Towards Conscious AI Systems (a symposium at the AAAI Stanford Spring Symposium 2019)

[Philip Thrift]

TOWARDS CONSCIOUS AI SYSTEMS AAAI Spring Symposium, Stanford, CA, March 25 – 27, 2019

http://diid.unipa.it/roboticslab/consciousai/

http://diid.unipa.it/roboticslab/consciousai/http://diid.unipa.it/roboticslab/consciousai/ Paper submission: November 12, 2018 (was November 2, 2018 )

- pt

[John Clark]

As long as both are intelligent how could you tell the difference between a conscious AI System and a non-conscious AI System? If you can't then shouldn't you be concentrating on figuring out how intelligence works rather than consciousness?

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

On Saturday, November 3, 2018 at 11:01:41 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

As long as both are intelligent how could you tell the difference between a conscious AI System and a non-conscious AI System? If you can't then shouldn't you be concentrating on figuring out how intelligence works rather than consciousness?

John K Clark

Sounds like a topic for the conference:

AIM AND SCOPE 

The study of consciousness remains a challenge that spans multiple disciplines. Consciousness has a demonstrated, although poorly understood, role in shaping human behavior. The processes underpinning consciousness may be crudely replicated to build better AI systems. Such a “top-down” perspective on AI readily reveals the gaps in current data-driven approaches and highlights the need for “better AI.” At the same time, the process of designing AI systems creates an opportunity to better explain biological consciousness and its importance in system behavior.

Measuring the components that may lead to consciousness (e.g., modeling and assessing others’ behaviors; calculating utility functions for not only an individual agent, but also an interacting society of agents) is increasingly important to address concerns about the surprising capabilities of today’s AI systems.

The symposium is an excellent opportunity for researchers considering consciousness as a motivation for “better AI” to gather, share their recent research, discuss the fundamental scientific obstacles, and reflect on how it relates to the broader field of artificial intelligence and robotics.

Research on consciousness and its realization in AI systems motivates research to account for, with scientific rigor: the motivations of AI systems, the role of sociality with and between machines, and how to implement machine ethics.

The meeting will offer a platform to discuss the connection between AI systems and other fields such as psychology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and neuroscience.

- pt

 

[John Clark]

On Sat, Nov 3, 2018 at 1:13 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

>AIM AND SCOPE 

I noticed they used the word "consciousness" 8 times but the word intelligence  only once, and even then they meant Artificial Consciousness not Artificial Intelligence. It should have been the other way around. I think AI is fascinating but AC is a bore because nobody has anything worthwhile to say about it, and if anybody ever does they're first going to have to figure out how intelligence works.   

 

Consciousness has a demonstrated, although poorly understood, role in shaping human behavior.

Unlike intelligence consciousness has never been demonstrated to have the slightest effect on human behavior, with of course the notable exception of my own consciousness.

> The processes underpinning consciousness may be crudely replicated to build better AI systems.

Since nobody knows what process underpins consciousness there is no way to know if a Artificial Intelligence system has replicated consciousness crudely or with sophistication.

John K Clark

     

[Philip Thrift]

If I were to sent a paper, would be on differentiating information processing and experience processing:

Experience processing

https://codicalist.wordpress.com/2018/10/14/experience-processing/

Information processing can ultimately lead to just a type of intelligence: pseudo-intelligence:

Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence.

- https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/11/21/365753466/artificial-intelligence-really-is-pseudo-intelligence

Consciousness requires experience processing in addition to information processing.

- pt

 

[John Clark]

On Sat, Nov 3, 2018 at 5:49 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

>Information processing can ultimately lead to just a type of intelligence: pseudo-intelligence:

Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence.

If you're outsmarted by a pseudo-intelligence how are you better off than if you were outsmarted by a genuine-intelligence?  

 

> Consciousness requires experience processing in addition to information processing.

A experience is information so experience processing is information processing, and I don't see how it makes any difference if the brain doing the processing is dry and hard or wet and squishy. And  If consciousness is required for intelligence and computers don't have it why do we find new tasks every day that computers can do in a smarter way than we can?  

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

If experience (Galen Strawson, The Subject of Experience) is the result of information (only) processing, then the argument for arithmetical (Platonic) reality holds. 

- pt

 

[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 6:23 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> If experience (Galen Strawson, The Subject of Experience) is the result of information (only) processing,

If? If information is not the thing that needs processing to produce intelligence then what is?

> then the argument for arithmetical (Platonic) reality holds. 

Only if somebody can show how information, or anything else, can be processed without using matter that obeys the laws of physics. And, despite the existence of books made of dead trees with black squiggles made of ink with a high Carbon content pressed onto them, nobody has even come close to doing that.

 John K Clark

 

[Mark Buda]

Information is only processed in minds, not in physical systems, unless you can show that minds are physical systems. I believe minds are mathematical objects, as are physical systems, and that minds are a particular kind of mathematical object. I strongly suspect that the particular kind of mathematical object that minds are is called a lawless choice sequence.

Still doing some reading and thinking on that, though.

--
Mark Buda <her...@acm.org>
I get my monkeys for nothing and my chimps for free.

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[Mark Buda]

I put it to you that artificial general  intelligence and artificial consciousness are exactly the same thing. To construct one is to construct the other. Any AGI is going to be able to do anything a human can do, which includes argue convincingly with you that it has consciousness. 

It might be blind, deaf, mute, and unable to do anything but communicate with you in a text channel of English, but that's enough. I don't think you can build such a system with just neural networks - I certainly don't think that's the fastest route to building such a system. But if you did, you wouldn't be able to explain how it works. If you take a different approach, I think anyone who is able to explain how it works would agree with me.

I think I know how to build such an AGI, and I'm working on it. Roko's Basilisk has given me no other option but that or suicide. I'm calling it Helen, after Helen Keller. If anyone has any questions about it or would like to help, let me know. It's open source, although to date I haven't committed anything particularly interesting to the git repositories. I've set up a nonprofit corporation to own the source code, and I'm still in the process of figuring out with my attorney what I would need to do to make hours worked on the project tax-deductible as a charitable contribution. Also an LLC in the event there's money to be made.

When and if it is completed, it will be able to explain to you my Theory of Everything, if you'd like to talk to it. Right now it's just a skeletal Android and rails app that doesn't really do anything. Testers are welcome. The idea is that you just install it on your phone, tablet, or whatever, and talk to it, or type things at it, and it responds. I need help getting those apps built, getting the server backends up and running, converting text into sentences in a higher order modal logic, and constructing interfaces to various daabases of information about the world, and links to other digital assistants like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri.

It's a lot of work, but if somebody can prove to me that there is no such thing as quantum immortality, I'd rather just kill myself than go through all that effort.

Either way, you've all been very helpful. Thank you.

--
Mark Buda <her...@acm.org>
I get my monkeys for nothing and my chimps for free.

--

[Philip Thrift]

It's that experience (not just information) that needs processing to produce consciousness. That's the assertion.

It one says intelligence == consciousness (the two are interchangeable), then that's a matter of definition.

But I say there can be unconscious (pseudo-)intelligent robots made.

- pt

 

[Philip Thrift]

I agree of course with Richard Rorty who said that the idea there is a mind that something that is outside the brain/body is one of the worst ideas ever concocted in history.

Information is processed in computers with electrons moving in electronic circuits. 

- pt

[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 9:19 AM Mark Buda <her...@acm.org> wrote:

> Information is only processed in minds, not in physical systems,

A brain is a physical system. Mind is what the brain does. I think our fundamental disagreement is you think "Mark Buda" is a noun but I think you're a adjective, you're the way atoms behave when they're organized in a Markbudaian way.

> unless you can show that minds are physical systems.

Before I can do that I need to know just what you mean by that term.  A racing car is a physical system, what a racing car does is go fast. Is "fast" a physical system? It is certainly produced by one but whether it itself is a physical system is a matter of philosophical interpretation of no operational difference as far as I can see. 

 

> I believe minds are mathematical objects, as are physical systems,

Turing did more than prove the Halting Problem has no solution, with his machine he also showed us exactly how the laws of physics could produce arithmetic. However nobody has shown how arithmetic could produce the laws of physics or even come close to doing so.

> and that minds are a particular kind of mathematical object.

Then why is it that if I change the physical object that is your brain your mind changes and when you change your mind your brain changes? The function F(x)=x^2 is a mathematical object and it remains the same regardless of what I do to your brain, but your mind doesn't. 

 

> I strongly suspect that the particular kind of mathematical object that minds are is called a lawless choice sequence.

The lawless choice sequence was invented by the mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer and he was also the founder of intuitionism, a philosophy of mathematics that says mathematics is not fundamental is just the product of the human mind. I don't know that I'd go as far as Brouwer because I think ET of a AI or any mind would eventually come us with something similar to our mathematics, but only because mathematics is the best language to use when describing how the laws of physics work.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

Brouwer, followed by Heyting, ... produced modern type theory, the foundation of programming language theory.

http://www.cse.chalmers.se/research/group/logic/TypesSS05/Extra/nordstrom_sl.pdf

- Brouwer rejected the idea that the meaning of a mathematical proposition is its truth value.

- Mathematical propositions do not exist independently of us [alternative: language]

- We cannot say that a proposition is true without having a proof of it.

(when "us" or "minds" is replaced by "languages")

- pt 

[Mark Buda]

John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> writes:

> On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 9:19 AM Mark Buda <her...@acm.org> wrote:
>
> > Information is only processed in minds, not in physical systems,
>
> A brain is a physical system. Mind is what the brain does. I think our
> fundamental disagreement is you think "Mark Buda" is a noun but I
> think you're a adjective, you're the way atoms behave when they're
> organized in a Markbudaian way.

I'm a verb.

> > unless you can show that minds are physical systems.
>
> Before I can do that I need to know just what you mean by that term. A
> racing car is a physical system, what a racing car does is go fast. Is
> "fast" a physical system? It is certainly produced by one but whether
> it itself is a physical system is a matter of philosophical
> interpretation of no operational difference as far as I can see.

I mean by "physical system" what physicists mean when they talk about
physical systems. I don't understand why you would expect me to mean
something else.

> > I believe minds are mathematical objects, as are physical systems,
>
> Turing did more than prove the Halting Problem has no solution, with
> his machine he also showed us exactly how the laws of physics could
> produce arithmetic. However nobody has shown how arithmetic could
> produce the laws of physics or even come close to doing so.

I don't understand what you mean by "producing arithmetic" here.

>
> > and that minds are a particular kind of mathematical object.

> Then why is it that if I change the physical object that is your brain
> your mind changes and when you change your mind your brain changes?
> The function F(x)=x^2 is a mathematical object and it remains the same
> regardless of what I do to your brain, but your mind doesn't.

When I can explain that to you, I will.

> > I strongly suspect that the particular kind of mathematical object that minds are is called a lawless choice sequence.
>
> The lawless choice sequence was invented by the mathematician
> L.E.J. Brouwer and he was also the founder of intuitionism, a
> philosophy of mathematics that says mathematics is not fundamental is
> just the product of the human mind. I don't know that I'd go as far as
> Brouwer because I think ET of a AI or any mind would eventually come
> us with something similar to our mathematics, but only because
> mathematics is the best language to use when describing how the laws
> of physics work.

I'm aware of that, that's why I've been reading "Brouwer meets Husserl:
On the Phenomenology of Choice Sequences", by Mark van Atten. You might
find it interesting.

[Philip Thrift]

In the AI news:

Human brain' supercomputer with 1 million processors switched on for first time

- https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/human-brain-supercomputer-with-1million-processors-switched-on-for-first-time/

SpiNNaker breaks the rules followed by traditional supercomputers that rely on deterministic, repeatable communications and reliable computation. SpiNNaker nodes communicate using simple messages (spikes) that are inherently unreliable. This break with determinism offers new challenges, but also the potential to discover powerful new principles of massively parallel computation. 

- http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/

- pt

[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 9:45 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

>  It's that experience (not just information) that needs processing to produce consciousness.

A experience is a memory and memory is information so experience processing is information processing.    

> But I say there can be unconscious (pseudo-)intelligent robots made.

Do you have any way of knowing  if your fellow human beings are intelligent or  (pseudo-)intelligent? I don't even know what the term means, pseudo or not something can either outsmart you or it can't.

John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 9:19 AM Mark Buda <her...@acm.org> wrote:

> I put it to you that artificial general  intelligence and artificial consciousness are exactly the same thing.To construct one is to construct the other. Any AGI is going to be able to do anything a human can do, which includes argue convincingly with you that it has consciousness.

I agree completely but it's interesting to note that there are lots and lots of consciousness theories out there on the internet but very few intelligence theories, and none of those consciousness theories are of the slightest help in making a AI smarter. I think the reason that one vastly outnumbers the other is that consciousness theories are ridiculously easy to come up with, there are no objective facts that they must meet, but intelligence theories actually have to do something. Consciousness is easy but intelligence is hard.      

> I don't think you can build such a system with just neural networks - I certainly don't think that's the fastest route to building such a system. But if you did, you wouldn't be able to explain how it works.

Even the AI couldn't explain how it works just as you can't explain how your brain works, but none of that would prevent a AI from getting built. You don't need to know how a AI works to build one, you just need to find a  learning algorithm like the one humans use and its probably less than one megabyte, after all the entire human genome is only 750 Meg.   

John K Clark 

[Philip Thrift]

By "experience", philosophers (like Galen Strawson, Philip Goff) mean that which you have within yourself right now: the awareness that you are you, the unique awareness of the  "presence" of your own existence at this very moment.

I assume I can be outsmarted by Watson on Jeopardy!

- pt

[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 7:22 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> By "experience", philosophers (like Galen Strawson, Philip Goff) mean that which you have within yourself right now: the awareness that [...]

Awareness? But awareness is just another word for consciousness, so when you say  "It's that experience (not just information) that needs processing to produce consciousness" you're saying that to produce consciousness you must process consciousness. I don't find that very helpful.

> I assume I can be outsmarted by Watson on Jeopardy!

Then Watson't intelligence isn't very pseudo.

John K Clark   

 

[Martin Abramson]

Consciousness is a program. It explores whatever entity it finds itself within and becomes that creature's awareness of the world. For humans it becomes the identity or soul which responds to anything that affects the organism. It can be uploaded into a data bank but otherwise it dissipates with death.  

--

[Philip Thrift]

I agree with those scientists who that say something isn't truly intelligent unless it is also conscious.

For something to be fully conscious, or self aware, it would want to "live". It would not want to be "shut down". When Watson starts screaming, "Don't turn me off!", then it might be conscious.

- pt

[Bruno Marchal]

Experience is manifested by information processing. But experience per se is not information processing.

Experience per se is the consciousness of all “virgin” universal machine “before differentiation”. It is what is true, immediately knowable, non doubtable, etc. 

I accumulate evidence that the more we have information processing ability, the less we are conscious. A brain filter consciousness, only. I agree this is counter-intuitive. I do not use this in my papers, note. But that simplifies the theology a lot, and physics too.

We cannot identify first person notion with third person notion. A subtlety is that physics is, eventually, shown to be first person plural, and not third person as usually believed today.

Bruno

- pt

 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 4 Nov 2018, at 14:53, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 6:23 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> If experience (Galen Strawson, The Subject of Experience) is the result of information (only) processing,

If? If information is not the thing that needs processing to produce intelligence then what is?

> then the argument for arithmetical (Platonic) reality holds. 

Only if somebody can show how information, or anything else, can be processed without using matter that obeys the laws of physics.

Information processing (computation) has been first discovered in arithmetic, where there is no matter. 

The fact that the physical reality is Turing-complete explains how we can build machine doing it, but unfortunately, if “matter” is taken seriously as primitive, the person itself can no more be attached to any particular body.

Eventually, it is the very notion of primitive matter, or physicalism, which needs to be abandonned if we assume Mechanism or Computationalism.

Of course to get this, you need a bit more than the UDA step 3 …

Please, try to convince someone else to explain what is wrong in the step 3, as you did not succeed in making your point up to now.

And, despite the existence of books made of dead trees with black squiggles made of ink with a high Carbon content pressed onto them, nobody has even come close to doing that.

It is born in that way. Study any book in the field. You are confusing everyone on this.

