comp hypothesis. Then AUDA gives the logic of observable which is a step toward that metric isolation.

Dear Bruno,

    What I fail to understand is how the currently well known and existing proofs of the non-existence of generic metrics on infinite sets that are, AFAIK, identical to your concept of computations (as strings of numbers) do not seem to impress you at all. It is as if your are willfully blind to evidence that contradicts your claims.

You should elaborate, and if you are correct then you can extend UDA in a refutation of comp.

I am sympathetic to your motivation and am interested in finding a path around this serious problem that I see in your reasoning.

I don't see the problem at all, to be honest. You are to vague, and then use term which are too precise. 

My point here is that this claim that "UDA must be seen as a proof of existence of that "metric" from the comp hypothesis" has no epistemological "weight" if it cannot be associated with the other aspects of mathematics.

But it can. The "metric" is already on the horizon of the Z logics.

And as i said, comp forces that "metric" to exist. If you can proof that it does not exist, then comp is wrong. There is no philosophical problem: only a mathematical problem, and if you have an argument that the mlathematical problem will be solved in the negative, then you can write a paper. It would be a refutation of comp, not of UDA which you would need to use to get your result.

One must show how one's new idea/discovery of mathematical "objects/relations" are related to the wider universe of mathematical objects and relations; or one is risking the path of solipsism.
    I have tried to get your attention to look at various possibilities, such as the axiom of choice, non-well founded sets, the Tennenbaum theorem, etc. as possible hints to a path to the solution but you seem to be trapped in a thought, like light orbiting a black hole, endlessly repeating the same idea over and over. Would you snap out of it and see what I am trying to explain to you?

UDA is valid or not? You are like someone saying to the guy who proved that sqrt(2) is irrational things like "have you thought about real nulbers", etc.

In science we prove things, for NOT having to repeat all the time. 

What I need to understand is the reasoning behind your choice of set theory and arithmetic axioms;

I don't use set theory. Only elementary arithmetic. At the ontological level.

    But Bruno, you are being disingenuous here. The phrase "only elementary arithmetic" is not all that is involved! in order to have a meaningful description of "only elementary arithmetic" one has to relate to a wider univerce of concepts and one must connect to the physical acts that support the experience of what numbers are.

If that is true, then logic makes no sense. You are again confusing levels. The ontology does not require the notion of sets. The theory is literally elementary arithmetic. I am not sure you understand what "theory" means for a logician.

At the meta-level I use all the math I need, like any scientist in any part of science.

    I am not sure what that means.

The theory is elementary arithmetic. But I do not work, 99% of the time, in that theory. I work *on* that theory. The theory is the object of study, like in metamathematics. mathematicians, including logicians, never work in formal theory. We always work with common sense english. 

after all there are many mutually-exclusive and yet self-consistent choices that can be made. Do you see a 1p feature that would allow you to known that preference is not biased?

As I said, I use arithmetic because natiural numbers are taught in high school, but any (Turing) universal will do.

    Do you understand the idea that "natural numbers [as] ... taught in high school" does not have special ontological status?

?

I am trying to get you to think of numbers in a wider context.

the point is that neither the laws of consciousness, nor the laws of matter depend on the choice of the basic initial system, so I use the one that everybody knows.

    So, does a consensus of belief grant special ontological status?

This does not make sense.

What else am I to think of the implication of the phrase "... that everybody knows".

Have you met someone saying that s(0) + s(0) is not s(s(0)) ?

I think you are talking like if I was doing philosophy. This confusion is frequent in the field, given that it works on a place traditionally reserved to philosophy. But I don't. You have to take the thing literally. Everybody knows the natural numbers because it is part of the hugh school curriculum.

Closed sets of communications are (representationally) studied in network, game and graph theory. From what I have read, finite versions of these reach equilibrium in at least log_2 N steps and once there never change again. This only illustrates the point that we have to consider open systems and those are such that they do not allow for exact closed form descriptions in math. This is a well known fact to any competent engineer.

And what does that change. A close system like arithmetic contains infinitely many open systems.

Sometimes I use the combinators or the lambda algebra. I don't use geometrical or physical system because that would be both a treachery, in our setting, and it would also be confusing for the complete derivation of the physical laws.

    Nice excuse! LOL!

It is a key idea. Please study the work and make specific technical questions if you disagree with a point.

I don't see any point in your prose. I am never able to see if you have a problem with comp, or with the UD Argument and its conclusion.

And it remains to be seen if that defines a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought.

    If it does not have "subjective argeement" with other mutually exclusive then there would be a big problem. No?

No. It would be a refutation of comp+classical theory of knowledge (by UDA). That would be a formidable result. 

But the evidences available now, is that the physics derived from arithmetic, through comp+ usual definition of knowledge, is similar to the empirical physics (AUDA).

    Exactly what does this mean? You keep repeating these words... How about finding a new set of words that has the same meaning? Truths are independent of particular representations!

I repeat the theorems, and have given the proofs. I repeat them because you seem to ignore them, and they play a big role in the debate.

    Do you realize that you are asking Bruno the same question here that I have been asking him for a long time now? Exactly how do computations have any form of causal efficacy upon each other within an immaterialist scheme?

By the embedding of a large part of the constructive computer science in arithmetic.

    What "part" is not embedded?

The non elementary, second order, or analytical part. It is not embedded in the number relations, but it appears in the mind of the universal numbers as tool to accelerate the self-study. It is epistemological.

