Consciousness in 5 grams or less

81 views
Skip to first unread message

Philip Thrift

unread,
May 28, 2019, 1:57:16 PM5/28/19
to Everything List
n Tuesday, May 28, 2019 at 6:30:08 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 27 May 2019, at 20:20, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

If you are a real materialist (Strawson's term), then consciousness is a property of  (at least) the matter that fills up our skulls. Consciousness is 100% material.

That has no meaning for me. Could you send me 5g of consciousness, tell me how it reacts, etc. 


Bruno 


Would you like a bug


or a small mouse


?

@philipthrift

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 29, 2019, 9:27:36 AM5/29/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Phillip. I don’t see the relation between the likes and my point. It would be easier to make your  point, and add the links only for those wanting more information, or details.

Bruno





@philipthrift

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/54ca54d1-f102-4bd1-9c33-c9eb3c4d63d2%40googlegroups.com.

Philip Thrift

unread,
May 29, 2019, 1:38:37 PM5/29/19
to Everything List
On Wednesday, May 29, 2019 at 8:27:36 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 28 May 2019, at 19:57, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

n Tuesday, May 28, 2019 at 6:30:08 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 27 May 2019, at 20:20, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

If you are a real materialist (Strawson's term), then consciousness is a property of  (at least) the matter that fills up our skulls. Consciousness is 100% material.

That has no meaning for me. Could you send me 5g of consciousness, tell me how it reacts, etc. 


Bruno 


Would you like a bug


or a small mouse


?


Phillip. I don’t see the relation between the likes and my point. It would be easier to make your  point, and add the links only for those wanting more information, or details.

Bruno




You requested "Could you send me 5g of consciousness".


Of course I could send you that!

Do you want a bug or a mouse sent to you?

@philipthrift
 

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 30, 2019, 6:18:13 AM5/30/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 29 May 2019, at 19:38, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:


On Wednesday, May 29, 2019 at 8:27:36 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 28 May 2019, at 19:57, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

n Tuesday, May 28, 2019 at 6:30:08 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 27 May 2019, at 20:20, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

If you are a real materialist (Strawson's term), then consciousness is a property of  (at least) the matter that fills up our skulls. Consciousness is 100% material.

That has no meaning for me. Could you send me 5g of consciousness, tell me how it reacts, etc. 


Bruno 


Would you like a bug


or a small mouse


?


Phillip. I don’t see the relation between the likes and my point. It would be easier to make your  point, and add the links only for those wanting more information, or details.

You told me that consciousness is material. Please extract it from the bug, and send me 5g of pure consciousness extract. 

I have few doubt that insect and arthropodes have some first person (conscious) experience, so if consciousness is material, you should succeed in extracting it from the bug.

Bruno





Bruno




You requested "Could you send me 5g of consciousness".


Of course I could send you that!

Do you want a bug or a mouse sent to you?

@philipthrift
 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Philip Thrift

unread,
May 30, 2019, 8:32:00 AM5/30/19
to Everything List


On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 5:18:13 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:


You told me that consciousness is material. Please extract it from the bug, and send me 5g of pure consciousness extract. 

I have few doubt that insect and arthropodes have some first person (conscious) experience, so if consciousness is material, you should succeed in extracting it from the bug.

Bruno


I'm not a dualist, so there is no X is material and Y is immaterial (like ghosts) that make up nature.


@philipthrift

Bruno Marchal

unread,
May 31, 2019, 6:25:07 AM5/31/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
But a game of bridge is something immaterial, not be confused with its implementation. I don’t believe in ghost, but I believe in a tun or immaterial things. Using fictionalism to dismiss the existence of immaterial thing, like numbers, will make eventually the whole physical reality, and mathematical reality into fiction, making the term devoid of meaning.

Bruno





@philipthrift

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Philip Thrift

unread,
May 31, 2019, 9:37:30 AM5/31/19
to Everything List


On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 5:25:07 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 30 May 2019, at 14:32, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 5:18:13 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:


You told me that consciousness is material. Please extract it from the bug, and send me 5g of pure consciousness extract. 

I have few doubt that insect and arthropodes have some first person (conscious) experience, so if consciousness is material, you should succeed in extracting it from the bug.

Bruno


I'm not a dualist, so there is no X is material and Y is immaterial (like ghosts) that make up nature.

But a game of bridge is something immaterial, not be confused with its implementation. I don’t believe in ghost, but I believe in a tun or immaterial things. Using fictionalism to dismiss the existence of immaterial thing, like numbers, will make eventually the whole physical reality, and mathematical reality into fiction, making the term devoid of meaning.