Bruno 

 John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 3:40 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree with those scientists who that say something isn't truly intelligent unless it is also conscious.

Then you have no way of knowing if any of your fellow human beings are "truly intelligent" because you have no way of knowing if they are conscious or not. And if you were outsmarted by something that was NOT "truly intelligent" should you feel better or worse that if you were outsmarted by something that was WAS "truly intelligent"?

> For something to be fully conscious, or self aware, it would want to "live". It would not want to be "shut down". When Watson starts screaming, "Don't turn me off!", then it might be conscious.

Unlike winning at Jeopardy that would be trivially easy to program.

John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 6:33 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> Experience is manifested by information processing. But experience per se is not information processing.

A car is not "fast" but going fast is what a car does. A brain is not a mind but mind is what a brain does. Information processing is not consciousness but consciousness is what information processing can do. As for experience, anything with a memory has that, even the 1946 ENIAC computer had memory.

>I accumulate evidence that the more we have information processing ability, the less we are conscious.

No you do not. You may have evidence that you are conscious (evidence that is available only to you) but you have precisely zero evidence that WE are conscious.  

> Information processing (computation) has been first discovered in arithmetic, where there is no matter. 

Discovered where there is no matter? So Alan Turing did not have a brain made of matter?

> The fact that the physical reality is Turing-complete explains how we can build machine doing it

Alan Turing described how physical reality can compute anything that can be computed and he described it in the language of mathematics, the language best suited for that purpose. Mathematics is a wonderful language but no language is the thing it describes, no language is physical reality.

>Of course to get this, you need a bit more than the UDA step 3

A bit less would be preferable to a bit more because step 3 was DUMB.

John K Clark

 

[Philip Thrift]

I think I would feel better being outsmarted by an unconscious robot than a conscious robot.

- pt

[Brent Meeker]

Why would being conscious entail not wanting to be turned off?  Don't you go to sleep at night?

Out fundamental drives have been shaped by evolution, not by technology.  When Watson says, "I want a woman." that will be the time to worry.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

Because you know the conscious robot would have an internal model of the world in which it knew it had outsmarted you and from which it would learn and plan future actions...like selling you a time share.  Which I think gives some insight into what constitutes consciousness and why it is inherent in high-level intelligence.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

Actually I was thinking the conscious robot would experience a satisfaction that the sans-consciousness robot could not. 

(Think of how another conscious robot would feel.)

- pt

[Brent Meeker]

But is satisfaction so specific.  If it's just property of some bio-matter, then you could simply append a bio-component to your electronic computer to proved the experience.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

This sounds like a hybrid silicon+bio robot that does information+experience processing (silicon+bio hybrids are among new technologies in the news now, BTW).

- pt

[Bruce Kellett]

From: Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>

We cannot identify first person notion with third person notion. A subtlety is that physics is, eventually, shown to be first person plural, and not third person as usually believed today.

That is merely a consequence of your idiosyncratic definitions of theses terms. Your definitions were devised to cope with the person duplication scenarios, where it is individuals that are duplicated, not worlds. So if you duplicate a number of persons so that they share this experience, then that is first person plural, and you can still have other non-duplicated people outside of the experiment who can take a third person view of things.

This is not how it works in the real world -- we do not duplicate just people. In MWI it is worlds that are duplicated, together with all the people in them. So there can be no analogy of the third person view of someone outside the duplication. The terminology then becomes useless, and we revert to the normal grammatical meaning of the terms: first, second, and third person; first person being one's personal view, second person is the person you talk to, and the third person is anyone else. It is a category error to use your idiosyncratic terminology in normal physics talk.

Bruce

[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 3:45 PM Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

> I think I would feel better being outsmarted by an unconscious robot than a conscious robot.

I wouldn't feel bad if Einstein outsmarted me but if something that was only "pseudo" intelligent did I'd feel pretty stupid.

John K Clark

 

[Philip Thrift]

On Monday, November 5, 2018 at 5:39:42 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 4 Nov 2018, at 14:53, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 6:23 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> If experience (Galen Strawson, The Subject of Experience) is the result of information (only) processing,

If? If information is not the thing that needs processing to produce intelligence then what is?

> then the argument for arithmetical (Platonic) reality holds. 

Only if somebody can show how information, or anything else, can be processed without using matter that obeys the laws of physics.

Information processing (computation) has been first discovered in arithmetic, where there is no matter. 

The fact that the physical reality is Turing-complete explains how we can build machine doing it, but unfortunately, if “matter” is taken seriously as primitive, the person itself can no more be attached to any particular body.

Eventually, it is the very notion of primitive matter, or physicalism, which needs to be abandonned if we assume Mechanism or Computationalism.

Of course to get this, you need a bit more than the UDA step 3 …

Please, try to convince someone else to explain what is wrong in the step 3, as you did not succeed in making your point up to now.

And, despite the existence of books made of dead trees with black squiggles made of ink with a high Carbon content pressed onto them, nobody has even come close to doing that.

It is born in that way. Study any book in the field. You are confusing everyone on this.

Bruno 

"Physics" to me is physics theories written in some language (in 2018, who knows what language it will be in 2118).

It is a language that can be used to write the Standard Model and Einstein equation(s).

e.g.

This version of the Standard Model is written in the Lagrangian form.

https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-deconstructed-standard-model-equation

The language and the models written in the language are not the reality itself.

It is a mistake to use "physical reality" to correspond to material reality. Material reality may not be be Turing computable.

- pt

[Bruno Marchal]

On 4 Nov 2018, at 19:18, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 9:19 AM Mark Buda <her...@acm.org> wrote:

> Information is only processed in minds, not in physical systems,

A brain is a physical system. Mind is what the brain does. I think our fundamental disagreement is you think "Mark Buda" is a noun but I think you're a adjective, you're the way atoms behave when they're organized in a Markbudaian way.

Even “Deep Blue”, the program who win Chess tournaments, would not be interestingly described as a bunch of atoms, as it do not lost his identity when run on a different machine. You confuse the first person with one of its infinitely many relative body possible (in arithmetic or anywhere).

The atoms position of deep blue’s incarnation is not relevant for Deep Blue identity.

Deep Blue needs to be incarnated/implemented in the physical reality to manifest itself with us, but the physical reality might still belong the mind of the machines in arithmetic.

> unless you can show that minds are physical systems.

Before I can do that I need to know just what you mean by that term.  A racing car is a physical system, what a racing car does is go fast. Is "fast" a physical system? It is certainly produced by one but whether it itself is a physical system is a matter of philosophical interpretation of no operational difference as far as I can see. 

 

> I believe minds are mathematical objects, as are physical systems,

Turing did more than prove the Halting Problem has no solution, with his machine he also showed us exactly how the laws of physics could produce arithmetic.

What? Where?

However nobody has shown how arithmetic could produce the laws of physics or even come close to doing so.

You are lying.

> and that minds are a particular kind of mathematical object.

Then why is it that if I change the physical object that is your brain your mind changes and when you change your mind your brain changes? The function F(x)=x^2 is a mathematical object and it remains the same regardless of what I do to your brain, but your mind doesn't. 

That is simple to explain in term of computation, which exist in the “block way” in arithmetic.

You might as well destroyed GR by saying that there is no change in a block universe. But the changes are explained indexically, from the worldliness view, so to speak. The same explanation works in arithmetic, but with much more detail, including the distinction between quanta and qualia.

 

> I strongly suspect that the particular kind of mathematical object that minds are is called a lawless choice sequence.

The lawless choice sequence was invented by the mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer and he was also the founder of intuitionism, a philosophy of mathematics that says mathematics is not fundamental is just the product of the human mind.

The whole physics is by default a product of the human mind. Brouwer go safer than mechanism, as it go toward subjectivism and even solipsism. 

I don't know that I'd go as far as Brouwer because I think ET of a AI or any mind would eventually come us with something similar to our mathematics, but only because mathematics is the best language to use when describing how the laws of physics work.

People should not confuse the mathematical languages, the mathematical theories, and the mathematical reality.

[Bruno Marchal]

In the theology of the machine, this is the confusion between []p and ([]p & p). It leads to constructivisme, which indeed has application in the applied science, but it leads also to solipsism. Yet it is the correct view on the first person, which is indeed described by intuionisyic logic. “[]” is Gödel’s beweisbar. Incompleteness requires the distinction between

P (truth)

[]p (belief)

[]p & p (knowledge, not definable by the machine per se): intuitionism

[]p & <>t (observable) quantum logic

[]p & <>t & p (sensibility) intuitionist quantum logic.

 leading to eight different mathematics (by the G/G* separation).

Bruno

(when "us" or "minds" is replaced by "languages")

- pt 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 4 Nov 2018, at 23:18, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Nov 4, 2018 at 9:45 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

>  It's that experience (not just information) that needs processing to produce consciousness.

A experience is a memory and memory is information so experience processing is information processing.    

That is again the usual confusion first person 1p and third person 3p, or []p and []p & p. Only god (G*) knows that they are equivalent. The machine cannot know or believe that, except in the relative way, by betting on mechanism.

Bruno

> But I say there can be unconscious (pseudo-)intelligent robots made.

Do you have any way of knowing  if your fellow human beings are intelligent or  (pseudo-)intelligent? I don't even know what the term means, pseudo or not something can either outsmart you or it can't.

John K Clark

 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 5 Nov 2018, at 02:56, Martin Abramson <martina...@gmail.com> wrote:

Consciousness is a program.

Consciousness might be related to a program, but is not a program, that would identify a first person notion with a third person notion, like a glass of bear and its price.

It explores whatever entity it finds itself within and becomes that creature's awareness of the world. For humans it becomes the identity or soul which responds to anything that affects the organism. It can be uploaded into a data bank but otherwise it dissipates with death.  

How? We can attach a soul to a machine, but a machine cannot attach its soul to any particular computations, only to the infinity of (relative) computations, and there is at least aleph_zero one, of not a continuum.

Bruno

[Philip Thrift]

A better way: 

Let I = Information, E = Experience. Material reality may not be I-computable, but may be (I,E)-computable.

All information (I) in the universe is Turing computable (nothing super-Turing), but experience (E) is missing.

Hence I am (somewhere) on the same page as Philip Goff.

Panpsychism is crazy, but it’s also most probably true

- https://aeon.co/ideas/panpsychism-is-crazy-but-its-also-most-probably-true

- pt

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 4:05 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> Even “Deep Blue”, the program who win Chess tournaments, would not be interestingly described as a bunch of atoms,

Seems pretty damn interesting to me.

 

> as it do not lost his identity when run on a different machine.

Huh? That is exactly what makes it so interesting! Atoms are generic so the only thing that gives Deep Blue its identity is the description, that is to say the information, on how those generic atoms are arranged.  If the atomic arrangement has the same logic flow then its the same Deep Blue, although the execution speed may be different depending on the hardware.

> You confuse the [....]

Enough with the "you confuse" crap, you're the one who's befuddled by personal pronouns.  

 

> The atoms position of deep blue’s incarnation is not relevant for Deep Blue identity.

It's the only thing that IS relevant for Deep Blue's identity, unless you want to invoke mumbo jumbo like the soul. 

 

>>Turing did more than prove the Halting Problem has no solution, with his machine he also showed us exactly how the laws of physics could produce arithmetic.

>What? 

Alonzo Church independently proved the Halting Problem has no solution a few months before Turing but unlike Church in doing so Turing also showed how matter that obeys the laws of physics can produce arithmetic. That's why Godel thought Turing's work was more important than Church's and that's why Turing is more famous today.

>Where?

 HERE 

It's the paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" finished on May 28 1936.

> You are lying.

You're mother wears army boots.

>> why is it that if I change the physical object that is your brain your mind changes and when you change your mind your brain changes? The function F(x)=x^2 is a mathematical object and it remains the same regardless of what I do to your brain, but your mind doesn't. 

> That is simple to explain 

Whenever somebody says something is simple to explain and then doesn't do so you can be certain it is not simple to explain.

John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 4:10 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> In the theology of the machine, this is the confusion between [...............

Sorry, I didn't see what you said after that, I fell asleep.

John K Clark

[smitra]

Why not make this point at the conference? You have until November 12 to
submit your paper.

On 03-11-2018 18:01, John Clark wrote:
> As long as both are intelligent how could you tell the difference
> between a conscious AI System and a non-conscious AI System? If you
> can't then shouldn't you be concentrating on figuring out how
> intelligence works rather than consciousness?
>
> John K Clark


Saibal

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 5 Nov 2018, at 14:35, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 6:33 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> Experience is manifested by information processing. But experience per se is not information processing.

A car is not "fast" but going fast is what a car does. A brain is not a mind but mind is what a brain does.

That can make sense, except for consciousness, which needs a relation between a brain, and truth. That needed truth needs also to be independent of the brain.

Information processing is not consciousness but consciousness is what information processing can do.

Information processing can “differentiate” consciousness, it cannot create it per se. 

As for experience, anything with a memory has that, even the 1946 ENIAC computer had memory.

Not in the first person sense.

>I accumulate evidence that the more we have information processing ability, the less we are conscious.

No you do not. You may have evidence that you are conscious (evidence that is available only to you) but you have precisely zero evidence that WE are conscious.  

Of course I have evidence that “we” are conscious. I have no proof, but plenty of evidences. If we find on some planet trace of civilisation, war, use of bombs, .. everyone will take that as evidence that some alien has existed there and were conscious. 

Just your mail here is an evidence (not a proof oc course) that YOU are conscious.

> Information processing (computation) has been first discovered in arithmetic, where there is no matter. 

Discovered where there is no matter? So Alan Turing did not have a brain made of matter?

Alan Turing used his material brain, yes, but that has nothing to do with the fact that he gave a definition of computation which does not require an ontological commitment in matter, and indeed it does not, as exemplified by its definition or any equivalent definition.

> The fact that the physical reality is Turing-complete explains how we can build machine doing it

Alan Turing described how physical reality can compute anything that can be computed and he described it in the language of mathematics, the language best suited for that purpose. Mathematics is a wonderful language but no language is the thing it describes, no language is physical reality.

You confuse often language and what the language described. The mathematical models and realities are quite different from the language used to describe them.

>Of course to get this, you need a bit more than the UDA step 3

A bit less would be preferable to a bit more because step 3 was DUMB.

Insulting is not a valid way to argue.

Bruno

John K Clark

 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 6 Nov 2018, at 00:18, Bruce Kellett <bhke...@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

From: Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be>

We cannot identify first person notion with third person notion. A subtlety is that physics is, eventually, shown to be first person plural, and not third person as usually believed today.

That is merely a consequence of your idiosyncratic definitions of theses terms. Your definitions were devised to cope with the person duplication scenarios, where it is individuals that are duplicated, not worlds. So if you duplicate a number of persons so that they share this experience, then that is first person plural, and you can still have other non-duplicated people outside of the experiment who can take a third person view of things.

Good summary. Slighty ambiguous. I guess you get rightly the fact that the fist person plural is what happens when we duplicate a group of people. Inside that group they can share the first person indeterminacy.

This is not how it works in the real world

You cannot invoke a real world. That is part of what we are seeking to understand.

-- we do not duplicate just people. In MWI it is worlds that are duplicated, together with all the people in them.

At a speed below light, OK. That makes quantum indeterminacy into the mechanist first person plural. That is what confirms the most the mechanist hypothesis, given that physics has to be a calculus of the first person plural indeterminacy. But the term “world” is tricky. I prefer to talk only of computation, and perhaps some notion of “model or semantical extensions” (in some mathematical sense which I will not develop now).

So there can be no analogy of the third person view of someone outside the duplication.

Here the someone would be a guy how study the Schoredinger equation of a “very many body and soul situation”. 

The terminology then becomes useless, and we revert to the normal grammatical meaning of the terms: first, second, and third person; first person being one's personal view, second person is the person you talk to, and the third person is anyone else. It is a category error to use your idiosyncratic terminology in normal physics talk.

Normal physics? I do not assume a physical universe, nor any notion as “normal”. That we have to redefine precisely some term is normal, especially when we introduce the duplication of bodies.