    So exactly how are numbers embedded themselves such that this second order aspect can have some measure of the logical analogue of causal efficasy (aka significance)? You are not avoiding the "other minds" problem here! One has to explain how minds can have any influence or even synchrony with each other.

Yes. We have to explain the color of the sky too, and the shape of Saturn annulus. Hire students.

Even Leibniz recognized this and postulated a "pre-established harmony" to account for it. It was a good try, but ultimately it failed for the simple reason that such a "pre-established harmony" is equivalent to the solution to an infinite NP-Complete computational problem. 

We discuss this. NP completeness concerns the tractability issue and is not (yet) relevant. You keep escaping result by citing theorem which have no relevance. 

You simply cannot ignore the implications of computational complexity!

I do not. But I do ignore tractability complexity.

There is a universal diophantine polynomial (I will say more on this on the FOAR list soon). Once you have a universal system, you get them all (with CT). I might identify a notion of cause with the notion of universal (or not) machine. Some existing number relation implements all the possible relations between all possible universal machine.

    Universality (of computations) requires the existence of an equivalence class (modulo diffeomorphisms) of physical systems over which that computation is functionally equivalent. No?

?

    Do I underestimate your ability to understand the English language? Do we need to go through the discussion of universality again? Really? OK, I will try to step though my reasoning slowly for you.


    What does computational universality means if not some form of functional equivalence between a large (possibly infinite) set of physical systems?

Universality has nothing to do with physics. You can define it in Robinson arithmetic. 

When we study General Relativity we discover something known as the "Hole Argument".

GR is not part of the theory. By construction I have to ignore what a physical system is, as we have to recover them from arithmetical dream. Please study the work, make precise your own assumption, and then let us see if your theory is comptaible or not with comp.

It ultimately shows the notion of "Leibniz Equivalence. If two distributions of fields are related by a smooth transformation, then they represent the same physical systems." (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-holearg/Leibniz_Equivalence.html)

    I am assuming that the readers can understand that "sets of physical systems" (as considered in the notion of computational universality)

I insist. "computational universality" has just nothing to do with physics.

are connected to representations of physical systems by "distributions of fields" for my reasoning to be clear here. Perhaps I have not explained this and made the mistake of just assuming that it is understood that in physics we use mathematical objects to *represent* the physical objects of experience. It is how *representation* works that we seem to have differences in opinion.

    How much more do I need to explain? You claim that universality is completely separable from physical systems. I disagree.

This is explained in *all* book of theoretical computer science. I am currently explaining this on the FOAR list.

If not, how is universality defined? Over a purely abstract set? What defines the axioms for that set?

You don't need set. You can define "universal" in arithmetic. I am starting an explanation of this on the FOAR list.

    OK, I will continue to pay attention to your posts. :-)

Note that I have explain this more than once on the everything list. 

You have to study the detail of Gödel's proof, or study Kleene's predicate, which translate computer science in arithmetic. For the non materialist, the problem is not to get interactions, the problem is not having too much of them.

    Correct! You get an infinite regress of "interactions"! Way too many! In fact, I bet that you get at least a aleph_1 cardinal infinity. But what about the continuum hypothesis? Do you take it as true or false in your sets?

I don't care at all.

    That is why I see your thesis as ultimately a failure. You are ignoring the very thing that causes problems for your idea.

You miss the methodology. I give proofs. This does not depend on anything not used in the proof, unless a step is invalid. Which one?

You cannot just assume that some kind of number is special without justification.

It is just obvious that computationalism makes natural number or integers more important. It is due to the "digital" aspect. The doctor will put your soul in a numeric form on some hard disk.

While it is true that a huge quantity of work has been done discovering the properties of recursively enumerable functions and integers does not by itself justify or offer a proof that they are somehow special, as Kronecker and others seem to which with their statements such as : "God made the integers; all else is the work of man." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Created_the_Integers

Yes, with comp you can say "God made the integers, all the rest are integers' dreams". You must study the proof and explain which step is non valid if you think so.

If you take it as false then you obtain a very interesting thing in the number theory; it looks like all arithmetics are non-standard in some infinite limit! You have to have a means to necessitate a limit to finite sets. The requirement of Boolean satisfyability exactly gives us this "rule".

? (unclear).

    Where does the existence of non-contradiction in logic obtain from? Mere or arbitrary postulation? No. It is necessary. But this necessity in the axiomatic sense that we see when we consider logic as an abstract entity does not transfer into or onto actual sets of propositions such as those that would accurately represent physical systems interacting with each other in our worlds of experience.

Are you postulating a primitive physical reality?

Keep in mind I submit a problem, for the computationalist. Not a solution., but precise problems. You can use the arithmetical quantization to test test the quantum tautologies.

We will see if there is or not some winning topological quantum computer on the border of numberland, as seen from inside all computations.

    What physical experiment will measure this effect?

Well, here the physical events is the discovery of quantum computations in nature. That is what remain to be seen in the arithmetical physics. But we have already the quantization and a quantum logic.

    Have you tried this: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=quantum+computation++photosynthesis&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C41&as_vis=1

   

I send that reference and similar on this list sometime ago. Interesting but not relevant.  UDA works with quantum computation.

But how does the implementation of quantum computation in "natural" (as opposed to "man-made) systems prove your idea? So far I have shown you that there exists proofs that one cannot extract quantum logics from classical logics without serious moduli.