Bruno



A game a bridge - I suppose as something literally defined with words and symbols in a book on bridge - can be seen as some sort of algorithm or (dynamic) mathematical structure even. There are probably fictional board games in fantasy literature - like Game of Thrones - which could be taken and tuned into games people could play.

But these are not immaterial from the fictionalist standpoint, just as one can take the fictional Sherlock Homes in a Arthur Conan Doyle text and make a stage play to "realize" the characters.


You don't like fictionalism, and you won't like this either, but it is an interesting alternative.


If physicalism is true, everything is physical. In other words, everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. Accordingly, if there are logical/mathematical facts, they must be necessitated by the physical facts of the world. The aim of this paper is to clarify what logical/mathematical facts actually are and how these facts can be accommodated in a purely physical ontology



No matter how one obscures things, to see things as some being material and some being immaterial is dualism. There is no way to wiggle out of that.

@philipthrift

Brent Meeker

unread,
May 31, 2019, 5:06:31 PM5/31/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Interesting explication of the materialist view of mathematics.  I notice that he didn't directly consider Goedel's idea that arithmetic has true propositions that can't be proven.  I can see that he could create a hierarchy of  formal systems in which the natural numbers would be another formal system which the semantics of PA refer to.  But are the natural numbers a formal system...or do they have to be formalized in order to serve as a model?

Brent




No matter how one obscures things, to see things as some being material and some being immaterial is dualism. There is no way to wiggle out of that.

@philipthrift
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

John Clark

unread,
May 31, 2019, 5:41:49 PM5/31/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
> Could you send me 5g of consciousness?

No because consciousness is a property and adjectives are not measured in grams, only nouns are.

 John K Clark

Philip Thrift

unread,
May 31, 2019, 5:45:32 PM5/31/19
to Everything List


On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 4:06:31 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:


On 5/31/2019 6:37 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:


On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 5:25:07 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 30 May 2019, at 14:32, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 5:18:13 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:


You told me that consciousness is material. Please extract it from the bug, and send me 5g of pure consciousness extract. 

I have few doubt that insect and arthropodes have some first person (conscious) experience, so if consciousness is material, you should succeed in extracting it from the bug.

Bruno


I'm not a dualist, so there is no X is material and Y is immaterial (like ghosts) that make up nature.

But a game of bridge is something immaterial, not be confused with its implementation. I don’t believe in ghost, but I believe in a tun or immaterial things. Using fictionalism to dismiss the existence of immaterial thing, like numbers, will make eventually the whole physical reality, and mathematical reality into fiction, making the term devoid of meaning.

Bruno



A game a bridge - I suppose as something literally defined with words and symbols in a book on bridge - can be seen as some sort of algorithm or (dynamic) mathematical structure even. There are probably fictional board games in fantasy literature - like Game of Thrones - which could be taken and tuned into games people could play.

But these are not immaterial from the fictionalist standpoint, just as one can take the fictional Sherlock Homes in a Arthur Conan Doyle text and make a stage play to "realize" the characters.


You don't like fictionalism, and you won't like this either, but it is an interesting alternative.


If physicalism is true, everything is physical. In other words, everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. Accordingly, if there are logical/mathematical facts, they must be necessitated by the physical facts of the world. The aim of this paper is to clarify what logical/mathematical facts actually are and how these facts can be accommodated in a purely physical ontology

Interesting explication of the materialist view of mathematics.  I notice that he didn't directly consider Goedel's idea that arithmetic has true propositions that can't be proven.  I can see that he could create a hierarchy of  formal systems in which the natural numbers would be another formal system which the semantics of PA refer to.  But are the natural numbers a formal system...or do they have to be formalized in order to serve as a model?

Brent


One way I can see to proceed materially is to assume that physical ITTMs can be produced

    Infinite-Time Turing Machines
    Joel David Hamkins, Andy Lewis

or something like that where literally infinite-in-length proofs can be "written".


Or better, some sort of Löbian Theorem Prover which does complete in finite time with finite resources.

Parametric Bounded Löb’s Theorem and RobustCooperation of Bounded Agents
Andrew Critch

Löb’s theorem and Gödel’s theorem make predictions about the behavior of
self-reflective systems with unbounded computational resources with which to
write and evaluate proofs. However, in the real world, self-reflective systems
will have limited memory and processing speed, so in this paper we introduce
an effective version of Löb’s theorem theorem which is applicable given such
bounded resources. These results have powerful implications for the game
theory of bounded agents who are able to write proofs about themselves and
one another, including the capacity to out-perform classical Nash equilibria.