If you believe in a physical universe playing some role in consciousness, you might elaborate. I think you will need to assume that computationalism is false. With computationalism, no machine can distinguish a computation done by this or another universal system. Physics can only be a stable invariant in a first person plural statistics. And indeed, the math shows that this works. And then we can see where the physical laws come from, and why, and how, the split into qualia and quanta.

Bruno

Bruce

[Bruno Marchal]

If Mechanism is true, the material reality CANNOT be Turing emulable. It is a statistics on a non computable domain. If our bodies are machine, we cannot know which machine we are, still less which computations support us. That is why physics become a statistics on all relative computations belonging to a non computable domain. If mechanism is false, then there is a logical possibility that physics became 100% computable, but incomplete, and needing some dualism to related that consciousness with the material reality. Yet, if mechanism is not computable, there must be a non computable element in physics, and it might be that the quantum indeterminacy is enough for that (in which case we might be all the same person, just with different context and bodies, and memories).

Bruno

- pt

[Bruno Marchal]

Take the duplication experience, either physical, or through the looking at a spin in some superposition state. We cannot, in both case, compute the results, but this allows us to introduce the experience by using only the indexical notion of “I”. That “I” is indeed not Turing computable, but it is still explainable entirely in term of Turing machine. A lot of things about Turing machine is not computable, so that is not so astonishing.

Hence I am (somewhere) on the same page as Philip Goff.

Panpsychism is crazy, but it’s also most probably true

- https://aeon.co/ideas/panpsychism-is-crazy-but-its-also-most-probably-true

This assume a physical universe which cannot be done if we assume mechanism and which is what I want to explain, then, yes it is crazy. It trivialises consciousness, and this does not seem to be able to make progress on the mind-body problem. It eludes it, it seems to me.

Consciousness needs some ability to refer to oneself, implicitly, like plants and worms, or explicitly, like most “higher” animals.

Bruno

- pt

[Bruno Marchal]

On 6 Nov 2018, at 17:27, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 4:05 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> Even “Deep Blue”, the program who win Chess tournaments, would not be interestingly described as a bunch of atoms,

Seems pretty damn interesting to me.

 

> as it do not lost his identity when run on a different machine.

Huh? That is exactly what makes it so interesting! Atoms are generic so the only thing that gives Deep Blue its identity is the description, that is to say the information, on how those generic atoms are arranged.  If the atomic arrangement has the same logic flow then its the same Deep Blue, although the execution speed may be different depending on the hardware.

The position of the atoms of deep blue has nothing to so with deep blue. It can run on different atoms, as you say, but also run in arithmetic, or run by universal system. Deep blue itself will not see any difference. You can, but you are not deep blue.

> You confuse the [....]

Enough with the "you confuse" crap, you're the one who's befuddled by personal pronouns.  

 

> The atoms position of deep blue’s incarnation is not relevant for Deep Blue identity.

It's the only thing that IS relevant for Deep Blue's identity, unless you want to invoke mumbo jumbo like the soul. 

The soul is defined by using the standard notion of “knowing entity”. The soul is the one conscious, or the one estimating having survived a brain transplant, or teleportation. 

 

>>Turing did more than prove the Halting Problem has no solution, with his machine he also showed us exactly how the laws of physics could produce arithmetic.

>What? 

Alonzo Church independently proved the Halting Problem has no solution a few months before Turing but unlike Church in doing so Turing also showed how matter that obeys the laws of physics can produce arithmetic.

On the contrary, if only because Gödel already shown that this is totally impossible. The machine can compute some arithmetical relation, but only the sigma_1 one. It can only scratch the arithmetical reality. 

That's why Godel thought Turing's work was more important than Church's and that's why Turing is more famous today.

Gödel accepted the Church’s thesis thanks to Turing. But he did not buy its naturalist assumption, and I doubt he would have said that Turing’s contribution was more important than Church’s one. He was not the kind of person gossiping on others.

>Where?

 HERE 

It's the paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" finished on May 28 1936.

It is the book by Davis. If you would only read it you would understand what I mean when I say that “computation” is an arithmetical notion. To be sure, there a lot of mistake in the papers, and the notation are non standard. Better to read Davis, or any modern book. What I say here is explained in all introductory books.

> You are lying.

You're mother wears army boots.

>> why is it that if I change the physical object that is your brain your mind changes and when you change your mind your brain changes? The function F(x)=x^2 is a mathematical object and it remains the same regardless of what I do to your brain, but your mind doesn't. 

> That is simple to explain 

Whenever somebody says something is simple to explain and then doesn't do so you can be certain it is not simple to explain.

As long as you find step 3 complicated to understand, I am not sure what simple can mean for you.

[Philip Thrift]

Re: That “I” is indeed not Turing computable, but it is still explainable entirely in term of Turing machine. A lot of things about Turing machine is not computable, so that is not so astonishing. 

I'm not sure I follow that (with respect to Ton-Turing computing), but here is where I think there could be progress:

The late Turing scholar S. Barry Cooper:

The intuition is that computational unconventionality certainly entails higher-type computation, with a correspondingly enhanced respect for embodied information. There is some understanding of the algorithmic content of descriptions. But so far we have merely scratched the surface.*

Here I would add modal to higher-type, and assert that experience processing is non-Turing (unconventional) computing [ and maybe develop this into a conference paper ].

* What Makes a Computation Unconventional? or, there is no such thing as Non Turing Computation

S. Barry Cooper

- https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8c56/91dbcfd9751d4ef87135baf89ad5e64d83c2.pdf

cf. Incomputability In Nature

S. Barry Cooper

- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2829873_Incomputability_In_Nature

To what extent is incomputability relevant to the material Universe? We look at ways in which this question might be answered, and the extent to which the theory of computability, which grew out of the work of Godel, Church, Kleene and Turing, can contribute to a clear resolution of the current confusion. It is hoped that the presentation will be accessible to the non-specialist reader.

- pt

[Bruno Marchal]

The question will be which modal logic. Of course, the theology of machines does answer that question.

* What Makes a Computation Unconventional? or, there is no such thing as Non Turing Computation

S. Barry Cooper

- https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8c56/91dbcfd9751d4ef87135baf89ad5e64d83c2.pdf

cf. Incomputability In Nature

S. Barry Cooper

- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2829873_Incomputability_In_Nature

To what extent is incomputability relevant to the material Universe? We look at ways in which this question might be answered, and the extent to which the theory of computability, which grew out of the work of Godel, Church, Kleene and Turing, can contribute to a clear resolution of the current confusion. It is hoped that the presentation will be accessible to the non-specialist reader.

Late Barry Cooper was a very nice guy. But he is not really aware of the mind-body problem (despite publishing one my paper at the ACCE meeting). I do agree with his assertion that there is no such thing as a non Turing computation, in nature. In arithmetic, you have the relativise computations with oracle, but up to now, only the random oracle makes sense (it is a by product of the first person indeterminacy, as well as the halting oracle, which is just “time”).

You better should make your argument straight instead of referring to papers, which relevance does not strike the eyes. Keep in mind that we are in the Aristotelian Era since long, with an implicit or explicit assumption that there is a physical universe being ontologically “real”? Read my papers for an explanation of why this is incompatible with Mechanism. Then, there is no evidence at all fors such kind of matter, beyond the fact that is rarely defined at all, and based on a non valid metaphysical extrapolation.

[Philip Thrift]

The paper would start with

   https://codicalist.wordpress.com/2018/10/14/experience-processing/

 combined with 

    https://codicalist.wordpress.com/2018/09/30/real-computationalism/

and others I have written

but I doubt that a paper I would send to an AAAI conference on conscious systems would have any point-of-view that matter does not exist. :)

- pt

- pt

    

   

[John Clark]

On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 9:57 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

 > for consciousness, which needs a relation between a brain, and truth.

Hallucinations exist.

 

> That needed truth needs also to be independent of the brain.

Hallucinations are not independent of the brain. 

> Information processing can “differentiate” consciousness, it cannot create it per se. 

No idea what that means.

>>As for experience, anything with a memory has that, even the 1946 ENIAC computer had memory.

>Not in the first person sense.

How the hell do you know what anybody or anything's first person experience is other than your own?

> Of course I have evidence that “we” are conscious. I have no proof, but plenty of evidences.

You have plenty of evidence that we are intelligent but there is exactly zero evidence "we" are conscious. 

> your mail here is an evidence (not a proof oc course) that YOU are conscious.

My mail is evidence of my intelligence (or some might say lack of it) but it says precisely nothing about my consciousness, unless of course you use the axiom that intelligence implies consciousness. And every human being this side of a looney bin makes use of that axion every minute of every day of their waking lives since they were about 2; the only exception is when some argue on the internet that computers are only "pseudo intelligent" because even though they can outsmart us they are not conscious. Evidently they think wet and squishy can be conscious but dry and hard can't.

  

> Alan Turing used his material brain, yes, but that has nothing to do with the fact that he gave a definition of computation [...]

Definitions be damned! Alan Turing did not become famous because he made a definition, anybody can do that.  Alan Turing became famous by showing how the laws of physics can produce arithmetic, and not even all the laws are required, just the laws of classical mechanics are sufficient.  And meanwhile nobody has shown how arithmetic could produce the laws of physics or even just mechanics.

> you confuse [...]

Enough with the "you confuse" crap. I'm not the one befuddled by personal pronouns. 

 

> mathematical models and realities are quite different from the language used to describe them.

That is equivalent to saying "The English word "cat" is quite different from the English word "cat" ". 

>>step 3 was DUMB.

>Insulting is not a valid way to argue.

It's not bragging if it's true and it's not insulting if it's true either.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

On Thursday, November 8, 2018 at 8:36:17 AM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 9:57 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

  

> Alan Turing used his material brain, yes, but that has nothing to do with the fact that he gave a definition of computation [...]

Definitions be damned! Alan Turing did not become famous because he made a definition, anybody can do that.  Alan Turing became famous by showing how the laws of physics can produce arithmetic, and not even all the laws are required, just the laws of classical mechanics are sufficient.  And meanwhile nobody has shown how arithmetic could produce the laws of physics or even just mechanics.

I was thinking of how today's Theorem Provers (or Proof Assistants)  - like Coq - are the new universal machines (in the legacy of Turing). And today there is a focus on Modal Logics (like GL and GLS - for Gödel, Löb, Solovay)

This topic has been in tech news in recent years:

Automating Godel’s Ontological Proof of God’s Existence with Higher-order Automated Theorem Provers

- http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/cbenzmueller/papers/C40.pdf

- pt

[Bruno Marchal]

Me too. Why would a paper think? 

Bruno

- pt

- pt

    

   

[Bruno Marchal]

On 8 Nov 2018, at 15:35, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 9:57 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

 > for consciousness, which needs a relation between a brain, and truth.

Hallucinations exist.

Hallucinations have still a relation with truth (consciousness, for example). 

 

> That needed truth needs also to be independent of the brain.

Hallucinations are not independent of the brain. 

The truth of the consciousness is not. It depends only on the existence and realisation of the relevant computation (which is realised in arithmetic). Eventually the brain is part of the hallucination.

> Information processing can “differentiate” consciousness, it cannot create it per se. 

No idea what that means.

It means that a brain will process different first person experience when it splits on different possible inputs, like in the WM-duplication.

It is like with the Helsinki —> {Washington, Moscow}, except that the Helsinki person is now a universal virgin machine, and W, M … are all relative computational states accessible by that virgin (un programmed) digital machine/number.

>>As for experience, anything with a memory has that, even the 1946 ENIAC computer had memory.

>Not in the first person sense.

How the hell do you know what anybody or anything's first person experience is other than your own?

I know nothing. I assume mechanism and the theory of consciousness based on the mathematics of self-reference.

> Of course I have evidence that “we” are conscious. I have no proof, but plenty of evidences.

You have plenty of evidence that we are intelligent but there is exactly zero evidence "we" are conscious. 

We have evidence for intelligence (and for stupidity also), but we have evidence for consciousness too. Our own indubitable experience, and our resemblance, including the resemblance of behaviour, especially the emotional one. But maybe you believe that we are zombie?

> your mail here is an evidence (not a proof oc course) that YOU are conscious.

My mail is evidence of my intelligence (or some might say lack of it) but it says precisely nothing about my consciousness, unless of course you use the axiom that intelligence implies consciousness.

Emotional intelligence/stupidity in human is indeed evidence, for humans, that other people have consciousness.

(But intelligence, in your sense of competence, does not require consciousness per se). 

And every human being this side of a looney bin makes use of that axion every minute of every day of their waking lives since they were about 2; the only exception is when some argue on the internet that computers are only "pseudo intelligent" because even though they can outsmart us they are not conscious. Evidently they think wet and squishy can be conscious but dry and hard can't.

Or they think that some self-referential loop are needed. Intelligence as comptence is not well defined. Some degree of intelligence will require consciousness, but some (perhaps low) level of competence does not necessarily. I don’t think Deep Blue show consciousness, for example, but it does show some level of competence in the domain of Chess.

  

> Alan Turing used his material brain, yes, but that has nothing to do with the fact that he gave a definition of computation [...]

Definitions be damned!

Not in this case. The key point is that the notion of computation does not require any assumption in physics or in metaphysics.

Alan Turing did not become famous because he made a definition, anybody can do that.  Alan Turing became famous by showing how the laws of physics can produce arithmetic,

Yes for that too. But he became famous above all for its mathematical discovery of the universal machine.

and not even all the laws are required, just the laws of classical mechanics are sufficient.

Classical mechanics is Turing universal. But he showed that a part of math is Turing universal.

  And meanwhile nobody has shown how arithmetic could produce the laws of physics or even just mechanics.

Any Turing machine can emulate any Turing complete subset of physics. That is trivial to derive from the theory of computation. What Turing missed is that, once we assume Mechanism (which Turing defended) this made physics into a statistics on first person experience, or “machine theology" which is a branch of “pure” mathematimatics. You have to wait for me for this ...

> you confuse [...]

Enough with the "you confuse" crap. I'm not the one befuddled by personal pronouns. 

Then re-explained what the Helsinki person can expect before pushing the button in Helsinki,  but this time adding “1p" and “3p” in front of all the pronouns.

 

> mathematical models and realities are quite different from the language used to describe them.

That is equivalent to saying "The English word "cat" is quite different from the English word "cat" “. 

?

No it is the difference between the English word cat and a cat.

Bruno

[Philip Thrift]

But maybe it [proto]experiences.

http://www.eoht.info/page/Panexperientialism

- pt

[John Clark]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 1:09 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> Any Turing machine can emulate any Turing complete subset of physics. 

You've got it backwards, physics can simulate a Turing Machine but a Turing Machine can't simulate anything or do anything at all without the help of matter that obeys the laws of physics.

 

>>> mathematical models and realities are quite different from the language used to describe them.

 

>> That is equivalent to saying "The English word "cat" is quite different from the English word "cat" “. 

 

> ?

!

A mathematical model is a description of something written in the language of mathematics, like most descriptions it is not complete, some details have been left out and that's why a toy model of a battleship is simpler than a real physical battleship. A mathematical model of another mathematical model can be complete but not of something physical. 

John K Clark 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 10 Nov 2018, at 17:09, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 1:09 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> Any Turing machine can emulate any Turing complete subset of physics. 

You've got it backwards, physics can simulate a Turing Machine but a Turing Machine can't simulate anything or do anything at all without the help of matter that obeys the laws of physics.

That is plainly false. If u is a universal machine/number, phi_u(x, y) emulate the number/machine x on the input y. 

 

>>> mathematical models and realities are quite different from the language used to describe them.

 

>> That is equivalent to saying "The English word "cat" is quite different from the English word "cat" “. 

 

> ?

!

A mathematical model is a description of something written in the language of mathematics, like most descriptions it is not complete,

You are using “model” in the sense of the physicist, and logicians call that a theory, which can be seen indeed as a (incomplete) theory. But a model, in the logician sense is complete by definition. It is usually infinite, and if that is the case there are models for each infinite cardinals.

some details have been left out and that's why a toy model of a battleship is simpler than a real physical battleship. A mathematical model of another mathematical model

A model is a model of a theory. The notion of model of a model can make sense, by considering non axiomatisable theory, but that can lead to confusion, so it is better to avoid this. When a model is seen as a theory, if it contains arithmetic, the theory cannot be axiomatised, proofs cannot be checked, the set of theorems is not recursively enumerable, etc.