You make the same error again and again. We cannot enrich a quantum logic in a boolean framework, but we can represent it in boolean framework. That is why book on quantum logic are developed in boolean logic. Some classical modal logic can simulate some quantum logic, QM is a classical theory.

And the Z logic gives an arithmetical quantum logic, so refute, also, your point.

On the other hand, we can extract plenums of classical (Boolean) logical algebras from a single quantum logical lattice (modulo sufficient dimensions). Why are you so eager to extract quantum from the classical?

UDA makes this obligatory.

If there is no physical effect correlated with the difference, then this idea is literally a figment of someone's imagination and nothing more. The physical implementation of a quantum computer is a physical event. I thought that your idea that computations are independent of all physicality was completely and causally independent from such. =-O

    My argument is that a computational simulation is nothing more than "vaporware" (a figment of someone's imagination) until and unless there exists a plenum of physical systems that all can implement the "best possible version" of that simulation.

Arithmetic implements all computations already. And UDA explain that the physical emerges from that, and evidence are that the comp arithmetical physics can implement the quantum computations. They are just not primitive.

    Your use of the word "Implements" is nonsensical. Any concept of implementation that is completely divorced from physical actions is nonsense as it cannot imply things that it is unable to by its definition.

Like "computational universality", "implementation" has nothing to do with physics. You could as well say that Euclid's argument that there is an infinity of prime numbers is invalid because it does not take physics into account.

When we recall that Wolfram defines the "real thing" as the "best possible simulation, we reach a conclusion. This "plenum" is the trace or action (???I am not sure???)  of (on?) an equivalence class of spaces that are diffeomorphic to each *other under some ordering*. I am not certain of the wording of the first part of this, but I am absolutely certain of the latter part, "an equivalence class of spaces that are diffeomorphic to each *other under some ordering*" I am unassailably certain of.

Wolfralm is unaware of consciousness and first person indeterminacy.

    So? We could equally claim that you do not understand the role of complexity in computations and thus be dismissive of your ideas, but we chose not to.

You do that all the time, but never show the relevance. But if you have a minimum grasp of UDA, you do know the importance of he first person indeterminacy  in computationalism.

Bruno

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

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 3:39 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> It's true that if you knew the numerical value of Chaitin's Constant then you would know that if a 100 bit program had not stopped after a Turing Machine had run n number of finite operations then it never will; but the trouble is you don't know Chaitin's Constant and never can, so you can never know how big n is. So even though they have been running for a googoplex to the googoplex power years one of those programs could stop 5 seconds from now.

> Not if I waited, by chance or whatever, a time bigger than BB(100).

Then it will never stop but you don't know it will never stop, so you'll still be looking to see if it stops in the next 5 seconds or the next 10 seconds or the next  googoplex to the googoplex power years. Godel was a Platonist, he thought things were true or they were not he just said sometimes we can't know which, and Turing certainly believed all programs will come to a stop or they will not, but he was investigating if we can always obtain that one bit of information for any program and he proved we can not. Neither the Busy Beaver nor Chaitin's work on the Omega Constant changes that fact and is just more confirmation that Turing was right, not that more confirmation was needed, the proof is ironclad. 

> If a decimal change after that, then we got a computable function growing more quickly than BB.

As I've said if a program of a given size has not stopped by a certain finite number of operations it never will, but that fact does you no good at all because to know what that finite number is you'd have to know Chaitin's Constant and you don't know that and never will.

  John K Clark


 

[Stephen P. King]

On 6/20/2012 3:39 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 19 Jun 2012, at 19:41, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 6:01 AM, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> Unlike the proton and neutron nobody has found any experimental evidence that the electron has a inner structure, that it is made of parts.   

> The primitive matter I talk about is the idea of primary matter in the Aristotle sense

Aristotle was a great logician but a dreadful physicist.

> If I say that electron is not primitive, I don't mean it is made of part, almost the contrary, that it is a mathematical reality, or that it is reducible to a non physical mathematical or theological reality, an invariant in our sharable computations.

I don't know what that means. What experiment would I need to perform, what would a electron need to do to prove it was "primitive".

The electron cannot do that, but my pet amoeba cannot prove they are unicellular, despite they are.

It is just that if matter is primitive (not explainable from non material relation) then we have to make it infinite to singularize consciousness.

Dear Bruno,

    I am parsing your comments here as I want to fully and clearly understand them.

    Do you stand by that implication, that "matter is primitive" =  "not explainable from non material relation"?  This implies that: "matter is not primitive"  = "explainable from non material relation". No? I would like to better understand how the notion of ontological primitives is defined in your dictionary.

With comp, we just abandon the idea of singularize consciousness in bodies, and then the bodies have to be explained in term of number relation.

    Why would we have to "singularize consciousness in bodies" at all? What premise or postulate is it that consciousness is "singularized" in a body? I am assuming that "singularize" means "to make singular" in the sense of either a singularity or a singleton. I am not sure which of the latter you are assuming.

It is more easy to understand that reversal at the epistemological level. Physical concepts are not primitive means that we can reduce them to non physical concepts, like those coming from theoretical (mathematical) computer science. It means that physics is not the fundamental science. Exactly like we can reduce biology to physics, we can reduce physics to the study of machine dreams.

    At the epistemological level we are assuming that there already exist conscious entities, therefore a reversal cannot be run in a consistent manner if the reversal implies the non-existence of conscious entities. You are now equating "reducible" to "explainable". Is an explanation a "constructive" process in your thinking?