@philipthrift

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 5:10:10 AM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 31 May 2019, at 23:06, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 5/31/2019 6:37 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:


On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 5:25:07 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 30 May 2019, at 14:32, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 5:18:13 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:


You told me that consciousness is material. Please extract it from the bug, and send me 5g of pure consciousness extract. 

I have few doubt that insect and arthropodes have some first person (conscious) experience, so if consciousness is material, you should succeed in extracting it from the bug.

Bruno


I'm not a dualist, so there is no X is material and Y is immaterial (like ghosts) that make up nature.

But a game of bridge is something immaterial, not be confused with its implementation. I don’t believe in ghost, but I believe in a tun or immaterial things. Using fictionalism to dismiss the existence of immaterial thing, like numbers, will make eventually the whole physical reality, and mathematical reality into fiction, making the term devoid of meaning.

Bruno



A game a bridge - I suppose as something literally defined with words and symbols in a book on bridge - can be seen as some sort of algorithm or (dynamic) mathematical structure even. There are probably fictional board games in fantasy literature - like Game of Thrones - which could be taken and tuned into games people could play.

But these are not immaterial from the fictionalist standpoint, just as one can take the fictional Sherlock Homes in a Arthur Conan Doyle text and make a stage play to "realize" the characters.


You don't like fictionalism, and you won't like this either, but it is an interesting alternative.


If physicalism is true, everything is physical. In other words, everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. Accordingly, if there are logical/mathematical facts, they must be necessitated by the physical facts of the world. The aim of this paper is to clarify what logical/mathematical facts actually are and how these facts can be accommodated in a purely physical ontology

Interesting explication of the materialist view of mathematics.  I notice that he didn't directly consider Goedel's idea that arithmetic has true propositions that can't be proven.  I can see that he could create a hierarchy of  formal systems in which the natural numbers would be another formal system which the semantics of PA refer to.  But are the natural numbers a formal system...or do they have to be formalized in order to serve as a model?

By Gödel’s 1930 theorem (the completeness theorem, not the incompleteness theorem): all consistant theories have a model, in fact all essentially undecidable theories (like RA; PA, ZF, …) have an infinity of non-isomorphic models. 

Two equivalent version of the completeness theorem (for first order theories) are:

A theory is consistent iff it has a model.

A theory proves a proposition p iff p is true in all the models of the theory.

By incompleteness, no (enough rich, essentially undecidable) theories can define its own model, or its one semantic (the model of a theory is the same as a semantic of a theory).

The fact that, for all effective theory there are true proposition in the (standard) model of arithmetic that is not provable in that theory is not really an idea by Gödel, but a theorem in mathematics, by Gödel.

Bruno




Brent




No matter how one obscures things, to see things as some being material and some being immaterial is dualism. There is no way to wiggle out of that.

@philipthrift
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/6478ac38-9796-4511-950a-e042885613af%40googlegroups.com.


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 5:53:42 AM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 31 May 2019, at 15:37, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 5:25:07 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 30 May 2019, at 14:32, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 5:18:13 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:


You told me that consciousness is material. Please extract it from the bug, and send me 5g of pure consciousness extract. 

I have few doubt that insect and arthropodes have some first person (conscious) experience, so if consciousness is material, you should succeed in extracting it from the bug.

Bruno


I'm not a dualist, so there is no X is material and Y is immaterial (like ghosts) that make up nature.

But a game of bridge is something immaterial, not be confused with its implementation. I don’t believe in ghost, but I believe in a tun or immaterial things. Using fictionalism to dismiss the existence of immaterial thing, like numbers, will make eventually the whole physical reality, and mathematical reality into fiction, making the term devoid of meaning.

Bruno



A game a bridge - I suppose as something literally defined with words and symbols in a book on bridge - can be seen as some sort of algorithm or (dynamic) mathematical structure even. There are probably fictional board games in fantasy literature - like Game of Thrones - which could be taken and tuned into games people could play.

OK.
And all games, like all programs, are played (run) in arithmetic. 




But these are not immaterial from the fictionalist standpoint, just as one can take the fictional Sherlock Homes in a Arthur Conan Doyle text and make a stage play to "realize" the characters.

Yes, but that makes not them real. Sherlock Holmes is fictional by definition.





You don't like fictionalism, and you won't like this either, but it is an interesting alternative.


If physicalism is true, everything is physical. In other words, everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. Accordingly, if there are logical/mathematical facts, they must be necessitated by the physical facts of the world.