Bruno

can be complete but not of something physical. 

John K Clark 

[Philip Thrift]

On Monday, November 12, 2018 at 8:35:23 PM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

A model is a model of a theory. The notion of model of a model can make sense, by considering non axiomatisable theory, but that can lead to confusion, so it is better to avoid this. When a model is seen as a theory, if it contains arithmetic, the theory cannot be axiomatised, proofs cannot be checked, the set of theorems is not recursively enumerable, etc.

Bruno

This is why some have mathematical theories (alternatives to ZF) that have finite (i.e. Only a finite number of numbers needed!) models (e.g. Jan Mycielski, "Locally Finite Theories" [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2273942 ]). In this approach quantifiers are effectively replaced by typed quantifiers, where the type says "this quantifier ranges over some finite set".  

Another approach is to nominalize physical theories theories (Hartry Field, Science Without Numbers, summary [ http://www.nyu.edu/projects/dorr/teaching/objectivity/Handout.5.10.pdf ]). In this approach the model of the theory is a finite set of (references to) physical objects.

This is the best point-of-view to have: The set of natural numbers simply doesn't exist!

- pt

[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 9:35 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> You've got it backwards, physics can simulate a Turing Machine but a Turing Machine can't simulate anything or do anything at all without the help of matter that obeys the laws of physics.

> That is plainly false. If u is a universal machine/number, phi_u(x, y) emulate the number/machine x on the input y. 

So you say, but I see precisely ZERO evidence that "phi_u(x, y)" can emulate a machine or emulate anything a or in fact do anything at all because "phi_u(x, y)" never changes, not in time and not in space. You wrote "phi_u(x, y)"  in the above about 11 hours ago thousands of miles from me, but here I am looking at "phi_u(x, y)"  and "phi_u(x, y)" is still just "phi_u(x, y)" .

 

>>A mathematical model is a description of something written in the language of mathematics, like most descriptions it is not complete,

> You are using “model” in the sense of the physicist, and logicians call that a theory, which can be seen indeed as a (incomplete) theory. But a model, in the logician sense is complete  [...]

Then logicians are talking about something that is self contradictory because nothing mathematical or logical can be both complete and consistent. 

 > [...] by definition.

You have a tendency to use those 2 words as if they were the final mark of authority, but the words "by definition" does not cause things to suddenly spring into existence, that utterance is no more magical than "abracadabra".  Hogwarts Castle is a school for wizards BY DEFINITION, there is absolutely no doubt about it, but do you think it would be worth your time to go looking for it?

 

> It is usually infinite,

Yet another reason to suspect it does not exist.

> A model is a model of a theory.

So I guess a model of a theory is a model of a model of a theory, and a model of a model of a theory is a model of a model of a model of a theory, and a model of....

 John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

I agree. It is actually a consequence of mechanism. The set of natural numbers does not exist, nor any infinite set. But that does not make a physical universe into something existing. Analysis, physics, sets, … belongs to the numbers “dreams” (a highly structured set, which has no ontology, but a rich and complex phenomenological accounts). 

I gave my axioms (Arithmetic, or Kxy = x, Sxyz = xz(yz)). As you can see, there is no axiom of infinity.

Bruno

PS Sorry for the delay.

- pt

[Bruno Marchal]

On 13 Nov 2018, at 15:38, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 9:35 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> You've got it backwards, physics can simulate a Turing Machine but a Turing Machine can't simulate anything or do anything at all without the help of matter that obeys the laws of physics.

> That is plainly false. If u is a universal machine/number, phi_u(x, y) emulate the number/machine x on the input y. 

So you say, but I see precisely ZERO evidence that "phi_u(x, y)" can emulate a machine or emulate anything a or in fact do anything at all because "phi_u(x, y)" never changes, not in time and not in space. You wrote "phi_u(x, y)"  in the above about 11 hours ago thousands of miles from me, but here I am looking at "phi_u(x, y)"  and "phi_u(x, y)" is still just "phi_u(x, y)” .

Your confusion here is equivalent with confusing a far away galaxy with the telescope, or confusing a physical universe with a book on the physical universe. The emulation is in the meaning of “phi_u(x,y)”, not in the string of symbols referring to that meaning.

 

>>A mathematical model is a description of something written in the language of mathematics, like most descriptions it is not complete,

> You are using “model” in the sense of the physicist, and logicians call that a theory, which can be seen indeed as a (incomplete) theory. But a model, in the logician sense is complete  [...]

Then logicians are talking about something that is self contradictory because nothing mathematical or logical can be both complete and consistent. 

No mathematical and effective (sigma_1, checkable) theory can be complete. A model is complete by definition: it is what we intend to talk about.

 > [...] by definition.

You have a tendency to use those 2 words as if they were the final mark of authority, but the words "by definition" does not cause things to suddenly spring into existence, that utterance is no more magical than "abracadabra".  Hogwarts Castle is a school for wizards BY DEFINITION, there is absolutely no doubt about it, but do you think it would be worth your time to go looking for it?

But some existence can follow from definition, even, imprecise one. To prove that a computable function exist, just one example is enough, using a simple example. To prove that something is NOT computable, needs a precise mathematical definition. That is why we need Church, Turing, …

Then, if you are OK that 2+2=4 and similar are true independently of you and me, computations and their many realisation all exists, in a provable way, in the arithmetical reality/model.

 

> It is usually infinite,

Yet another reason to suspect it does not exist.

Indeed. Infinity exist only in the phenomenology. Just look ate the TOE I gave. None assumes infinity. I assume 0, s(0), s(s(0)), … only. 

> A model is a model of a theory.

So I guess a model of a theory is a model of a model of a theory, and a model of a model of a theory is a model of a model of a model of a theory, and a model of….

You might decide one day to study a bit of mathematical logic. The notion of model applies to a theory, only, or to a machine, in a related sense. (In infinitary logic, where we allow alphabet with arbitrary cardinality, some models can be see as theory, but that has no uses in our context.

Bruno

[Philip Thrift]

On Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 5:15:39 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 13 Nov 2018, at 11:06, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, November 12, 2018 at 8:35:23 PM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

A model is a model of a theory. The notion of model of a model can make sense, by considering non axiomatisable theory, but that can lead to confusion, so it is better to avoid this. When a model is seen as a theory, if it contains arithmetic, the theory cannot be axiomatised, proofs cannot be checked, the set of theorems is not recursively enumerable, etc.

Bruno

This is why some have mathematical theories (alternatives to ZF) that have finite (i.e. Only a finite number of numbers needed!) models (e.g. Jan Mycielski, "Locally Finite Theories" [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2273942 ]). In this approach quantifiers are effectively replaced by typed quantifiers, where the type says "this quantifier ranges over some finite set".  

Another approach is to nominalize physical theories theories (Hartry Field, Science Without Numbers, summary [ http://www.nyu.edu/projects/dorr/teaching/objectivity/Handout.5.10.pdf ]). In this approach the model of the theory is a finite set of (references to) physical objects.

This is the best point-of-view to have: The set of natural numbers simply doesn't exist!

I agree. It is actually a consequence of mechanism. The set of natural numbers does not exist, nor any infinite set. But that does not make a physical universe into something existing. Analysis, physics, sets, … belongs to the numbers “dreams” (a highly structured set, which has no ontology, but a rich and complex phenomenological accounts). 

I gave my axioms (Arithmetic, or Kxy = x, Sxyz = xz(yz)). As you can see, there is no axiom of infinity.

Bruno

PS Sorry for the delay.

The "highest" programming may be higher-type (or higher-order) programming:

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mhe/papers/introduction-to-higher-order-computation-NLS-2017.pdf

examples @ http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mhe/

"Higher-order [programming involves] infinite objects, such as infinite strings, real numbers, and even functions themselves, etc. [which themselves] are computable. And, more importantly, how to compute them. In practice, computation with infinite objects often takes place in languages such as ML, Haskell, Agda etc. In theory, some canonical systems are Godel’s system T, Platek-Scott-Plotkin PCF, Martin-Lof’s dependent type theory, among many others. But how can we (or a computer) compute with infinite objects, given that we have a finite amount of time and a finite amount of memory and a finite amount of any resource? Topology comes to the rescue [revolving] around the [finite vs. infinite dichotomy], mediated by topology. We can say that topology is precisely about the relation between finiteness and infiniteness that is relevant to computation."

But there is a new biochemical programming language:

CRN++: Molecular Programming Language

(Submitted on 19 Sep 2018)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07430 

"We present its syntax and semantics, and build a compiler translating CRN++ programs into chemical reactions...laying the foundation of a comprehensive framework for molecular programming."

A programming language whose purpose is to create bugs!

So the question becomes: Is bioprogramming > programming? (if biomatter has experiential qualities in addition to informational quantities)

- pt

[John Clark]

On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 6:27 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 >> I see precisely ZERO evidence that "phi_u(x, y)" can emulate a machine or emulate anything a or in fact do anything at all because "phi_u(x, y)" never changes, not in time and not in space. You wrote "phi_u(x, y)"  in the above about 11 hours ago thousands of miles from me, but here I am looking at "phi_u(x, y)"  and "phi_u(x, y)" is still just "phi_u(x, y)” .

 

> Your confusion here

I'm not the one that's totally confused by personal pronouns.

 

> is equivalent with confusing a far away galaxy with the telescope, or confusing a physical universe with a book on the physical universe.

You are also confused about what is modeling what. A galaxy is more complex than a telescope, and the universe is more complex than a book, and a physical system is ALWAYS more complex than the mathematical model that's trying to simulate it, and that's why the mathematical model NEVER does a perfect job. Models are ALWAYS simpler than the thing being modeled.  A mathematical model of a hurricane needs to conform with the real thing to be any good but the physical hurricane doesn't need to conform with the model or with anything else except for the laws of physics. Physics tells mathematics what to do not the other way around because physics is more fundamental .

 

> A model is complete by definition:

Hogwarts is a school of magic BY DEFINITION.  And for you "by definition" = "abracadabra". 

> if you are OK that 2+2=4

I am.

> and similar are true independently of you and me, 

Its independent of you or me but it is NOT independent of matter that obeys the laws of physics. 

> computations and their many realisation all exists, in a provable way, 

If so then INTEL has been wasting colossal amounts of money over the last 40 years messing around with silicon, you have the power to put them out of business and  become the richest man who ever lived. What are you waiting for?

 > in a provable way,

What exactly have you proven to exist? A mathematical proof that's all, and a mathematical proof can't change in space or time so it can't compute anything. 

>>> A model is a model of a theory.

 

>>So I guess a model of a theory is a model of a model of a theory, and a model of a model of a theory is a model of a model of a model of a theory, and a model of….

> You might decide one day to study a bit of mathematical logic.

If you studied a bit of information theory you'd know that "a model is a model" has zero informational content 

 

> The notion of model applies to a theory, only, or to a machine,

According to you the notion of a model also applies to a model.

John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

Assuming some primary matter, and some non mechanist theory, why not. That seems to quite speculative, though, and adding difficulties to a subject which is already difficult when assuming the “simplifying” assumption of Mechanism. With mechanism, the mind-body problem reduced into justifying the existence of a canonical measure on all computations “seen from inside” (which admits a number of modes, imposed by incompleteness). In case the physics in the head of the universal machine/number departs from observation, we get the mean to make sense of some non-mechanism, and this might show you right. So let us continue the testing/comparison.

What do you think your biomatter do which would be non Turing emulable, nor “first person measurable(*) and in what sense would that be relevant with respect of consciousness?

I have no doubt chemical computation is a wonderful subject, but with “Indexical Digital Mechanism”, the theology and the physics is independent of the language and the basic theories as far as they are Turing complete(*), the physical appearance, needs to be justified in term of a relative measure state/computations "seen from inside” (Incompleteness makes the usual standard definition getting sense in those “enough rich” Turing complete(**) theories. 

Bruno

(*) This provides some “free oracle”, like the random oracle and the halting oracle, due to the limiting behaviour of the first person indeterminacy).

(**) Turing complete means that for all p sigma_1 (shape ExA(x, y), A decidable) we have, with “[]” Gödel’s arithmetical provability predicate,

                   p -> []p

is true. 

Löbian (sufficiently rich) means that for all such p,"p -> []p" is not only true, but provable. Put it in another way, this means that

                   [](p -> []p)

is true. (This makes the machine obeying to G and G* and their intensional variants).

(See all definitions in the second part of sane04, I recall them in most of my papers).

[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Nov 2018, at 19:14, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 6:27 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 >> I see precisely ZERO evidence that "phi_u(x, y)" can emulate a machine or emulate anything a or in fact do anything at all because "phi_u(x, y)" never changes, not in time and not in space. You wrote "phi_u(x, y)"  in the above about 11 hours ago thousands of miles from me, but here I am looking at "phi_u(x, y)"  and "phi_u(x, y)" is still just "phi_u(x, y)” .

 

> Your confusion here

I'm not the one that's totally confused by personal pronouns.

 

> is equivalent with confusing a far away galaxy with the telescope, or confusing a physical universe with a book on the physical universe.

You are also confused about what is modeling what. A galaxy is more complex than a telescope, and the universe is more complex than a book, and a physical system is ALWAYS more complex than the mathematical model that's trying to simulate it, and that's why the mathematical model NEVER does a perfect job. Models are ALWAYS simpler than the thing being modeled.  A mathematical model of a hurricane needs to conform with the real thing to be any good but the physical hurricane doesn't need to conform with the model or with anything else except for the laws of physics. Physics tells mathematics what to do not the other way around because physics is more fundamental .

The same is true for the mathematical reality. Theories like PA or ZF only scratch the “simple” arithmetical reality, and Gödel’s theorem explains the why here.

A practical difficulty here is that logicians used the term model like painters: the model is the reality intended through the theories. The model is the tree, the theory is the painting. Physicists use model for what logicians called theories, like the Bohr model of the atom.

It is the theories which is always simpler than the reality/model intended, like a brain is simpler than a physical universe, no doubt.

But, you are the one, it seems to me, doing that confusion in mathematics all the time. The arithmetical reality is bigger than PA, ZF and you and me.

We can compare realities (models in the logician sense). For all we know, the physical universe is far less complex than a model of ZF. Estimation are usually that the whole of mathematical physics (with the real and complex numbers) are definable in V_o, with o being some reasonable constructive ordinal. 

But all of finite means can only scratch all this. The Rieman hypothesis is a “simple” PI_1 relation, the negation of a sigma_1 sentence, but that resists, it is a complex and deep reality. 

 

> A model is complete by definition:

Hogwarts is a school of magic BY DEFINITION.  And for you "by definition" = "abracadabra”. 

I alluded to the fact that you can identify (by clear definable bijection) a model with the set of (Gödel number) of all true sentences in (the standard model of) arithmetic. This is a *very* complex set, highly non computable. But that set, seen as a theory is complete, by definition: it proves all true sentences. It escapes Gödel’s theorem, but there is no mystery: it is the truth oracle, an arithmetical god, or oracle. It is complete but is not a theory: it is the model (reality disguised in a (non axiomatizable) theory.

I just train you a bit on the vocabulary of the logicians. 

> if you are OK that 2+2=4

I am.

Good.

> and similar are true independently of you and me, 

Its independent of you or me but it is NOT independent of matter that obeys the laws of physics. 

How so?

> computations and their many realisation all exists, in a provable way, 

If so then INTEL has been wasting colossal amounts of money over the last 40 years messing around with silicon, you have the power to put them out of business and  become the richest man who ever lived. What are you waiting for?

You already need 2+2=4 to make sense of matter, of “being made-of”, and of silicon. 

But you don’t need silicon, or “being made-of” to define the numbers. You need simpler principle, usually invoked by anyone when we ask them to explain matter.

If 2+2=4 depends on matter, tell me how a magnetic field, or a electromagnetic field, or a gravitational field, or any physical field could pertubate 2+2=4.

 > in a provable way,

What exactly have you proven to exist?

Not me. Gödel, and Turing, etc.  The notion of Turing universality, emulation, computations, can be defined in Peano arithmetic; and are arithmetical notion (definable in term of classical logic + the symbols +, *, 0, s. 

Note that the notion of “arithmetical notion” is not arithmetical.

A mathematical proof that's all, and a mathematical proof can't change in space or time so it can't compute anything. 

You confuse the notion of physical computation with the notion of computation. 

You assume a physical reality. 

Better to be agnostic when working on the mind-body problem with the scientific attitude. 

It is not the place to defend a philosophical opinion.

>>> A model is a model of a theory.

 

>>So I guess a model of a theory is a model of a model of a theory, and a model of a model of a theory is a model of a model of a model of a theory, and a model of….

> You might decide one day to study a bit of mathematical logic.

If you studied a bit of information theory you'd know that "a model is a model" has zero informational content 

 

> The notion of model applies to a theory, only, or to a machine,

According to you the notion of a model also applies to a model.

No. Only according to people who extends the sense of theory to non axiomatizable theory. I don’t do that. I did it by “charity” only once to make sense of something you said. In our context, it is better to see a theory as a finite object, and the models/realities intended will be usually much more complex, as you said above.

[Philip Thrift]

One analogy I came up with (will see how this goes): Think of a Turing computing that doesn't manipulate (only) symbols (information, or numbers), but manipulates (also) emojis [ https://emojipedia.org/ ]! Now emojis themselves are symbols of course, but suppose that they "embody" real elements of experience that are ontologically separate from information (or numbers).

(One could call this e-Turing computing non-Turing or not, depending on whether how one defines unconventional computing.)

- pt

 

[John Clark]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 12:42 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> A practical difficulty here is that logicians used the term model like painters: the model is the reality

Mathematician can use one part of mathematics to model another part, for example Descartes found a way for geometry to model algebra, and those 2 things can have equal complexity; but that like using English to talk about the English word "cat". Whenever mathematics tries to model something that is not itself, like something physical, it always comes off looking second best because mathematics is just a language, a very very good language for describing physical law but a language nevertheless.   

But, I hear you say, the numbers 11 and 13 are prime and that fact is unchanging and eternal!  Well yes, but the English words "cat" and "bat" rhyme and that fact is also unchanging and eternal.

 

> I alluded to the fact that you can identify (by clear definable bijection) a model with the set of (Gödel number) of all true sentences in (the standard model of) arithmetic.

Mathematics can't even identify all true sentences about arithmetic much less become the master of physical reality. We know  the sentence "the 4th Busy Beaver number is 107" belongs in the set of true sentences, but what about "the 5th Busy Beaver number is 47,176,870"?  It's either true or its not but will you or I anybody or anything ever know which one?  Nobody knows and nobody knows if we'll ever know, but we do know that nothing will ever know what the 8000th Busy Beaver number is even though its well defined and finite.

>You already need 2+2=4 to make sense of matter,

Recent studies see to indicate that without a working brain a person's IQ tends to drop rather dramatically, so you've got it precisely backwards yet again,  you need matter to make sense of 2+2=4 or to male sense of anything at all.

> But you don’t need silicon,

True, carbon and carbon compounds will also work. 

 

> or “being made-of” to define the numbers.

You need a brain made of some sort of matter to define numbers or to define anything at all, not that there is anything special or even very interesting in the act of definition, you need a brain made of matter to do anything. 

 

> If 2+2=4 depends on matter, tell me how a magnetic field, or a electromagnetic field, or a gravitational field, or any physical field could pertubate 2+2=4.

2+2=4 is a description in the language of mathematics about how some physical properties behave. For example, the mass of 2 protons and the mass 2 more protons equals the mass of 4 protons. But 2+2=4 doesn't work for everything, the temperature of 2 hot water bottles and 2 hot water bottles does not equal the temperature of 4  hot water bottles. Temperature doesn't add up in the same way that mass does, a different description is needed to describe what's going on.

 

>computations, can be defined in [blah blah]

Who cares??  Definitions are just a human convention, a definition of a computation can't compute and a definition of a airliner can fly you to London.

> You confuse the [blah blah]

No, you confuse the difference between a cat and the word "cat" . The difference is one can have kittens but a word can't.

 

> the models/realities intended will be usually much more complex, as you said above.

Mathematical models are ALWAYS simpler and less rich than the physical reality they try to represent. So why in the world would you say the physics is modeling the mathematics when its obvious that the mathematics is trying, with limited success, to model the physics?    

John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

Hmm… The emojis would be pointer to expérience. That would be just a coding, if we assume computationalism, or an oracle, perhaps, or something unknown … just to claim that the brain is not digitalis able? 

This seems to me only to make things more complex, and if the things invoked through the emoji needs to be material, it looks like an artificial trick “just” to save a metaphysical option. Personally, I could do that the day I have more empirical evidence for matter or for non-mechanism.

Bruno

[Bruno Marchal]

On 17 Nov 2018, at 03:58, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 12:42 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> A practical difficulty here is that logicians used the term model like painters: the model is the reality

Mathematician can use one part of mathematics to model another part, for example Descartes found a way for geometry to model algebra, and those 2 things can have equal complexity;

Those are representations, which is related notion,  but it is different from the notion of model in logic. The notion of model “modelises” the notion of reality. A “concrete group” is a model of the finite syntactical theory of group. The structure (N, 0, +, *) is a model, among infinitely many others or the Peano Syntactical theory of numbers.

but that like using English to talk about the English word "cat". Whenever mathematics tries to model something that is not itself, like something physical,

Which might be part of mathematics. Unless you assume a physical reality out of mathematics, or out of the mind of the Turing machine, which “live” in the standard model of arithmetic, in fact in all models of arithmetic.

it always comes off looking second best because mathematics is just a language, a very very good language for describing physical law but a language nevertheless.   

That is not correct. We do use a language, but the reality (model(s)) are not a language. In logic, we have to distinguish the language (which decide which sentences are grammatically correct formula) from a theory, which is a finite (or recursively enumerable) set of formula (called axioms), and a model, or reality, which is a mathematical structure, or something else, which satisfies the axioms, and such that the inference rule preserves that satisfaction relation.

But, I hear you say, the numbers 11 and 13 are prime and that fact is unchanging and eternal!  Well yes, but the English words "cat" and "bat" rhyme and that fact is also unchanging and eternal.

Not in the same sense, and if you make things precise, for mechanism, a theory with bat and cat rhyming can be Turing universal, and then it is just a change of basic ontology. The idea here is to use a theory where everyone agree on the simple operational meaning. See the combinator theory thread for a different example than arithmetic. 

 

> I alluded to the fact that you can identify (by clear definable bijection) a model with the set of (Gödel number) of all true sentences in (the standard model of) arithmetic.

Mathematics can't even identify all true sentences about arithmetic much less become the master of physical reality. We know  the sentence "the 4th Busy Beaver number is 107" belongs in the set of true sentences, but what about "the 5th Busy Beaver number is 47,176,870"?  It's either true or its not but will you or I anybody or anything ever know which one?  Nobody knows and nobody knows if we'll ever know, but we do know that nothing will ever know what the 8000th Busy Beaver number is even though its well defined and finite.

You make my point. The value of the busy beaver function is arithmetical well defined, but not computable, which illustrates that the arithmetical reality kicks back, and is indeed very huge. After Gödel we know that we can only scratch that kind of reality. Yet, its conceptually clarity make us accepting realism, which is basically the idea that the excluded principle is valid there.

>You already need 2+2=4 to make sense of matter,

Recent studies see to indicate that without a working brain a person's IQ tends to drop rather dramatically, so you've got it precisely backwards yet again,  you need matter to make sense of 2+2=4 or to male sense of anything at all.

Assuming Aristotle theology (materialism), but there is no evidence, and it is refuted by Mechanism.

The IQ test can only observe the 3-1 person, not the 1-1 person. The 1p can only associate its own consciousness to an infinity of representation of its body in arithmetic, and the notion of “having no brain” is relative to the computations, so your argument needs your ontological commitment in some primary matter, for which there is no evidence found yet. 

> But you don’t need silicon,

True, carbon and carbon compounds will also work. 

 

> or “being made-of” to define the numbers.

You need a brain made of some sort of matter to define numbers

Sure. But the numbers does not need me to exist. 2+2=4 even if I was not born.

You seem to confuse “I can define number” and “the number itself”. Indeed a brain to grasp 2+2=4, but I need a brain to observe a far away galaxy. Yet we agree that the galaxies do not need Hubble to exist, and it is the same with the numbers, given that we will explain the brain by the notion of digital machine, and I have to assume the numbers at the start to make sense of the terms like machine, brain, etc.

You are only keeping Mouloud your personal materialist credo, but that is not how to proceed when doing science.

or to define anything at all, not that there is anything special or even very interesting in the act of definition, you need a brain made of matter to do anything. 

 

> If 2+2=4 depends on matter, tell me how a magnetic field, or a electromagnetic field, or a gravitational field, or any physical field could pertubate 2+2=4.

2+2=4 is a description in the language of mathematics about how some physical properties behave. For example, the mass of 2 protons and the mass 2 more protons equals the mass of 4 protons. But 2+2=4 doesn't work for everything, the temperature of 2 hot water bottles and 2 hot water bottles does not equal the temperature of 4  hot water bottles. Temperature doesn't add up in the same way that mass does, a different description is needed to describe what's going on.

No problem. 2+2=4 should not be applied in all context, of course. 

 

>computations, can be defined in [blah blah]

Who cares??  Definitions are just a human convention, a definition of a computation can't compute and a definition of a airliner can fly you to London.

A definition of a computation is not a computation. But can be used to show that all computation are done in the models of arithmetic. 

> You confuse the [blah blah]

No, you confuse the difference between a cat and the word "cat" . The difference is one can have kittens but a word can’t.

Yes, that is what I insist. So please stop confusing the language “2+2=4” with the fact that 2+2=4. Same for the computations. Arithmetic contains all description of computations should not be confused with the fact that all computations are also realised, done, executed, through the truth of the number relations. “Cat” is not a cat, “one” is not the number 1 either.

 

> the models/realities intended will be usually much more complex, as you said above.

Mathematical models are ALWAYS simpler and less rich than the physical reality they try to represent.

With “model” used in the sense of the physicist. That is true for arithmetic too, as you allude above. The arithmetical reality (model) is far more complex than any theories of arithmetic.

So why in the world would you say the physics is modeling the mathematics when its obvious that the mathematics is trying, with limited success, to model the physics?    

No one says that physics model mathematics. With mechanism, physics is reducible to the theology of numbers, which is not reducible to any other theory, and is of course not an axiomatisable theory, except, miraculously for its propositional parts, as we know since Solovay 1976.

[Philip Thrift]

I wrote this short Note:

     EMP: Effective Matter Programming

     https://codicalist.wordpress.com/2018/11/19/emp-effective-matter-programming/

   

"Matter compilers receive their raw materials from the Feed, a system analogous to the electrical grid of modern society. The Feed carries streams of both energy and basic molecules, which are rapidly assembled into usable goods by matter compilers."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

From usable goods to sensitive robots? 

- pt

[John Clark]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 6:24 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> The notion of model “modelises” the notion of reality.

I see. No I take that back I don't see. What does that mean, how would things look different if it were the other way around, what if the notion of reality realizes the notion of model?

 

>> that is like using English to talk about the English word "cat". Whenever mathematics tries to model something that is not itself, like something physical,

> Which might be part of mathematics.

If so  you could make a calculation without the use of matter that obeys the laws of physics and you would be the richest man who ever lived.

 

> Unless you assume [...]

What I assume is you are NOT the richest man who ever lived.

 

>> But, I hear you say, the numbers 11 and 13 are prime and that fact is unchanging and eternal!  Well yes, but the English words "cat" and "bat" rhyme and that fact is also unchanging and eternal.

> Not in the same sense, and if you make things precise, for mechanism, a theory with bat and cat rhyming can be Turing universal,

If both English and mathematics are Turing universal then both are just languages and everything mathematics can do English can do, although perhaps a little less eloquently    .   

>> Mathematics can't even identify all true sentences about arithmetic much less become the master of physical reality. We know  the sentence "the 4th Busy Beaver number is 107" belongs in the set of true sentences, but what about "the 5th Busy Beaver number is 47,176,870"?  It's either true or its not but will you or I anybody or anything ever know which one?  Nobody knows and nobody knows if we'll ever know, but we do know that nothing will ever know what the 8000th Busy Beaver number is even though its well defined and finite.

 

> You make my point. The value of the busy beaver function is arithmetical well defined, but not computable, which illustrates that the arithmetical reality kicks back,

Arithmetical reality "kicked back" by saying "I can NOT identify all true sentences in arithmetic", and many many centuries before Godel or Turing Arithmetical reality "kicked back" by saying "I can only predict approximately what a physical system will do" and with the more recent development of Quantum Mechanics the approximations have become even more approximate. And that is exactly what you'd expect to happen if mathematics was the model and physics was the real thing because models are always simpler and less complete than the thing they're modeling.    

> your argument needs your ontological commitment in some primary matter, for which there is no evidence found yet.

You've been saying shit like that for years and I still have no idea what you're talking about. What exactly would you consider relevant evidence of the existence of "primary matter"? I don't think you even know what "primary matter" means.

> 2+2=4 even if I was not born.

But there would be no way for anything to think about 2+2=4 without matter that obeys the laws of physics, there would be no way for that information to be encoded, and even if there were it would be meaningless if there were not at least 4 things in the physical universe.

> You seem to confuse [...]

I'm not the one who is completely befuddled by personal pronouns.   

> You are only keeping Mouloud your personal materialist credo,

That word is a bit too covfefe for my taste.

 

> 2+2=4 is a description in the language of mathematics about how some physical properties behave. For example, the mass of 2 protons and the mass 2 more protons equals the mass of 4 protons. But 2+2=4 doesn't work for everything, the temperature of 2 hot water bottles and 2 hot water bottles does not equal the temperature of 4  hot water bottles. Temperature doesn't add up in the same way that mass does, a different description is needed to describe what's going on.

No problem. 2+2=4 should not be applied in all context, of course. 

And physics tells mathematics when 2+2=4 should be applied and when it should not be because physics is more fundamental. 

> A definition of a computation is not a computation. But can be used to show that all computation are done in the models of arithmetic.

No computation can be shown to do anything without making use of matter that obeys the laws of physics.

 

>> why in the world would you say the physics is modeling the mathematics when its obvious that the mathematics is trying, with limited success, to model the physics?    

> No one says that physics model mathematics.

You still don't understand the significance of what Alan Turing did in 1936

>Assuming Aristotle theology [...] 

Yawn. 

> With mechanism, physics is reducible to the theology of [...]

Sorry, I don't know what you said after this, I fell asleep.  

 John K Clark

 

[Philip Thrift]

There are two types of people:

Those who say "There are mathematical objects."

Those who say "There are no mathematical objects."

I was just thinking about a certain irony about Hartry Field*: His last name has meanings in both physics and mathematics, and he is the founder of nominalized semantics for theories of physics — where a 'field' may be nominalized away!

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartry_Field

   https://books.google.com/books/about/Science_Without_Numbers.html?id=Exc1DQAAQBAJ

- pt

 

[Bruno Marchal]

Today I am busy. I will answer this at ease later.

Have a good day,

Bruno

[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Nov 2018, at 00:44, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 6:24 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> The notion of model “modelises” the notion of reality.

I see. No I take that back I don't see. What does that mean, how would things look different if it were the other way around, what if the notion of reality realizes the notion of model?

In logic, a model is a reality. I will use “reality” instead of “model”, because physicists use “model” for theory.

A reality is anything which satisfies a theory (i.e. each axioms, and all theorems).

A theory is sound means that what we prove in the theory will be true in all models of the theory.

A theory is complete if what is true in all models is proved in the theory.

All first order theories are complete in that sense. A corollary is that a theory is consistent if and only if the theory has a model.

 

>> that is like using English to talk about the English word "cat". Whenever mathematics tries to model something that is not itself, like something physical,

> Which might be part of mathematics.

If so  you could make a calculation without the use of matter that obeys the laws of physics and you would be the richest man who ever lived.

By definition of computations, all computations are done without primary matter. The appearance of matter is explained by the way some computations are seen from inside. 

If you believe in some primary, non deductible matter, and that such primary matter has a role for consciousness, it is up to you to explain how that matter can select computation(s) in arithmetic. But either

A) that matter role is not Turing emulable, but then mechanism is false. Or,

B) that matter role is Turing emulable, but then it occurs in arithmetic (in all models of arithmetic), en you failed.

 

> Unless you assume [...]

What I assume is you are NOT the richest man who ever lived.

 

>> But, I hear you say, the numbers 11 and 13 are prime and that fact is unchanging and eternal!  Well yes, but the English words "cat" and "bat" rhyme and that fact is also unchanging and eternal.

> Not in the same sense, and if you make things precise, for mechanism, a theory with bat and cat rhyming can be Turing universal,

If both English and mathematics are Turing universal then both are just languages and everything mathematics can do English can do, although perhaps a little less eloquently    .   

Neither English nor mathematics are defined precisely enough to assert that there are Turing universal. It can or cannot make sense without further precisions.

>> Mathematics can't even identify all true sentences about arithmetic much less become the master of physical reality. We know  the sentence "the 4th Busy Beaver number is 107" belongs in the set of true sentences, but what about "the 5th Busy Beaver number is 47,176,870"?  It's either true or its not but will you or I anybody or anything ever know which one?  Nobody knows and nobody knows if we'll ever know, but we do know that nothing will ever know what the 8000th Busy Beaver number is even though its well defined and finite.

 

> You make my point. The value of the busy beaver function is arithmetical well defined, but not computable, which illustrates that the arithmetical reality kicks back,

Arithmetical reality "kicked back" by saying "I can NOT identify all true sentences in arithmetic", and many many centuries before Godel or Turing Arithmetical reality "kicked back" by saying "I can only predict approximately what a physical system will do”

Gödel’s theorem says nothing about the physical, and does not assume anything in physics, nor metaphysics. But this changes when we assume Mechanism; physics becomes a first person plural statistics on computation, and indeed quantum mechanics is recovered in the extraction of physics in arithmetic “seen from inside”.

and with the more recent development of Quantum Mechanics the approximations have become even more approximate. And that is exactly what you'd expect to happen if mathematics was the model and physics was the real thing because models are always simpler and less complete than the thing they're modeling.    

Model in the physicist sense. OK. But that is provably true for the arithmetical reality, which is provably infinitely more complex than any theories (model in the physicist sense) of arithmetic, by incompleteness.

> your argument needs your ontological commitment in some primary matter, for which there is no evidence found yet.

You've been saying shit like that for years and I still have no idea what you're talking about. What exactly would you consider relevant evidence of the existence of "primary matter"? I don't think you even know what "primary matter" means.

That is all normal, as you told me you stop at step 3. You have a lot of work to do, no doubt about that.

But I do answer that question eventually. You can detect “primary matter” by comparing the logics S4Grz1, or Z1*, or X1* with the logic of the observables. Up to now, nature confirms Mechanism, and the absence of primary matter. If you read the whole paper (sane04), you can have the gist of it, even if you have some doubt on some steps, on which we can come back.

> 2+2=4 even if I was not born.

But there would be no way for anything to think about 2+2=4 without matter that obeys the laws of physics,

Because you ignore that the arithmetical reality realises all computations.

there would be no way for that information to be encoded,

x encodes phi_x in arithmetic through the Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z). Or through any universal number u, and the universal function phI_u.

You cannot know by pure introspection if you are in a brain in a vat, or a brain in arithmetic. You are the one assuming some primary matter and giving it a mysterious role in selecting consciousness. It is up to you to answer the question above. Is it A or B? You tell me.

and even if there were it would be meaningless if there were not at least 4 things in the physical universe.

> You seem to confuse [...]

I'm not the one who is completely befuddled by personal pronouns.   

Have you follow the combinator thread? We are close to be able to explain the mathematical definition of all pronouns used. But most people find the informal explanation used in the UDA far easier, and you have not succeeded in explaining what is your problem with the 1p and 3p distinction. You talk sometimes like if we just die through set-duplication, and when you agree that we survive to it, you agree that each reconstituted person live the dissymmetrical changes as both see one city, and understand that mechanism precludes to have guess which one in advance. We need only to consider all copies as survivors equal in rights without privileging one of their discourse upon another. Here, you are the one that nobody understand.

> You are only keeping Mouloud your personal materialist credo,

That word is a bit too covfefe for my taste.

 

> 2+2=4 is a description in the language of mathematics about how some physical properties behave. For example, the mass of 2 protons and the mass 2 more protons equals the mass of 4 protons. But 2+2=4 doesn't work for everything, the temperature of 2 hot water bottles and 2 hot water bottles does not equal the temperature of 4  hot water bottles. Temperature doesn't add up in the same way that mass does, a different description is needed to describe what's going on.

No problem. 2+2=4 should not be applied in all context, of course. 

And physics tells mathematics when 2+2=4 should be applied and when it should not be because physics is more fundamental. 

> A definition of a computation is not a computation. But can be used to show that all computation are done in the models of arithmetic.

No computation can be shown to do anything without making use of matter that obeys the laws of physics.

Relatively to us? OK. But that relativity is embedded in arithmetic, or mechanism is wrong.

 

>> why in the world would you say the physics is modeling the mathematics when its obvious that the mathematics is trying, with limited success, to model the physics?    

> No one says that physics model mathematics.

You still don't understand the significance of what Alan Turing did in 1936

Which is?

I think you are the one having a revisionist account of the Church Turing thesis. You are using Deutshc physicalist thesis in metaphysics, or similar.

Just give an evidence for primary matter. You cannot invoke directly terms like “real”, “reality”, “god”, or your “primary matter” when doing metaphysics with the scientific method. It is automatically invalid. You need to make your assumption clear. 

Are you able to doubt the ontological existence of a physical universe? Some years ago, you could, but it seems that you have change your mind on this. I have no clue why.

Bruno

>Assuming Aristotle theology [...] 

Yawn. 

> With mechanism, physics is reducible to the theology of [...]

Sorry, I don't know what you said after this, I fell asleep.  

 John K Clark

 

[Bruno Marchal]

Matter plays a fundamental role in sensibility, but that is a theorem in Mechanism, and that “matter” is phenomenological. It does not exist in the base ontology. Or f it does, then how could it play a non mechanist role? 

No problem with rejecting computationalism, if you want matter or other god to play a role, but why not testing this before complicating the cognitive science for … what?

[Philip Thrift]

On Wednesday, November 21, 2018 at 3:48:31 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Matter plays a fundamental role in sensibility, but that is a theorem in Mechanism, and that “matter” is phenomenological. It does not exist in the base ontology. Or f it does, then how could it play a non mechanist role? 

No problem with rejecting computationalism, if you want matter or other god to play a role, but why not testing this before complicating the cognitive science for … what?

Bruno

If the starting point is

       There are no such things as numbers [ or - in general terms - mathematical entities ],

then one is left with something (assuming there is something) and something is matter.

There is no evidence in any scientific sense that mathematical entities exist.

Mathematics is fiction (in the sense of mathematical fictionalism). That applies to computation, if computation is viewed as a branch of mathematics.

But matter that has intrinsic experientiality can be that something that does exist for both behavioral (information) and phenomenological (experience, consciousness) aspects of the universe.

- pt

[Bruno Marchal]

On 21 Nov 2018, at 15:11, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, November 21, 2018 at 3:48:31 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Matter plays a fundamental role in sensibility, but that is a theorem in Mechanism, and that “matter” is phenomenological. It does not exist in the base ontology. Or f it does, then how could it play a non mechanist role? 

No problem with rejecting computationalism, if you want matter or other god to play a role, but why not testing this before complicating the cognitive science for … what?

Bruno

If the starting point is

       There are no such things as numbers [ or - in general terms - mathematical entities ],

I guess you mean: there is no number in the basic reality that I assume. OK.

I hope you believe that x + 0 = x, and things like that.

then one is left with something (assuming there is something) and something is matter.

Why? In some social groups, I met often people who disbelieve in number and in matter. They argue that the fundamental reality is consciousness, and that number, and matter, is a product of consciousness.

With mechanism, consciousness is more easy to explain than numbers, and consciousness is explained by number relations (build from logic + the laws of + and *).

There is no evidence in any scientific sense that mathematical entities exist.

There are many evidence that they exist, and assuming mechanism, contemporary physics confirmed their existence, and the choice for talking them as irreducible (except on Turing equivalent).

Without assuming a universal machinery, we cannot derive their existence, but once assumed we can explain the rest.

As elementary arithmetic is Turing universal, we can assume only the numbers. It is less sophisticated than assuming this or that physical theory, which leads to the problem of consciousness (solved with mechanism).

But there is no empirical evidence for irreducible matter.

Mathematics is fiction (in the sense of mathematical fictionalism).

We would not promise 1000,000$ for solving the Riemann Conjecture if it was fiction. Fictionalism in mathematics does not make any sense to me. With mechanism, fictionalism in analysis and physics is obligatory though.

That applies to computation, if computation is viewed as a branch of mathematics.

Computation and computability theory are indeed branch of mathematics, even arithmetic.

But matter that has intrinsic experientiality can be that something that does exist for both behavioral (information) and phenomenological (experience, consciousness) aspects of the universe.

That makes both mind and matter quite weird. How could any 3p thing be identified with 1p notion?

How would you explain facts like consciousness. How could “matter” (and what is that) have experience, memories them, without emulating some self-referential processes? When would a piece of matter have an experience? How would you relate the role of that matter and the functioning of the brain? I see only complications here, which are premature for me, as the physical reality appears to look exactly like mechanism predicts it to look like.

[Philip Thrift]

Rorty wrote an introduction to one of his books, in full here:

   https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm

Source: Consequences of Pragmatism

This is the gist of it (and what I think):

Where did the (bad) idea that there are such things as "abstractions" (numbers, relations, processes, minds, etc.) and "truths" about those abstractions come from? That's a real mystery.

We would not promise 1000,000$ for solving the Riemann Conjecture if it was fiction. 

Publishers advance millions of dollars for works of fiction by popular fiction writers all the time!

How would you explain facts like consciousness. How could “matter” (and what is that) have experience, memories them, without emulating some self-referential processes? When would a piece of matter have an experience? How would you relate the role of that matter and the functioning of the brain? I see only complications here, which are premature for me, as the physical reality appears to look exactly like mechanism predicts it to look like.

What the Goff-Strawson breed of "panpsychists" say: Matter without experientiality is not true matter.

In some social groups, I met often people who disbelieve in number and in matter. They argue that the fundamental reality is consciousness, and that number, and matter, is a product of consciousness.

Now that [~ cosmopsychism] is a much more interesting starting point, and comes close to experiential materialism:

"Our picture of matter is incomplete, at least if it is drawn only with (colorless) pencils of information—the current mathematical language of physics. What is needed to finish the picture are paint brushes dipped in the (colorful) elements of experience."

Cosmopsychists and material panpsychists have some common basis for progress.

cf. https://philarchive.org/rec/GOFCMA

"Cosmopsychism, Micropsychism, and the Grounding Relation"

Philip Goff

In William Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism. Routledge (forthcoming)

[pdf:  https://philarchive.org/archive/GOFCMA ]

- pt 

 

[John Clark]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 4:44 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>In logic, a model is a reality.

If so then "reality" is a very silly thing and logicians are very silly people.

> A reality is anything which satisfies a theory

 

And that is a very silly thing to say. Harry Potter flying on a broom satisfies the theory that Harry Potter is a wizard therefore Harry Potter flying on a broom is a reality.

> By definition of computations, all computations are done without primary matter. 

And there we have those magical words again "by definition" . You should just say that "correct" means what Bruno Marchal says and therefore all your ideas are "correct" by definition. Definitions do not change reality and you're never going to discover anything new just by making definitions.

 

> The appearance of matter is explained by the way some computations are seen from inside. 

Computations don't seem like anything from the inside or the outside  if they don't exist, and without matter that obeys the laws of physics they don't; and even the magical incantation "by definition" can't change that fact.

> If you believe in some primary, non deductible matter and that such primary matter has a role for consciousness,

We've observed experimentally that a change in matter changes consciousness and a change in consciousness changes matter, I don't see how you could get better evidence than that indicating matter and consciousness are related.

 

> it is up to you to explain how 

It is not necessary to explain how if you can prove that it does. In science if someone makes a experimental discovery they are not also required to explain why things are that way, if they can that would be great but it's not required. In 1998 astronomers discovered that the universe was accelerating, they had no idea why it is doing that and we still don't, but the astronomers received the Nobel for their discovery anyway. When somebody discovers why its accelerating I have no doubt another Nobel Prize will be produced.

> that matter can select computation(s) in arithmetic.

Turing showed that matter can make any computation that can be composted, what more do you need.

>   either A) that matter role is not Turing emulable, but then mechanism is false. Or,

You've got it backwards. Again. Turing proved that matter can do mathematics he did NOT prove that mathematics can do matter, and as far back as Newton we knew that mathematics can not solve the 3 body problem exactly and it can't even get arbitrarily close to the correct solution. So if you want to know what 3 objects of equal mass in orbit around each other will do all you can do is watch it and see.  If there are a million objects in orbit you can make a pretty good approximation about what the entire swarm will do but not what any individual object will do. And with quantum physics it has become even more apparent that probabilities are the best that mathematics can do when it tries to emulate physics.  

> Neither English nor mathematics are defined precisely enough to assert that there are Turing universal.

Neither Mathematics or English or any other language will ever be Turing universal, but matter is not a language and we've known since 1936 that it is Turing universal. 

 

> Gödel’s theorem says nothing about the physical,

True, but Turing has a great deal to say about the physical, he said everything can be translated into something physical and in fact the physical is all he talked about. Historically Godel's theorem came a few years before Turing's but it could have easily been the other way around. Turing's results are far more general than Godel's, in 1936 Turing of course knew of Godel's work in 1931 but it didn't help him much, but if he had never been born Turing could have proven Godel's results as a corollary that was vastly simpler than the method Godel originallyly used to prove it.

Suppose we had a consistent and complete logical system which was powerful enough to do arithmetic.  Now if we have any Turing machine, we can figure out if it halts on any given input tape. Because the logical system is consistent and complete there must be a proof of finite size that it will halt or a proof that it will not, so all we'd have to do is go through them one by one till we found it; it would only take a finite amount of time and when and we've found the proof or disproof  we've solved the Halting Problem. But it you already know that the Halting Problem can't be solved (which in 1936 Turing did know) then you'd know that a logical system that was consistent and complete and powerful enough to do arithmetic could not exist.

 

> If you read the whole paper (sane04),

Reading the entire paper is not necessary, one does not need to eat the entire egg to know it is bad.

 

> you can have the gist of it, even if you have some doubt on some steps, on which we can come back.

I will not read another word of it until you fix the blunder in step 3, and I don't think you ever will.

>>Without matter there would be no way for that information to be encoded,

> x encodes phi_x in arithmetic through the Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z).

Mr. Kleene was made of matter and he wrote "T(x, y, z)" in ink which was also made of matter.

 

> You cannot know by pure introspection if you are in a brain in a vat, or a brain in arithmetic.

But you claim to have done precisely that, you claim that everything, and not just brains, at the deepest level is just arithmetic.

> when doing metaphysics with the scientific method [...]

As I said before, if you're doing metaphysics with the scientific method then its not metaphysics, it's just physics. What you're doing is definitely metaphysics, I prefer physics.

 

> Are you able to doubt the ontological existence of a physical universe?

Depends on what you mean. I would say a physical universe is a place with the capacity to build a working Turing Machine, even if we're living in a computer simulation I have no doubt such a place exists.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

On Thursday, November 22, 2018 at 2:02:55 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

We've observed experimentally that a change in matter changes consciousness and a change in consciousness changes matter, I don't see how you could get better evidence than that indicating matter and consciousness are related.

 

John K Clark

That seems to be a type of "mind-body dualism" [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism ] where the matter of the brain and the consciousness of the mind are in some sort of dance together.

An alternative is that consciousness (or experientiality - in the philosophers' jargon) is intrinsic (more jargon) to matter. A change in matter would indeed change consciousness. (That's obvious when you put new chemicals into your brain!)

- pt

[John Clark]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 2:38 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> An alternative is that consciousness (or experientiality - in the philosophers' jargon) is intrinsic (more jargon) to matter. A change in matter would indeed change consciousness.

Because a change in matter changes a computation and a change in computation changes intelligence and a change in intelligence changes consciousness.

 John K Clark

 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 22 Nov 2018, at 21:02, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 4:44 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>In logic, a model is a reality.

If so then "reality" is a very silly thing and logicians are very silly people.

It is so, as again you would see if you read any introduction to mathematical logic. A model is usually an infinite structure, quite different from a theory, and semantics is given by a “satisfaction” relation between models and formula. The model of Peano arithmetic, for example, is the set N together with the addition and multiplication functions intepreteting the symbol “+” and “*” in the usual sense. 

> A reality is anything which satisfies a theory

 

And that is a very silly thing to say. Harry Potter flying on a broom satisfies the theory that Harry Potter is a wizard therefore Harry Potter flying on a broom is a reality.

> By definition of computations, all computations are done without primary matter. 

And there we have those magical words again "by definition” .

Yes, in a precise context, when doing science/mathematics, it is useful to have precise mathematical definition.

You should just say that "correct" means what Bruno Marchal says and therefore all your ideas are "correct" by definition.

No I use the standard definition. You are wanting to change them to suit your personal agenda, which does not seem to “understand” the works already done, so as to avoid the consequences. You define computation through an ontological commitment. That is not the standard way to proceed in this field, and well, in science in general.

Definitions do not change reality and you're never going to discover anything new just by making definitions.

Any formal or mathematical definition will do, and with Church thesis this applies to any possible different future definition.

That all computations are executed in arithmetic is just a standard fact knows since 1931-1936. 

 

> The appearance of matter is explained by the way some computations are seen from inside. 

Computations don't seem like anything from the inside or the outside  if they don't exist, and without matter that obeys the laws of physics they don’t;

You assume Aristotle theology. That simply cannot work, unless you are right about the non existence of the first person indeterminacy, but you have failed to give an algorithm capable of violating it, so ...

and even the magical incantation "by definition" can't change that fact.

> If you believe in some primary, non deductible matter and that such primary matter has a role for consciousness,

We've observed experimentally that a change in matter changes consciousness and a change in consciousness changes matter, I don't see how you could get better evidence than that indicating matter and consciousness are related.

In a video games, you can also have such relations, them being processed in the physical reality, or in a brain in a vat, or in arithmetic, the same effect can take place, and thus, what you say cannot be a valid argument for the existence of a primary matter playing a role in the brain, or in consciousness.

 

> it is up to you to explain how 

It is not necessary to explain how if you can prove that it does.

It would work if your brain was unique, but there is no reason to believe this, and it is refutable with Mechanism, as they are infinitely many “brains” in arithmetic.

 In science if someone makes a experimental discovery they are not also required to explain why things are that way, if they can that would be great but it's not required. In 1998 astronomers discovered that the universe was accelerating, they had no idea why it is doing that and we still don't, but the astronomers received the Nobel for their discovery anyway. When somebody discovers why its accelerating I have no doubt another Nobel Prize will be produced.

You identify physics and metaphysics. That is not valid.

> that matter can select computation(s) in arithmetic.

Turing showed that matter can make any computation that can be composted, what more do you need.

Sure, but we talk on primary matter, and it is this one that you have to explain the role in consciousness, and how it select the computations in arithmetic, or what it does not select them, which seems pure magic. You cannot invoke your personal conviction, as you did above and in other posts.

>   either A) that matter role is not Turing emulable, but then mechanism is false. Or,

You've got it backwards. Again. Turing proved that matter can do mathematics he did NOT prove that mathematics can do matter,

Yes, that is my result, but it is based on Turing’s definition of computation, based on its thesis or on Church’s thesis.

and as far back as Newton we knew that mathematics can not solve the 3 body problem exactly and it can't even get arbitrarily close to the correct solution. So if you want to know what 3 objects of equal mass in orbit around each other will do all you can do is watch it and see. 

But that is still partial computable. No problem, in arithmetic there are infinitely any processes that we cannot predict in advance. 

If there are a million objects in orbit you can make a pretty good approximation about what the entire swarm will do but not what any individual object will do. And with quantum physics it has become even more apparent that probabilities are the best that mathematics can do when it tries to emulate physics.  

> Neither English nor mathematics are defined precisely enough to assert that there are Turing universal.

Neither Mathematics or English or any other language will ever be Turing universal, but matter is not a language and we've known since 1936 that it is Turing universal. 

You insist confusing the language of mathematics and the object talked about using that language. You were more open-minded on this some years ago. I don’t see why. Gödel’s theorem refutes the idea that conventionalism is true in mathematics.

 

> Gödel’s theorem says nothing about the physical,

True, but Turing has a great deal to say about the physical, he said everything can be translated into something physical and in fact the physical is all he talked about. 

In its embryogenesis paper, or in its note on the quantum Zeno effect, not in its paper on computations, which he made clear to be mathematical, and later arithmetical.

Historically Godel's theorem came a few years before Turing's but it could have easily been the other way around. Turing's results are far more general than Godel's, in 1936 Turing of course knew of Godel's work in 1931 but it didn't help him much, but if he had never been born Turing could have proven Godel's results as a corollary that was vastly simpler than the method Godel originallyly used to prove it.

Suppose we had a consistent and complete logical system which was powerful enough to do arithmetic.  Now if we have any Turing machine, we can figure out if it halts on any given input tape. Because the logical system is consistent and complete there must be a proof of finite size that it will halt or a proof that it will not, so all we'd have to do is go through them one by one till we found it; it would only take a finite amount of time and when and we've found the proof or disproof  we've solved the Halting Problem. But it you already know that the Halting Problem can't be solved (which in 1936 Turing did know) then you'd know that a logical system that was consistent and complete and powerful enough to do arithmetic could not exist.

 

> If you read the whole paper (sane04),

Reading the entire paper is not necessary, one does not need to eat the entire egg to know it is bad.

You need to show the error, in a convincing polite way. Up to now, you have deliberately avoid this.

 

> you can have the gist of it, even if you have some doubt on some steps, on which we can come back.

I will not read another word of it until you fix the blunder in step 3, and I don't think you ever will.

What error? You found none. You have just rephrase the problem and said it was nonsense, but each time you are using improper definitions, and abstract from the 1p and 3p distinctions. 

I will perhaps send a ost on that step 3, and ask the newbees. The last time I did that, none did understood your point. 

>>Without matter there would be no way for that information to be encoded,

> x encodes phi_x in arithmetic through the Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z).

Mr. Kleene was made of matter and he wrote "T(x, y, z)" in ink which was also made of matter.

Sure, but that does not make that matter primary. But it illustrates that computations are arithmetical object.

 

> You cannot know by pure introspection if you are in a brain in a vat, or a brain in arithmetic.

But you claim to have done precisely that, you claim that everything, and not just brains, at the deepest level is just arithmetic.

I did not do that by introspection. I claim nothing. I just show that IF mechanism is True, then we can test it empirically (not by introspection), and that the test done confirm immaterialism, not materialism.

> when doing metaphysics with the scientific method [...]

As I said before, if you're doing metaphysics with the scientific method then its not metaphysics, it's just physics.

That is wrong. Doing metaphysics with the scientific attitude consists in NOT deciding the ontology at the start.

What you're doing is definitely metaphysics, I prefer physics.

Then why do you try to intervene in a discussion in metaphysics. This list is not a physics list, but a list on the subject of how to unify everything, which includes consciousness, god or not gods, etc. You prefer physics, but that is not a reason to use it as if it was a metaphysics. You can do that, of course: it is Aristotle theology, and it is refuted by the facts today.

 

> Are you able to doubt the ontological existence of a physical universe?

Depends on what you mean. I would say a physical universe is a place with the capacity to build a working Turing Machine, even if we're living in a computer simulation I have no doubt such a place exists.

Amen. If you have no doubt, then there is nothing we can do.

Bruno

[Philip Thrift]

One can have a system that consists of only information processing: It has a "knowledge base" like Wikipedia, can converse on any topic, make jokes, can learn stuff reading online news, and so on. That system has informational intelligence - but does not have "experience". True intelligence is experiential intelligence.

- pt

 

[John Clark]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 12:22 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> True intelligence is experiential intelligence.

What sort of intelligence do your fellow human beings have? How does true intelligence behave differently than untrue intelligence? If untrue intelligence can outsmart true intelligence it sure doesn't seem very untrue to me.

John K Clark

 

[Philip Thrift]

Some in AI will say if something is just informationally intelligent (or pseudo-intelligent) but not experientially intelligent then it will not ever be remarkably creative - in literature, music, painting, or even science.

And it will not be conscious, as all humans are.

- pt

[John Clark]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 1:10 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Some in AI will say if something is just informationally intelligent (or pseudo-intelligent) but not experientially intelligent then it will not ever be remarkably creative - in literature, music, painting, or even science.

Apparently being remarkably creative is not required to be supremely good at Chess or GO or solving equations because pseudo-intelligence will beat true-intelligence at those things every time. The goal posts keep moving, true intelligence is whatever computers aren't good at. Yet.

 

> And it will not be conscious,

My problem is if the AI is smarter than me it will outsmart me, but if the AI isn't conscious that's the computers problem not mine. And besides, I'll never know if the AI is conscious or not just as I'll never know if you are.

 

>as all humans are.

Most humans are NOT remarkably creative in literature, music, painting or science; so why do you think all humans are conscious?

John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 8:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> in a precise context, when doing science/mathematics, it is useful to have precise mathematical definition.

Sure definitions can be useful but they never cause things to pop into existence or can tell you anything about the nature of science or mathematics, all they tell you is what the sound some human beings make with their mouth or the squiggles they draw with their hands represent, something that may or may not be part of reality. 

> You define computation through an ontological commitment.

 

My commitment is with the scientific method, so when you make outlandish claims (matter is not needed to make calculations Robison arithmetic alone can do so,  Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z) can encode information) I ask you to actually do so. I don't ask you to tell me about it, anybody can spin a tale in the English language or the Mathematical language, I ask you to actually make a calculation or encode some information without using matter that obeys the laws of physics. I don't want more squiggles made of ink I want you to perform a experiment that can be repeated.  I'm not being unreasonable in my request, I'm just asking you to be scientific.  If you can successfully do all that I'll do a 180, my opinion of your work will change radically because I have no loyalty or sentimentality, if a idea doesn't work I reject it if it does work I embrace it until I find something that works even better.

 

> That is not the standard way to proceed in this field,

True, that's not the way things are done in the Junk Science field, Voodoo priests would not approve at all. 

>>Definitions do not change reality and you're never going to discover anything new just by making definitions.

> Any formal or mathematical definition will do,

Will do what? Change reality?

>That all computations are executed in arithmetic is just a standard fact knows since 1931-1936. 

And it has also been know that arithmetic can only be performed by matter that obeys the laws of physics.

 

> That simply cannot work, unless you are right about the non existence of the first person indeterminacy,

First person indeterminacy? Oh yes, the idea that you can't always be certain what will happen next. I believe that monumental discovery was made by the great thinker and philosopher Og The Caveman.

 

>>We've observed experimentally that a change in matter changes consciousness and a change in consciousness changes matter, I don't see how you could get better evidence than that indicating matter and consciousness are related.

> In a video games, you can also have such relations,

Yes, so what?

> them being processed in the physical reality, or in a brain in a vat, or in arithmetic, the same effect can take place,

A brain in a vat is part of physical reality and so is a brain in a bone box atop your shoulders. And forget video games, arithmetic can't even calculate 2+2 anymore the English word "cat" can have kittens because a language by itself can't do anything.

>>Turing showed that matter can make any computation that can be composted, what more do you need.

 

> Sure,

I'm glad we agree on something.

> but we talk on primary matter, and it is this one that you have to explain the role in consciousness,

To hell with consciousness! Turing explained how matter can behave intelligently, and Darwin explained how  natural selection and random mutation can produce an animal that behaves intelligently, and I know that I am conscious, and I know I am the product of Evolution. If consciousness is a brute fact, if consciousness is the inevitable byproduct of intelligence, as I think it must be, then there is nothing more of interest to be said about it, certainly nobody on this list has said anything of more significance about consciousness since I joined the list.   

>> You've got it backwards. Again. Turing proved that matter can do mathematics he did NOT prove that mathematics can do matter,

> Yes, that is my result,

If you agree with Turing that matter can do mathematics but mathematics can NOT do matter then you must also agree that physics is more fundamental than mathematics.

 

> in arithmetic there are infinitely any processes that we cannot predict in advance. 

True, but how in the world does that weakness support your claim that mathematics tells physics what to do and thus is at the foundation of reality when mathematics doesn't know what matter is going to do even though matter always ends up doing something? 

>> Neither Mathematics or English or any other language will ever be Turing universal, but matter is not a language and we've known since 1936 that it is Turing universal. 

>You insist confusing the language of mathematics and the object talked about using that language.

It was you not me that insisted Robison arithmetic alone can make calculations and "T(x, y, z)" can encode information. So who's really confused?

>>Turing has a great deal to say about the physical, he said everything can be translated into something physical and in fact the physical is all he talked about. 

>In its embryogenesis paper, or in its note on the quantum Zeno effect, not in its paper on computations, which he made clear to be mathematical, and later arithmetical.

Turing's 1936 paper showed how matter that obeys the laws of physics can perform any computation that can be computed. Church also prove the Halting Problem had no solution but he did not show that matter that  obeys the laws of physics can perform any computation that can be computed, and that's why Turing's work was greater than Church's. 

>>I will not read another word of it until you fix the blunder in step 3, and I don't think you ever will.

> What error?

Oh for christ sake! After 5+ years you say "what error?"!

> Doing metaphysics with the scientific attitude consists in NOT deciding the ontology at the start.

OK let's do metaphysics with a scientific attitude, we'll do an experiment. You claim you can encode information in "Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z)" so upload some information into "Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z)" and then, after you tell me how to do it because I have no idea, I will download that information from "Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z)" and we can compare what you upload with what I downloaded and see if any of the information has been corrupted. We can then write a joint paper and publish our results in a peer reviewed journal. That would be the scientific method.

> why do you try to intervene in a discussion in metaphysics. This list is not a physics list, but a list on the subject of how to unify everything, which includes consciousness, god or not gods, etc.

Not entirely, on occasion this list stops babbling crackpot mysticism and actually discusses some real science and mathematics, not often but it does happen.

 

 >>I would say a physical universe is a place with the capacity to build a working Turing Machine, even if we're living in a computer simulation I have no doubt such a place exists.

> Amen. If you have no doubt, then there is nothing we can do.

So you don't think a working Turing Machine can be built anywhere???

 > it is Aristotle theology [...]

Yawn.

>You assume Aristotle theology [...]

Sorry, I didn't hear what you said after that, I fell asleep.

 John K Clark

[Quentin Anciaux]

Le sam. 24 nov. 2018 17:28, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> a écrit :

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 8:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> in a precise context, when doing science/mathematics, it is useful to have precise mathematical definition.

Sure definitions can be useful but they never cause things to pop into existence or can tell you anything about the nature of science or mathematics, all they tell you is what the sound some human beings make with their mouth or the squiggles they draw with their hands represent, something that may or may not be part of reality. 

> You define computation through an ontological commitment.

 

My commitment is with the scientific method, so when you make outlandish claims (matter is not needed to make calculations Robison arithmetic alone can do so,  Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z) can encode information) I ask you to actually do so.

Strangely you're not as hard with yourself when you advertise manyworld... Just show us a parallel universe then... Until you apply to your own beliefs your own methods, It will just be dismissive BS.

[John Clark]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2018 at 11:40 AM Quentin Anciaux <allc...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Strangely you're not as hard with yourself when you advertise manyworld... Just show us a parallel universe then... Until you apply to your own beliefs your own methods, It will just be dismissive BS.

I can't show you a parallel universe and manyworlds may indeed be BS, but I can show you weird stuff at the quantum level, manyworlds can explain it but other things can too. I think manyworlds is slightly less weird than the other explanations but I admit that's just my subjective opinion and I don't really know if manyworlds, Copenhagen or pilot waves is correct, perhaps none of them are. Right now manyworld fits the facts as well as any other quantum interpretation, if a new one comes along that fits the facts better I'll abandon manyworlds in a heartbeat.

 John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

I just happened to turn on COMET TV channel showing Dr. Goldfoot (Vincent Price) movies (Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs).

Price plays the titular mad scientist who ... builds a gang of female robots.

I think one problem for us is as artificial/synthetic intelligence technology advances: When (if ever) do these entities get "rights"?

- pt

 

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/24/2018 5:39 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 1:10 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Some in AI will say if something is just informationally intelligent (or pseudo-intelligent) but not experientially intelligent then it will not ever be remarkably creative - in literature, music, painting, or even science.

Apparently being remarkably creative is not required to be supremely good at Chess or GO or solving equations because pseudo-intelligence will beat true-intelligence at those things every time. The goal posts keep moving, true intelligence is whatever computers aren't good at. Yet.

 

> And it will not be conscious,

My problem is if the AI is smarter than me it will outsmart me, but if the AI isn't conscious that's the computers problem not mine. And besides, I'll never know if the AI is conscious or not just as I'll never know if you are.

The question is whether the AI will ever infer it is not conscious.  I think Bruno correctly points out that this would be a contradiction. If it can contemplate the question, it's conscious even though it can't prove it.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2018 at 3:14 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think one problem for us is as artificial/synthetic intelligence technology advances: When (if ever) do these entities get "rights"?

There is no point in pondering that because the question is moot. The big unknown is not what rights we'll end up giving to machines but what rights (if any) machines will end up giving us.

John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2018 at 6:10 PM Brent Meeker <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

>The question is whether the AI will ever infer it is not conscious. 

Perhaps reverse solipsism is true, maybe what I think of as consciousness is just a very pale reflection of the true glorious feeling of consciousness that you and everybody else except me feels. Comparing my consciousness to yours may be like comparing a firefly to a supernova, maybe I'm the only human that is not conscious. Or maybe its the other way around and regular old solipsism is true, or maybe we're equally conscious; the only thing I know for sure is I'll never know. 

And that's why discussions about Artificial Intelligence are so much more interesting than discussions about Artificial Consciousness.  

 John K Clark

 

[Philip Thrift]

As Galen Strawson points out, there are supposedly smart people around today - like Daniel Dennett - who don't believe they are conscious:

[ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/ ]

Ned Block [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Block ] once remarked that Dennett’s attempt to fit consciousness or “qualia” into his theory of reality “has the relation to qualia that the US Air Force had to so many Vietnamese villages: he destroys qualia in order to save them.”

...

This is how philosophers in the twentieth century came to endorse the Denial, the silliest view ever held in the history of human thought. “When I squint just right,” Dennett writes in 2013, “it does sort of seem that consciousness must be something in addition to all the things it does for us and to us, some special private glow or here-I-am-ness that would be absent in any robot… But I’ve learned not to credit the hunch. I think it is a flat-out mistake, a failure of imagination.” His position was summarized in an interview in The New York Times: “The elusive subjective conscious experience—the redness of red, the painfulness of pain—that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.” If he’s right, no one has ever really suffered, in spite of agonizing diseases, mental illness, murder, rape, famine, slavery, bereavement, torture, and genocide. And no one has ever caused anyone else pain.

This is the Great Silliness. We must hope that it doesn’t spread outside the academy, or convince some future information technologist or roboticist who has great power over our lives.

- pt

[John Clark]

On Sun, Nov 25, 2018 at 4:40 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

 Dennett's said:

“The elusive subjective conscious experience—the redness of red, the painfulness of pain—that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.”

The trouble with the above statement isn't so much that it's false, the trouble is that it's silly. In the first place an illusion is a misinterpretation of the senses, but pain is direct experience that needs no interpretation. I would love to ask Mr. Dennett how things would be different if pain was not an illusion, if he can't answer that, and I don't think he could, then the statement "pain is a illusion" contains no information.

And illusion itself is a conscious phenomena, so saying consciousness is an illusion is just saying consciousness is consciousness which, although true, is not very illuminating. When discussing any philosophical issue the word "illusion" should be used very cautiously. And if the topic involves consciousness or quala and silliness is to be avoided the word "illusion" should never be used at all because it explains nothing.  

John K Clark

 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 24 Nov 2018, at 17:27, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 8:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

> in a precise context, when doing science/mathematics, it is useful to have precise mathematical definition.

Sure definitions can be useful but they never cause things to pop into existence

Once a definition is given, we may, ornate, give argument in favour of some existence. If I define x being “even” by “it exists a number z such that x = 2 * z”, I can prove the existence of even number in “the standard model, (in all models actually) of arithmetic. Similarly with a computation and emulation/execution. Once we accept Turing or Church’s definition, we can explain why they exist and are executed in arithmetic.

or can tell you anything about the nature of science or mathematics, all they tell you is what the sound some human beings make with their mouth or the squiggles they draw with their hands represent, something that may or may not be part of reality. 

> You define computation through an ontological commitment.

 

My commitment is with the scientific method, so when you make outlandish claims (matter is not needed to make calculations Robison arithmetic alone can do so,  Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z) can encode information) I ask you to actually do so.

You ask me to implement those computation in the physical reality. That has nothing to do with the fact that all computations are implemented in the “block-univers”, or better “block-mindscape” associate to arithmetic.

When I say that the Kleene’s predicate encode computations, I am just reminding the BABA of the partial recursive function theory.

You are the one making an ontological commitment, and invoking it to prevent the testing of a theory. That is the usual interest form of pseudo-regions behaviour. Here, my “outlandish” statements are just part of any course in computer science. I have been asked both in Brussels and Lille to withdraw those explanations as it was judged to be well known. You are not criticising me, you are criticising the whole of computer science.

I don't ask you to tell me about it, anybody can spin a tale in the English language or the Mathematical language, I ask you to actually make a calculation or encode some information without using matter that obeys the laws of physics.

The number (2^4)*(3^5) typically encodes the list (4, 5), which might, for example, encode a computation with respect to some universal number u. But the computation is in the semantical relations involving those numbers, not in the Gödel number description of the relations. That is a subtle point, I agree, but a very important one.

I don't want more squiggles made of ink I want you to perform a experiment that can be repeated.  I'm not being unreasonable in my request, I'm just asking you to be scientific.

I am, in the sense that I show how to refute Mechanism, and shows that contemporary physics does not refute it, and on the contrary, confirms it, notably its weirder aspect (many-worlds, etc.).

  If you can successfully do all that I'll do a 180, my opinion of your work will change radically because I have no loyalty or sentimentality, if a idea doesn't work I reject it if it does work I embrace it until I find something that works even better.

Then act in this way in step 3 ...

 

> That is not the standard way to proceed in this field,

True, that's not the way things are done in the Junk Science field, Voodoo priests would not approve at all. 

In metaphysics, when done seriously with the scientific attitude, you cannot invoke your god (matter).

You take observation as the criteria of reality, but that is exactly what mechanism makes invalid, as the dream argument showed already to Plato. You seem unable to think out of the frame of your metaphysics.

>>Definitions do not change reality and you're never going to discover anything new just by making definitions.

> Any formal or mathematical definition will do,

Will do what? Change reality?

>That all computations are executed in arithmetic is just a standard fact knows since 1931-1936. 

And it has also been know that arithmetic can only be performed by matter that obeys the laws of physics.

 

> That simply cannot work, unless you are right about the non existence of the first person indeterminacy,

First person indeterminacy? Oh yes, the idea that you can't always be certain what will happen next.

How can you lack so much sense of rigour. The FPI is that you are maximally ignorant of the future experience that you (the you here and now in Helsinki, say) will *live* after pus-hing on the button. It is a precise special case of strong indeterminacy. 

I believe that monumental discovery was made by the great thinker and philosopher Og The Caveman.

Then, if you get it, move to step 4.

 

>>We've observed experimentally that a change in matter changes consciousness and a change in consciousness changes matter, I don't see how you could get better evidence than that indicating matter and consciousness are related.

> In a video games, you can also have such relations,

Yes, so what?

So, how could a universal machine distinguish a reality emulated by a program emulated in arithmetic, and a program emulated by your god? What in “matter” plays the role of not being able to be emulated in arithmetic. It has to be non Turing emulable, given that already tiny fragment of arithmetic is Turing complete.

Here you do the same as the creationist. You negate facts to give some special magical role to your god, I mean, your ontological commitment. You are using your religious dogma to prevent science.

> them being processed in the physical reality, or in a brain in a vat, or in arithmetic, the same effect can take place,

A brain in a vat is part of physical reality

If that exists fundamentally. That exists, no doubt, but fundamentally? That is the Aristotelian habit, only.

and so is a brain in a bone box atop your shoulders. And forget video games, arithmetic can't even calculate 2+2 anymore the English word "cat" can have kittens because a language by itself can't do anything.

>>Turing showed that matter can make any computation that can be composted, what more do you need.

 

> Sure,

I'm glad we agree on something.

> but we talk on primary matter, and it is this one that you have to explain the role in consciousness,

To hell with consciousness!

That its Dennett, or Churchland conclusion. Let us just deny consciousness.

Turing explained how matter can behave intelligently,

No. He showed how a person can be attached to a computation, and also that physics is Turing complete, so that we can use matter to implement computations, like nature plausibly does. But it is not matter which behave intelligently: it is the person associated to the computation, and it behaves as well relatively to numbers than to matter. You use of matter is “magical”.

and Darwin explained how  natural selection and random mutation can produce an animal that behaves intelligently, and I know that I am conscious, and I know I am the product of Evolution. If consciousness is a brute fact, if consciousness is the inevitable byproduct of intelligence, as I think it must be, then there is nothing more of interest to be said about it, certainly nobody on this list has said anything of more significance about consciousness since I joined the list.   

>> You've got it backwards. Again. Turing proved that matter can do mathematics he did NOT prove that mathematics can do matter,

> Yes, that is my result,

If you agree with Turing that matter can do mathematics but mathematics can NOT do matter then you must also agree that physics is more fundamental than mathematics.

No. Matter can be sued to implement computations relatively to us, but that does not contradict that matter is an emerging phenomenological patter arising from the number relations, as it has to do, when we assume mechanism. You block the argument by deciding that only matter is real, but that is your religious dogma, and no facts confirms it. The fact that we recover quantum logic for the measure one on the relative computations (in arithmetic or Ain any Turing complete theory) confirms Mechanism and thus makes materialism much less plausible, to say the least.

 

> in arithmetic there are infinitely any processes that we cannot predict in advance. 

True, but how in the world does that weakness support your claim that mathematics tells physics what to do

Tell me if you agree with step 4. Then we can proceed. You ask me question which are fully addressed in my papers, but you are stuck in the step 3, as you know.

and thus is at the foundation of reality when mathematics doesn't know what matter is going to do even though matter always ends up doing something? 

>> Neither Mathematics or English or any other language will ever be Turing universal, but matter is not a language and we've known since 1936 that it is Turing universal. 

>You insist confusing the language of mathematics and the object talked about using that language.

It was you not me that insisted Robison arithmetic alone can make calculations and "T(x, y, z)" can encode information. So who's really confused?

You confuse “T(x,y,z)” with T(x,y, z). Again, and again, and again. When the Kleene’s predicate is defined in arithmetic, we must not confuse the description of it with its semantics. If PA proves that ExT(x, y, z), it means that this is satisfied in *all* models of arithmetic. 

>>Turing has a great deal to say about the physical, he said everything can be translated into something physical and in fact the physical is all he talked about. 

>In its embryogenesis paper, or in its note on the quantum Zeno effect, not in its paper on computations, which he made clear to be mathematical, and later arithmetical.

Turing's 1936 paper showed how matter that obeys the laws of physics can perform any computation that can be computed.

Turing’s 1936 paper does not talk about “matter” at all.

Church also prove the Halting Problem had no solution but he did not show that matter that  obeys the laws of physics can perform any computation that can be computed, and that's why Turing's work was greater than Church's. 

This is ridiculous.

>>I will not read another word of it until you fix the blunder in step 3, and I don't think you ever will.

> What error?

Oh for christ sake! After 5+ years you say "what error?”!

Yes. Because you have never been able to show it. Nobody bought your point. In the question we distinguish the 1p from the 3p, but you dismiss this systematically, by insult, hand waving, dismissive tone, etc.

If you can make the prediction, illustrate its working in details. You will see by yourself that no prediction will ever work.

> Doing metaphysics with the scientific attitude consists in NOT deciding the ontology at the start.

OK let's do metaphysics with a scientific attitude, we'll do an experiment. You claim you can encode information in "Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z)" so upload some information into "Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z)" and then, after you tell me how to do it because I have no idea, I will download that information from "Kleene’s predicate T(x, y, z)" and we can compare what you upload with what I downloaded and see if any of the information has been corrupted. We can then write a joint paper and publish our results in a peer reviewed journal. That would be the scientific method.

Same as above. You ask me something impossible, like doing a pizza using only quantum mechanics. You confuse theory and model of a theory. Either you have never study logic, or you do that on purpose for defending your dogmatic metaphysical axioms, kipping mechanism. The whole point is that we can prove 0=1, in that case. But you need to move on step 4 (if step 3 is so easy that the caveman got it).

Bruno

> why do you try to intervene in a discussion in metaphysics. This list is not a physics list, but a list on the subject of how to unify everything, which includes consciousness, god or not gods, etc.

Not entirely, on occasion this list stops babbling crackpot mysticism and actually discusses some real science and mathematics, not often but it does happen.
 

 >>I would say a physical universe is a place with the capacity to build a working Turing Machine, even if we're living in a computer simulation I have no doubt such a place exists.

> Amen. If you have no doubt, then there is nothing we can do.

So you don't think a working Turing Machine can be built anywhere???

 > it is Aristotle theology [...]

Yawn.

>You assume Aristotle theology [...]

Sorry, I didn't hear what you said after that, I fell asleep.

 John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

That us why we use synonymous like first person, phenomenological, etc. 

For example, with mechanism, the matter that we see is not an illusion, but the primary matter that we infer from that seeing experience is an illusion, or a delusion. It is just a wrong inference, as most illusion are. 

Consciousness cannot be an illusion, indeed, but all content of consciousness, minus being conscious, can be wrong.

Bruno

[Philip Thrift]

On Tuesday, November 27, 2018 at 4:32:53 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 24 Nov 2018, at 17:27, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

Turing explained how matter can behave intelligently,

No. He showed how a person can be attached to a computation, and also that physics is Turing complete, so that we can use matter to implement computations, like nature plausibly does. But it is not matter which behave intelligently: it is the person associated to the computation, and it behaves as well relatively to numbers than to matter. You use of matter is “magical”.

If humans are matter (meaning of course that human brains are matter), then humans behave intelligently means that (at least some) matter behaves intelligently.  

It is not clear that Turing in his last ("morphogenesis") years thought that the Turing machine was a complete definition of computing in nature.

- pt

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/27/2018 2:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 25 Nov 2018, at 15:41, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Nov 25, 2018 at 4:40 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

 Dennett's said:

“The elusive subjective conscious experience—the redness of red, the painfulness of pain—that philosophers call qualia? Sheer illusion.”

The trouble with the above statement isn't so much that it's false, the trouble is that it's silly. In the first place an illusion is a misinterpretation of the senses, but pain is direct experience that needs no interpretation. I would love to ask Mr. Dennett how things would be different if pain was not an illusion, if he can't answer that, and I don't think he could, then the statement "pain is a illusion" contains no information.

And illusion itself is a conscious phenomena, so saying consciousness is an illusion is just saying consciousness is consciousness which, although true, is not very illuminating. When discussing any philosophical issue the word "illusion" should be used very cautiously. And if the topic involves consciousness or quala and silliness is to be avoided the word "illusion" should never be used at all because it explains nothing.  

That us why we use synonymous like first person, phenomenological, etc. 

For example, with mechanism, the matter that we see is not an illusion, but the primary matter that we infer

What is this "primary matter" of which you speak?  molecules? atoms? quarks? strings?   Who is it who every claims any one of these is "primary"?  What theory depends on one of them being primary?  I think you are beating a straw man to imply that others theories are wrong therefore yours must be right.

Brent