>> To calculate the first 100 digits of Chaitin's constant you'd need to feed all programs that can be expressed in 100 bits or less into a Turing Machine and see how many of them stop and how many of then do not. Some of them will never stop but the only way to know how many is to wait a infinite number of years and then see how many programs are still running. So you'd need to be infinitely patient, in other words you'd need to be dead.

> Only to be sure of the decimals obtained.

Well yeah, it's easy to calculate Chaitin's constant  if you don't mind getting it wrong.

After BB(100) computation steps, the decimals will be correct. I will not know it, but they are correct.

    Is this correctness that occurs after the BB(100) steps capable of being "forced" to hold for the infinite case, as discussed in this paper http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0509616? I would like to better understand how you leap the gap between the finite case and the infinite case.

> If I relax that constraints, then I need only to be *very patient*. The non computable, but well defined Buzzy Beaver function (BB) bounds the time needed to wait. Of course it grows *very* fast. But I don't need an *infinite* time to get the 100 first digits correct. Any time bigger than BB(100) will do.

If we wait a googoplex to the googoplex power years some 100 bit programs will still be running, some of them could be Busy Beaver programs but others could just be very long finite programs. And in the same 1962 paper where Rado introduced the idea of the beaver he proved that a general algorithm to tell if a program is a Busy Beaver or not does not exist.

That is true for all programs. There is no algorithmic way to see if a program compute the factorial function. Again, this does not change anything in the argument.

    What if a factorial is involved in the explanation of consciousness?

It's true that if you knew the numerical value of Chaitin's Constant then you would know that if a 100 bit program had not stopped after a Turing Machine had run n number of finite operations then it never will; but the trouble is you don't know Chaitin's Constant and never can, so you can never know how big n is. So even though they have been running for a googoplex to the googoplex power years one of those programs could stop 5 seconds from now.

Not if I waited, by chance or whatever, a time bigger than BB(100). If a decimal change after that, then we got a computable function growing more quickly than BB.

    You do realize that this dependence upon a number of steps in a computational process is not equivalent to the notion of time in a strict way simply because time is not just the number of steps, it is also the transitional flow from one step to another.

And a Busy Beaver program grows faster than any computable function but to my knowledge it has not been proven that all non-computable functions grow as fast as the Busy Beaver.

That would be false. There are many non computable predicate, with non growing values.

    What would be the ration of computable to non-computable predicates? Are you considering an ensemble or a space of predicates?

> Lawrence Krauss in his book "A Universe From Nothing" says that someday something close to that might actually be possible. 

> You mean? Deriving addition and multiplication from physics?

No, Krauss talks about deriving physics from addition and multiplication, or at least from logic; he talks about proving that in the multiverse only certain fundamental laws of physics are logically self consistent.  He even talks about the distant dream of showing that "something" is consistent but "nothing" is not.

OK. Nice.

    Is not the proof (showing) that "something" is consistent and "nothing" is not consistent a triviality because "nothing" cannot be exactly defined such that a proof can be constructed.

> That is impossible.

I think both Krauss and I would give the same response to that, maybe.

> Why do you use "gibberish" to condemn free will, and not to condemn event without cause?

Because the meaning of "a event without a cause" is clear and no circularity is involved.

Cause is a fuzzy notion, and so "non causal" is even more fuzzy.

    I agree! This is why the entire discussion of free will is incoherent if it involves notions of cause and effect given an ambiguous notion of cause.

Even the meaning of the question "what caused a event without a cause?" is clear, although it is a stupid question because the answer is so obvious.  But the meaning of "free will" is anything but clear and circularity abounds.

In computer science, circularity is not a problem. We can eliminate it with the second recursion theorem of Kleene. Free-will seems to me rather clear, except that some philosopher defend a contradictory notion of free-will. I gave my definition of c-free-will, and I don't see why we should reject it.

    I would like to better understand how this elimination occurs. Could you point us to a good discussion of Kleene's second recursion theorem? Would you recommend this article http://www.math.ucla.edu/~ynm/lectures/2009csl.pdf ?

    The wiki article defined the 2nd theorem as: "The second recursion theorem. If F is a total computable function then there is an index e such that .

Here  means that, for each n, either both  and  are defined, and their values are equal, or else both are undefined."

    The point here is that either a fixed point obtains or the functions cannot be defined (aka are non-constructable). What is instructive to me is that fixed points have certain requirements to exist when we are thinking of them in the case of physics. For example, in the Brouwer fixed point theorem, we see that closure and convexity of a set of points is required. Exactly what would play the role of these in the computable function case?

And "why do we have free will?" is not a stupid question, its not smart and its not stupid and even though it contains a question mark it's not even a question, it's just a sequence of ASCII characters.

We agree that nc-free-will does not make sense, but you have not succeeded in convincing me that all notion of free-will is non sensical.

    I would really like to understand why it is that John Clark insists on this elimination attitude toward the referent of that "sequence of ASCII characters". It seems that he does not understand the ramifications of such a postulate! IMHO, it makes anything that claims to be produced by his mind to be a meaningless "sequence of ASCII characters" as it clearly cannot be the result of an act of "his" will. He can have no will and thus there is not really a "his" associated with the supposed entity that is denoted by the sequence of ASCII characters : "John Clark". There is no such thing as a possessive modifier for universes accessible by "John Clark" if we are to be consistent with claims.

[Stephen P. King]

On 6/20/2012 4:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 19 Jun 2012, at 20:25, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/19/2012 5:39 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 19 Jun 2012, at 08:01, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 5:13 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Brent, Stephen,

On 18 Jun 2012, at 18:55, Stephen P. King wrote:

On 6/18/2012 11:51 AM, meekerdb wrote:

On 6/18/2012 1:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Because consciousness, to be relatively manifestable, introduced a separation between me and not me, and the "not me" below my substitution level get stable and persistent by the statistical interference between the infinitely many computations leading to my first person actual state.

How does on computation interfere with another? and how does that define a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought?

Brent

They interfere statistically by the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic).

Hi Bruno,

    You seem to have an exact metric for this "measure" of "the first person indeterminacy on UD* (or arithmetic)".

Not at all. I only reduce the mind-body problem (including the body problem) into the problem of finding that metric. UDA must be seen as a proof of existence of that "metric" from the comp hypothesis. Then AUDA gives the logic of observable which is a step toward that metric isolation.

Dear Bruno,

    What I fail to understand is how the currently well known and existing proofs of the non-existence of generic metrics on infinite sets that are, AFAIK, identical to your concept of computations (as strings of numbers) do not seem to impress you at all. It is as if your are willfully blind to evidence that contradicts your claims.

You should elaborate, and if you are correct then you can extend UDA in a refutation of comp.

 Dear Bruno,

    Why is this made so difficult for you? I simply cannot comprehend how what I am saying is not clear to you unless you are intentionally attempting to obfuscate my claims.  

I am sympathetic to your motivation and am interested in finding a path around this serious problem that I see in your reasoning.

I don't see the problem at all, to be honest. You are to vague, and then use term which are too precise.

    There is a difference between independence of any particular physical systems and independence of all physical systems. It is that simple. You claim the latter and I am claiming the former to be implied by computational universality.

My point here is that this claim that "UDA must be seen as a proof of existence of that "metric" from the comp hypothesis" has no epistemological "weight" if it cannot be associated with the other aspects of mathematics.

But it can. The "metric" is already on the horizon of the Z logics.

And as i said, comp forces that "metric" to exist. If you can proof that it does not exist, then comp is wrong. There is no philosophical problem: only a mathematical problem, and if you have an argument that the mlathematical problem will be solved in the negative, then you can write a paper. It would be a refutation of comp, not of UDA which you would need to use to get your result.

    If it is a mathematical problem then it would also be a problem for the philosopher studying the mathematical problem, but it does not have to be a problem that all philosopher wish to tackle.

One must show how one's new idea/discovery of mathematical "objects/relations" are related to the wider universe of mathematical objects and relations; or one is risking the path of solipsism.
    I have tried to get your attention to look at various possibilities, such as the axiom of choice, non-well founded sets, the Tennenbaum theorem, etc. as possible hints to a path to the solution but you seem to be trapped in a thought, like light orbiting a black hole, endlessly repeating the same idea over and over. Would you snap out of it and see what I am trying to explain to you?

UDA is valid or not? You are like someone saying to the guy who proved that sqrt(2) is irrational things like "have you thought about real nulbers", etc.

In science we prove things, for NOT having to repeat all the time.

    Does UDA require that computational universality requires independence from all physical systems? If so, then I claim that UDA is invalid; if not, then I do not claim that UDA is invalid. Is that clear?

What I need to understand is the reasoning behind your choice of set theory and arithmetic axioms;

I don't use set theory. Only elementary arithmetic. At the ontological level.

    But Bruno, you are being disingenuous here. The phrase "only elementary arithmetic" is not all that is involved! in order to have a meaningful description of "only elementary arithmetic" one has to relate to a wider univerce of concepts and one must connect to the physical acts that support the experience of what numbers are.

If that is true, then logic makes no sense. You are again confusing levels. The ontology does not require the notion of sets. The theory is literally elementary arithmetic. I am not sure you understand what "theory" means for a logician.

    I am trying to avoid confusion. Please give me some credit for my attempt. My point is that one cannot make claims about the significance and meaning of some "elementary arithmetic" in the absence of relations to other things. THis would be like taking a dictionary and removing or blanking out all of the words that occur to the right of the word that we are considering and then assuming that the definition of the word remains intact.

At the meta-level I use all the math I need, like any scientist in any part of science.

    I am not sure what that means.

The theory is elementary arithmetic. But I do not work, 99% of the time, in that theory. I work *on* that theory. The theory is the object of study, like in metamathematics. mathematicians, including logicians, never work in formal theory. We always work with common sense english.

    So what? I am not requiring that you personally work in that theory, I am just assuming that you are competent in your discussion of elementary arithmetic. It seems as if you do not understand how meaning comes to occur. You seem to assume some naive realist theory of meaning!

http://www.theoryofknowledge.info/theories-of-perception/naive-realism/

"Naive realism holds that the view of the world that we derive from our senses is to be taken at face value: there are objects out there in the world, and those objects have the properties that they appear to us to have. If I have an experience as of a large apple tree, then that’s because there’s a large apple tree in front of me. If the apples on the tree appear to me to be red, then that’s because there are objects in front of me, apples, that have the property redness; simple."

    The rest of this article is instructive:

"Plausible though naive realism may be, it has serious problems, among which is the problem of the variability of perception. The same object may appear differently to different people, or to the same person at different times. The apples may appear to be red in the daytime, but at dusk they are a shade of grey. If naive realism is to be taken seriously, and colours are out there in the world, then apples regularly change colour depending on how much light is around them. It is much more plausible, though, to think that the apples are the same as they ever were, that all that has changed is our experience of them."

    How exactly are you claiming to have knowledge of the objects of elementary arithmetic? You are in fact proposing a theory of epistemology, I appreciate that, I just want you to understand that I see a problem in your attempt that needs to be corrected. You cannot get your Bp&p to work if there is no way for the &p (is true) part to work if you maintain the idea that universality requires the complete disconnection between the physical implementation of a computer program. On the other hand, if you drop the claim of disconnection then Bp&p will work, but at the price of having to give up on your immaterial ontology.

after all there are many mutually-exclusive and yet self-consistent choices that can be made. Do you see a 1p feature that would allow you to known that preference is not biased?

As I said, I use arithmetic because natiural numbers are taught in high school, but any (Turing) universal will do.

    Do you understand the idea that "natural numbers [as] ... taught in high school" does not have special ontological status?

?

    You do not see the choice of a particular kind of number to be a biased selection?

I am trying to get you to think of numbers in a wider context.

the point is that neither the laws of consciousness, nor the laws of matter depend on the choice of the basic initial system, so I use the one that everybody knows.

    So, does a consensus of belief grant special ontological status?

This does not make sense.

    You do not wish it to make sense, I can see...

What else am I to think of the implication of the phrase "... that everybody knows".

Have you met someone saying that s(0) + s(0) is not s(s(0)) ?

I think you are talking like if I was doing philosophy. This confusion is frequent in the field, given that it works on a place traditionally reserved to philosophy. But I don't. You have to take the thing literally. Everybody knows the natural numbers because it is part of the hugh school curriculum.

    You are not doing philosophy? Really!? Is "philosophy" now defined as equivalent to "sophistry"?

Closed sets of communications are (representationally) studied in network, game and graph theory. From what I have read, finite versions of these reach equilibrium in at least log_2 N steps and once there never change again. This only illustrates the point that we have to consider open systems and those are such that they do not allow for exact closed form descriptions in math. This is a well known fact to any competent engineer.

And what does that change. A close system like arithmetic contains infinitely many open systems.

    Is a system equivalent to a set? How is "arithmetic" a system if there is not assumed to also exist an equivalence class of physical systems that can implement it?

Sometimes I use the combinators or the lambda algebra. I don't use geometrical or physical system because that would be both a treachery, in our setting, and it would also be confusing for the complete derivation of the physical laws.

    Nice excuse! LOL!

It is a key idea. Please study the work and make specific technical questions if you disagree with a point.

    I have repeatedly asked the technical and specific question: Why do you insist upon the complete disconnection of the physical world with computational universality?

I don't see any point in your prose. I am never able to see if you have a problem with comp, or with the UD Argument and its conclusion.

    I have a problem with your claim of ontological primitivity of integers (that which "elementary arithmetic" operated upon).

And it remains to be seen if that defines a conscious stream of thought that is subjective agreement with other streams of thought.

    If it does not have "subjective argeement" with other mutually exclusive then there would be a big problem. No?

No. It would be a refutation of comp+classical theory of knowledge (by UDA). That would be a formidable result. 

But the evidences available now, is that the physics derived from arithmetic, through comp+ usual definition of knowledge, is similar to the empirical physics (AUDA).

    Exactly what does this mean? You keep repeating these words... How about finding a new set of words that has the same meaning? Truths are independent of particular representations!

I repeat the theorems, and have given the proofs. I repeat them because you seem to ignore them, and they play a big role in the debate.

    I will ignore this claim.

    Do you realize that you are asking Bruno the same question here that I have been asking him for a long time now? Exactly how do computations have any form of causal efficacy upon each other within an immaterialist scheme?

By the embedding of a large part of the constructive computer science in arithmetic.

    What "part" is not embedded?

The non elementary, second order, or analytical part. It is not embedded in the number relations, but it appears in the mind of the universal numbers as tool to accelerate the self-study. It is epistemological.

    So exactly how are numbers embedded themselves such that this second order aspect can have some measure of the logical analogue of causal efficasy (aka significance)? You are not avoiding the "other minds" problem here! One has to explain how minds can have any influence or even synchrony with each other.

Yes. We have to explain the color of the sky too, and the shape of Saturn annulus. Hire students.

    Again, you completely ignore the place where the problem occurs. You want me to show a proof and you refuse to look at the proof. What am I to conclude?

Even Leibniz recognized this and postulated a "pre-established harmony" to account for it. It was a good try, but ultimately it failed for the simple reason that such a "pre-established harmony" is equivalent to the solution to an infinite NP-Complete computational problem. 

We discuss this. NP completeness concerns the tractability issue and is not (yet) relevant. You keep escaping result by citing theorem which have no relevance.

    No, you simply refuse to see the relevance. I am not causing your blindness.

You simply cannot ignore the implications of computational complexity!

I do not. But I do ignore tractability complexity.

    OK, could you state exactly why it is that intractability and complexity issues are *not* relevant?

There is a universal diophantine polynomial (I will say more on this on the FOAR list soon). Once you have a universal system, you get them all (with CT). I might identify a notion of cause with the notion of universal (or not) machine. Some existing number relation implements all the possible relations between all possible universal machine.

    Universality (of computations) requires the existence of an equivalence class (modulo diffeomorphisms) of physical systems over which that computation is functionally equivalent. No?

?

    Do I underestimate your ability to understand the English language? Do we need to go through the discussion of universality again? Really? OK, I will try to step though my reasoning slowly for you.


    What does computational universality means if not some form of functional equivalence between a large (possibly infinite) set of physical systems?

Universality has nothing to do with physics. You can define it in Robinson arithmetic. 

    So, waht difference does that make? You still must be able to make marks on the chalkboard (or functionally equivalent physical actions) that represent Robinson Arithmetic to communicate the idea of universality! Universality is not disconnection from the physical! Universality is what allows communication to occur!

When we study General Relativity we discover something known as the "Hole Argument".

GR is not part of the theory. By construction I have to ignore what a physical system is, as we have to recover them from arithmetical dream. Please study the work, make precise your own assumption, and then let us see if your theory is comptaible or not with comp.

    You can ignore what any particular physical system is but you cannot ignore the necessary existence of physical systems. To do so would to render meaningless the very concept of arithmetic dreams.

It ultimately shows the notion of "Leibniz Equivalence. If two distributions of fields are related by a smooth transformation, then they represent the same physical systems." (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-holearg/Leibniz_Equivalence.html)

    I am assuming that the readers can understand that "sets of physical systems" (as considered in the notion of computational universality)

I insist. "computational universality" has just nothing to do with physics.

"Computational universality: A system is called universal with respect to a class of systems if it can compute every function computable by systems in that class "

are connected to representations of physical systems by "distributions of fields" for my reasoning to be clear here. Perhaps I have not explained this and made the mistake of just assuming that it is understood that in physics we use mathematical objects to *represent* the physical objects of experience. It is how *representation* works that we seem to have differences in opinion.

    How much more do I need to explain? You claim that universality is completely separable from physical systems. I disagree.

This is explained in *all* book of theoretical computer science. I am currently explaining this on the FOAR list.

    Could you please cite any example of this explanation?

If not, how is universality defined? Over a purely abstract set? What defines the axioms for that set?

You don't need set. You can define "universal" in arithmetic. I am starting an explanation of this on the FOAR list.

    OK, I will continue to pay attention to your posts. :-)

Note that I have explain this more than once on the everything list.

    Could you quote your posting here?

You have to study the detail of Gödel's proof, or study Kleene's predicate, which translate computer science in arithmetic. For the non materialist, the problem is not to get interactions, the problem is not having too much of them.

    Correct! You get an infinite regress of "interactions"! Way too many! In fact, I bet that you get at least a aleph_1 cardinal infinity. But what about the continuum hypothesis? Do you take it as true or false in your sets?

I don't care at all.

    That is why I see your thesis as ultimately a failure. You are ignoring the very thing that causes problems for your idea.

You miss the methodology. I give proofs. This does not depend on anything not used in the proof, unless a step is invalid. Which one?

    Step 8.

You cannot just assume that some kind of number is special without justification.

It is just obvious that computationalism makes natural number or integers more important. It is due to the "digital" aspect. The doctor will put your soul in a numeric form on some hard disk.

    So it is the ability to make an unambiguous statement that is important here?

While it is true that a huge quantity of work has been done discovering the properties of recursively enumerable functions and integers does not by itself justify or offer a proof that they are somehow special, as Kronecker and others seem to which with their statements such as : "God made the integers; all else is the work of man." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Created_the_Integers

Yes, with comp you can say "God made the integers, all the rest are integers' dreams". You must study the proof and explain which step is non valid if you think so.

    Step 8 is in valid because it implies that knowledge cannot be communicated.

If you take it as false then you obtain a very interesting thing in the number theory; it looks like all arithmetics are non-standard in some infinite limit! You have to have a means to necessitate a limit to finite sets. The requirement of Boolean satisfyability exactly gives us this "rule".

? (unclear).

    Where does the existence of non-contradiction in logic obtain from? Mere or arbitrary postulation? No. It is necessary. But this necessity in the axiomatic sense that we see when we consider logic as an abstract entity does not transfer into or onto actual sets of propositions such as those that would accurately represent physical systems interacting with each other in our worlds of experience.

Are you postulating a primitive physical reality?

    No, I am demanding that numbers be understood to be on an equal ontological level as physical worlds. neither numbers nor physical reality can be taken as ontologically primitive. The explanation of this has already been written by such people as B. Spinoza and Bertrand Russell. I have stated this before.

Keep in mind I submit a problem, for the computationalist. Not a solution., but precise problems. You can use the arithmetical quantization to test test the quantum tautologies.

We will see if there is or not some winning topological quantum computer on the border of numberland, as seen from inside all computations.

    What physical experiment will measure this effect?

Well, here the physical events is the discovery of quantum computations in nature. That is what remain to be seen in the arithmetical physics. But we have already the quantization and a quantum logic.

    Have you tried this: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=quantum+computation++photosynthesis&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C41&as_vis=1

   

I send that reference and similar on this list sometime ago. Interesting but not relevant.  UDA works with quantum computation.

    So the discovery that quantum computation does in fact occur in Nature is not relevant? What did you  mean to say int he sentence "..here the physical events is the discovery of quantum computations in nature..." in responce to my question as to what would be a physical measurement that would be a proof of your result.

But how does the implementation of quantum computation in "natural" (as opposed to "man-made) systems prove your idea? So far I have shown you that there exists proofs that one cannot extract quantum logics from classical logics without serious moduli.

You make the same error again and again. We cannot enrich a quantum logic in a boolean framework, but we can represent it in boolean framework. That is why book on quantum logic are developed in boolean logic. Some classical modal logic can simulate some quantum logic, QM is a classical theory.

And the Z logic gives an arithmetical quantum logic, so refute, also, your point.

    Interesting. So a representation of a quantum logic is Boolean. Many paper have been written that directly contradict this claim of yours. You might wish to read this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3328

"Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory. It is therefore surprising that physicists have been unable to agree on what a quantum state represents. One possibility is that a pure quantum state corresponds directly to reality. But there is a long history of suggestions that a quantum state (even a pure state) represents only knowledge or information of some kind. Here we show that any model in which a quantum state represents mere information about an underlying physical state of the system must make predictions which contradict those of quantum theory."


    "Mere information" is an example of "boolean framework".
   
    You might wish to consider what I am not making an error but in fact you are not understanding the full implication of your statement.

On the other hand, we can extract plenums of classical (Boolean) logical algebras from a single quantum logical lattice (modulo sufficient dimensions). Why are you so eager to extract quantum from the classical?

UDA makes this obligatory.

    I know! This is the bone of contention between us.

If there is no physical effect correlated with the difference, then this idea is literally a figment of someone's imagination and nothing more. The physical implementation of a quantum computer is a physical event. I thought that your idea that computations are independent of all physicality was completely and causally independent from such. =-O

    My argument is that a computational simulation is nothing more than "vaporware" (a figment of someone's imagination) until and unless there exists a plenum of physical systems that all can implement the "best possible version" of that simulation.

Arithmetic implements all computations already. And UDA explain that the physical emerges from that, and evidence are that the comp arithmetical physics can implement the quantum computations. They are just not primitive.

    Your use of the word "Implements" is nonsensical. Any concept of implementation that is completely divorced from physical actions is nonsense as it cannot imply things that it is unable to by its definition.

Like "computational universality", "implementation" has nothing to do with physics. You could as well say that Euclid's argument that there is an infinity of prime numbers is invalid because it does not take physics into account.

    Nonsense! The existence or not existence of arguments like that of Euclid's does not involve ontological claims like the one that you are claiming, thus your remark here is a clear case of obfuscation. You cannot reserve the right to use a concept when you disallow the very coherence of the class which that concept is a member of. If the physical world - that "physics" describes - is not on the same ontological level as the elementary arithmetic then all that follows from the physical cannot be taken to still occur for the elementary arithmetic.

    The concept of implementation is meaningless in the absence of physical worlds.

When we recall that Wolfram defines the "real thing" as the "best possible simulation, we reach a conclusion. This "plenum" is the trace or action (???I am not sure???)  of (on?) an equivalence class of spaces that are diffeomorphic to each *other under some ordering*. I am not certain of the wording of the first part of this, but I am absolutely certain of the latter part, "an equivalence class of spaces that are diffeomorphic to each *other under some ordering*" I am unassailably certain of.

Wolfralm is unaware of consciousness and first person indeterminacy.

    So? We could equally claim that you do not understand the role of complexity in computations and thus be dismissive of your ideas, but we chose not to.

You do that all the time, but never show the relevance. But if you have a minimum grasp of UDA, you do know the importance of he first person indeterminacy  in computationalism.

    What does first person indeterminacy show other than the independence of the process that generates the 1p from any particular case of physical system? Why do you take it to be a complete disconnection from all physical systems? You are simply going too far.

[Bruno Marchal]

John, Stephen,

I am quite busy today. I will comment your last posts asap. Thanks for
your patience.

Best,

Bruno


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

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012  Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:

> Do you [Bruno] stand by that implication, that "matter is primitive" =  "not explainable from non material relation"?  This implies that: "matter is not primitive"  = "explainable from non material relation".

That implies nothing of the sort, in fact it implies the exact opposite. If it's really primitive then it's the end of a long line of "what is that made of?" or "why did that happen?" questions. If it's truly primitive then it's not explainable PERIOD, otherwise the explanation would be the thing that was primitive, unless of course the explanation itself had a explanation. Maybe nothing is primitive and it's like a onion with a infinite number of layers, or maybe not, nobody knows.    

> time is not just the number of steps, it is also the transitional flow from one step to another.

You don't know that to be true and without instrumentation if time jumped just a hundred times a second or so you couldn't tell the difference between that and continuous flow, that's why TV and movies work. And there are theoretical reasons to suspect that there is no time shorter than the Plank Time, 10^-44 seconds, a number that can be calculated using only the gravitational constant, the speed of light, and Plank's constant, which makes me think they may be the most important physical constants around and although the laws of physics may be different in different parts of the multiverse those three numbers may stay the same. Or maybe not, nobody knows. 

 > I would really like to understand why it is that John Clark insists on this elimination attitude toward the referent of that "sequence of ASCII characters". It seems that he does not understand the ramifications of such a postulate! IMHO, it makes anything that claims to be produced by his mind to be a meaningless "sequence of ASCII characters" as it clearly cannot be the result of an act of "his" will. He can have no will

I have said, more than once, that the meaning of "will" is clear and I have absolutely no problem with it; but I don't have the slightest idea what "free will" is supposed to mean and neither do you and neither does anybody else. I know this because whenever anybody tries to give a definition or a example or even a informal explanation of "free will" it only takes them about 2 seconds to tie themselves into idiotic self contradictions, circularity, and other ridiculous logical knots.  

  John K Clark