Assuming there is an ontological world, which is precisely what I have never found any evidence for. 



The aim of this paper is to clarify what logical/mathematical facts actually are and how these facts can be accommodated in a purely physical ontology

That is logically impossible when we assume mechanism.






No matter how one obscures things, to see things as some being material and some being immaterial is dualism. There is no way to wiggle out of that.


Yes, if one believe in things like an ontological Matter, dualism is unavoidable, and that is per se already a good reason to doubt that an ontological material reality make any sense. But with mechanism, we need to assume arithmetic (just to recover Turing’s definition of computation), and then it can be shown that we cannot add any more axioms (that what we need to have digital universal machine), all the rest has to be deduced from arithmetic/computer-science, at the machine’s phenomenological level. It works, until now.

Bruno





@philipthrift

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 6:09:09 AM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Interesting. Löb’s result are even more fundamental for the … fundamental studies, but I don’t claim it is only its main application.

Bruno 




@philipthrift

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Philip Thrift

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 9:19:31 AM6/2/19
to Everything List


On Sunday, June 2, 2019 at 4:53:42 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 31 May 2019, at 15:37, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



A game a bridge - I suppose as something literally defined with words and symbols in a book on bridge - can be seen as some sort of algorithm or (dynamic) mathematical structure even. There are probably fictional board games in fantasy literature - like Game of Thrones - which could be taken and tuned into games people could play.

OK.
And all games, like all programs, are played (run) in arithmetic. 

Bruno



But still, to run programs, including ones that play bridge, poker, chess,  one goes to a computer store and buys a computer to run them in. One doesn't go into Best Buy and buy arithmetic and carry it out the door.

@philipthrift 

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 9:44:15 AM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 2 Jun 2019, at 15:19, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Sunday, June 2, 2019 at 4:53:42 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 31 May 2019, at 15:37, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



A game a bridge - I suppose as something literally defined with words and symbols in a book on bridge - can be seen as some sort of algorithm or (dynamic) mathematical structure even. There are probably fictional board games in fantasy literature - like Game of Thrones - which could be taken and tuned into games people could play.

OK.
And all games, like all programs, are played (run) in arithmetic. 

Bruno



But still, to run programs, including ones that play bridge, poker, chess,  one goes to a computer store and buys a computer to run them in.

Yes, if the goal consists in running a program relatively you environment, but the existence of the environment is only explained, when we assume Mechanism, by the fact that elementary arithmetic run all programs, and that we are distributed in them. It is explained by the non trivial statistics on all computations that we get when we take incompleteness and computer science into account.



One doesn't go into Best Buy and buy arithmetic and carry it out the door.

Of course. 

The problem is to explain where the physical computer appearance come from, and why there is no more white rabbits. At first sight arithmetic predicts too much, but then when we do the math, the too much becomes the solution, a bit like in quantum mechanics, it is because the wave describe all the path taken by the particles, that we get the destructive interference explain why some parts is more common than other.

Mechanism does not oppose to physics, only to physicalism. To use mechanism to make physical prediction is like to use string theory to taste a pizza. It makes no practical sense.

Physics is usually neutral on after death (unlike many physicalist). With Mechanism, we can show how much such question are complicated, but also that we have tools to measure that complexit, and get a tentative picture of the possible everything, and test it with Nature.

Bruno





@philipthrift 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.

Brent Meeker

unread,
Jun 2, 2019, 2:45:20 PM6/2/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On 6/2/2019 2:53 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> Assuming there is an ontological world, which is precisely what I have
> never found any evidence for.

You refer to ontological existence and phenomenological existence all
the time.

Brent

Bruno Marchal

unread,
Jun 3, 2019, 3:50:40 AM6/3/19
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
Oops sorry. I meant “assuming an ontological *physical* world".

With mechanism: the ontological existence is given by the use of the existential quantification rule in the first order logic applied to the base (and weak) Turing-complete used (very elementary arithmetic like RA, or the SK theory extended in a first order theory, etc.).

The phenomenological existences are given by the modal first-order “extension" of Solovay theorem. I put “extension” in quote, because the first order modal extension, unlike their proposition variant, are not axiomatisable. qG is PI_2-complete, qG* is PI_1 complete in the Oracle of the Arithmetical Truth. (Yes, the arithmetical Noùs is far more powerful than God itself!).

Bruno





>
> Brent
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/fb9dc458-9d6e-b4ec-c555-f0ac76c1584e%40verizon.net.

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages