Observation versus assumption

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jul 8, 2019 at 7:22 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> You're atoms are different from what they were a year ago, if you have survived that brain transplant operation with your consciousness intact (and only you know if it has)

 

> OK. That is my point.

No, I wish it were but that is not your point, if it were you wouldn't have made the following silly remark.

> No, saying that you survive a digital substitution at some level, is the hypothesis/axiom of Mechanism, like saying that 0 is different from s(x) for any x is an hypothesis/axiom of elementary arithmetic.

For god's sake! You don't need mathematical notation to figure out if you are conscious or not or to figure out that if you've already survived one brain transplant, and you have, then there is no reason to think you won't survive another one. 

 

> It is conceivable that the copy of me acts exactly like me, but that we die in the transplant process.

It is conceivable but the only one that knows if that happened during your last brain transplant, the one that replaced the atoms you had last year with new ones, is you. If it didn't happen then there is no reason to think it will happen in your next brain transplant.

> Plato was just the guy having a scientific attitude (doubt, skepticism) toward the popular and religious/metaphysical belief that there is a physical universe (in its primary or irreductible sense made precise later by Aristotle who came back to that idea).

 

Neither Plato or Aristotle ever performed a single exparament in their life. Many of their ideas, like heavy objects fall more quickly than light ones or that men have more teeth than woman could have been disproved with a simple exparament that would have taken less than 2 minutes to perform, but they never bothered. They thought they could figure out how the world worked just by sitting and thinking. That is the very opposite of the scientific attitude.

>> I already know how the word "faith" is defined in the English Language and it's not worth my time to learn the definition in Brunospeak as you are the only one that uses that language.

> In science, we redefined all terms used in the mundane language.

But you are not Mr. Science and you are not Mr. English so you can't expect to unilaterally change the meaning of important words and still effectively communicate.   

>>>  [blah blah] that is in accordance with classical greek theology.

>> Then it is almost certainly wrong.

> On this matter, you can’t have both Plato and Aristotle wrong,

That is incorrect. It's easy for 2 people who hold incompatible views to both be wrong if both are ignoramuses, and compared to a bright modern fourth grader they both are. 

>> So we agree that I can't prove it and it would in no way effect my decision to say yes to the doctor or yes to being frozen even if I could. So what are we arguing about?

> Good question. Once you agree that we cannot prove Mechanism, we agree. That was the point where you seemed to disagree.

I've said 99 times that nobody can prove they're conscious and nobody ever will, and I've said 99 time that nobody needs to prove it to say yes to the doctor, which is what you call Mechanism. 

>> I define "magic carpet" as a rug that can fly. Like you I give no hint as to how to build such a thing but unlike you and your "Löbian machine" at least from my description you can recognize a magic carpet for what it is if you happen to see one. But neither you or I or Löb has any way of telling if something is a "Löbian machine" or not.  Which means the "Löbian machine" idea can not help anyone understand anything.

 

> You loss me here.

Which word didn't you understand? The only one I don't is "Löbian machine"

 

 >> Turing explained in complete detail exactly how to build one of his machines, but neither you or anybody else has ever provided a hint as to how to make one of these things, you don't even tell us how we can recognize a Löbian machine if we see one as you don't say what the machine looks like or what it can do or but only what it "knows". In contrast Turing told us that not all machines are Turing Machines and taught us how to tell the difference. So it's not surprising that, at least according to Google, nobody but you believes the  Löbian machine concept to be useful and uses it.

> No. It is a key chapter in mathematical logic,

How odd that both Google and Bing know nothing about a key chapter in mathematical logic!
 

> Of course if you know how to build a Turing machine from Turing’s theory,

And I do.  

> you can build a Löbian machine with the same ease. 

But I don't know how to construct a working Löbian machine and I don't even know how I'd recognize it if I saw one. I'd ask you to tell me how to construct such a device or at least tell me how I can differentiate between a Löbian machine and a non-Löbian machine but I know there is not a snowball's chance in hell of you ever doing that. Instead you'll just type out some ASCII characters and claim that is a machine.

 

> I use the purely mathematical notion of machine, like Turing an all computer scientist.

NO!! Turing told us EXACTLY how to make a real machine, and the fact that it gave birth to a multi trillion dollar industry is proof he was on to something. When I see a multi trillion dollar (or even a multi hundred dollar) Löbian machine industry I'll know you were right. I'm not holding my breath.

 

> That is not Aristotle theology.

Bruno, I don't give a rats ass what is or what is not Aristotle theology.

>> Nobody in the history of the world as been able to calculate 2+2 without using matter that obeys the laws of physics and I further claim that even matter can't make a calculation unless it is organized in the ways Turing described and a mathematical textbook, even a very good one, is not one of those ways, that's why nobody replaces circuit boards with textbooks in their computers.

> A test book is not a program. 

And no program in the history of the world has ever calculated 2+2 without the help of a computer made of matter that obeys the laws of physics. Yes hardware needs software but software needs hardware just as much. 

> What on earth are you talking about?! The atoms that made up you last year have been replaced with new atoms and yet you are still conscious (or at least I am) therefore there is no need to take every atom into account.

> Assuming mechanism,

Therefore if you don't assume mechanism then you Bruno Marchal are not conscious. Therefore you Bruno Marchal had better assume mechanism

 > but the point is that we cannot prove it.

So tell me, do you think It's a little silly to keep making the same point to somebody if they have already agreed with it over and over and over and over again? 

> Not that I want defend communism, but I will still be open to the idea, if it is not imposed by force.

Communism says the state can take all my stuff so it can be equally distributed (although some people are more equal than others), but if I disagree with that idea and don't want anybody to take my stuff then the state must use force, and history has certainly shown they are not shy about doing exactly that. In the 20th century communism was tried in many countries and every single time it has lead to disaster. Of the 4 greatest monsters of the 20th century 3 of them, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, were communists.

> if my mind operate at the level of gluons, (which I agree is newly plausible), 

I would say that is astronomically implausible!  

 > it might be that the replacement is made following the instructions present in my gluons, and replacing them without going through the usual natural process would not work. 

You can't replace atoms without replacing gluons and your last year atoms have been replaced. 

> You are the one who insist to use God in the christian sense.

OK, so in the language of Brunospeak the following statement is true "Christians think God does not exist". And in Clarkspeak (which is just like English except it reverses the meaning of the words "yes" and "no") if I asked "do you agree 100% with every word I've ever written" you would answer "yes".

 

> It looks like brunospeak (and ad hominem term, BTW) 

You never named your new made up language and I'm sorry if you don't like "Brunospeak" but I've got to call it something and I certainly can't call it English with so many radical new definitions of very important words. I didn't know what else to call it, if you have another name for your new language I'll use it, although I won't bother to learn the language itself because a language known to only one man is not of much use.  

If you don't like Brunospeak I have a suggestion, how about Newspeak?

> you admit never having read Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry, Damascius, 

Because I have better things to do with my time than to read the ramblings of people who didn't know where the sun went at night. Apparently you don't have anything better to do. 

>> Being frozen might or might not work but it will certainly not make anybody deader, so I don't see how it could have a moral dimension at all.

> If it does not work, and impose it to somebody, you are killing that somebody. The moral dimension is related to “thou shall not kill”.

Instead of freezing a cadaver would it be more moral to put it in the ground and let it be eaten by worms or burn it up in a furnace?  

>> Without matter that obeys the laws of physics you can't perform ANY operation on words, simple or otherwise.

 

> That is your religion, again and again.

In Brunospeak (or Newspeak) perhaps it is, you're the expert on that not me.

> It is my definition of atheist: the believer in Matter.  

And that is a good illustration of why I had to invent the word "Brunospeak".

> I guess I'm more religious than you, at least in Brunospeak. 

> Of course you are more religious. You believe in in grey amorphous Blob of indeminate size.

And that is yet another example of why I had to invent the word "Brunospeak".

John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

On 10 Jul 2019, at 15:28, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 8, 2019 at 7:22 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> You're atoms are different from what they were a year ago, if you have survived that brain transplant operation with your consciousness intact (and only you know if it has)

 

> OK. That is my point.

No, I wish it were but that is not your point, if it were you wouldn't have made the following silly remark.

Which remark? Please quote with respect to what you try to convey. Avoid term like “silly”.

> No, saying that you survive a digital substitution at some level, is the hypothesis/axiom of Mechanism, like saying that 0 is different from s(x) for any x is an hypothesis/axiom of elementary arithmetic.

For god's sake! You don't need mathematical notation to figure out if you are conscious or not or to figure out that if you've already survived one brain transplant, and you have, then there is no reason to think you won't survive another one. 

You are not at the right level. When we do a theory, we put as axioms everything that we cannot derive from less axiom.

In the theory RA (Robinson arithmetic): we use explicitly an axiomatisation of propositional logic, like the axiom of Hilbert Ackermann:

A -> (B -> A)

Etc.

+ the axioms for the quantisers.

We give the rule of reasoning, like the modus ponens {A, A -> B} / B, and the “necessitation” rule for the for all quantifier (x) ( {A(x) / (x)A(x)

And then the so called non logical axioms, using the first formal symbols F_0, F_1, R_1, etc., except we use the usual symbols to ease the intended interpretation (in arithmetic that is easy, because we have a clear informal undersatidng of the natural numbers), the symbols 0, s, +, *.

Here they are:

1) 0 ≠ s(x)

2) x ≠ y -> s(x) ≠ s(y)

3) x ≠ 0 -> Ey(x = s(y)) 

4) x+0 = x

5) x+s(y) = s(x+y)

6) x*0=0

7) x*s(y)=(x*y)+x

Similarly, to make the digital mechanist hypothesis as precise as possible, we proceed in a similar way, eventually mechanism will correspond to a retraction of truth to the partial computable truth (the sigma_1-truth, or the universal dovetailing).

We need to be precise to understand well what the Lôbian universal machine will say about all this.

Keep in mind that the ontology for mechanism will be shown to be given by the axiom above, without adding anything.

An observer will be defined by the same axioms + the induction axioms. They are richer entities than the ontology, but RA can prove their existence, and can imitate them (but of course RA cannot prove if they are right or wrong, and that play a key role in the sequel).

 

> It is conceivable that the copy of me acts exactly like me, but that we die in the transplant process.

It is conceivable

That’s the point.

but the only one that knows if that happened during your last brain transplant, the one that replaced the atoms you had last year with new ones, is you. If it didn't happen then there is no reason to think it will happen in your next brain transplant.

> Plato was just the guy having a scientific attitude (doubt, skepticism) toward the popular and religious/metaphysical belief that there is a physical universe (in its primary or irreductible sense made precise later by Aristotle who came back to that idea).

 

Neither Plato or Aristotle ever performed a single exparament in their life.

Plato gives rise to Plotinus, who gives right to Hypatia who made extraordinary experience in astronomy and optics.

Yes, science was theoretical at the start, but Aristotle made the first systematic observation on plants and animals, he created logic, biology, and provided the motivation (and alas the bad ontology, if mechanism is correct) for physics.

Many of their ideas, like heavy objects fall more quickly than light ones or that men have more teeth than woman could have been disproved with a simple exparament that would have taken less than 2 minutes to perform, but they never bothered. They thought they could figure out how the world worked just by sitting and thinking. That is the very opposite of the scientific attitude.

I prefer to keep my mind where they convinced me more than the current materialists. I take the good in people, and does not mention what I find not OK, or where my understanding is less advanced.

Being shown mistaken is an honour in science, but we are not programmed to appreciate too much, I am pretty sure Plato did not have any problem with that, as he shows wise people discussing calmly, and never using insult or such kind of non-argument, BTW.

>> I already know how the word "faith" is defined in the English Language and it's not worth my time to learn the definition in Brunospeak as you are the only one that uses that language.

> In science, we redefined all terms used in the mundane language.

But you are not Mr. Science and you are not Mr. English so you can't expect to unilaterally change the meaning of important words and still effectively communicate.   

In science we let anyone redefine any term in any theory. No scientist would dare to criticise a use of a term, because that would betray is non scientific attitude. 

How could a theory of *everything* not be a theology, given that it will have to say that if there is 0 gods, or 1 god, or two gods, or 3 gods, or … aleph_0 gods, or …., or to say “open problem”.

But don’t attribute me this attitude, it *is* the attitude of modesty: in metaphysics, you have to be able to doubt all ontological commitment, and in particular to doubt the existence of irreducibly physical attribute. You can define god by what remains in case the physical universe appears to be an illusion, even if a persistent one (to quote Einstein).

>>>  [blah blah] that is in accordance with classical greek theology.

>> Then it is almost certainly wrong.

> On this matter, you can’t have both Plato and Aristotle wrong,

That is incorrect. It's easy for 2 people who hold incompatible views to both be wrong if both are ignoramuses, and compared to a bright modern fourth grader they both are. 

In metaphysics:

Aristotle = what I see is what exist

Plato = I am not sure of that, what I see might be the shadows of something else, maybe the ideas, maybe the numbers.

In modern term:

Aristotle = assume weak materialism or physicalism

Plato = do not assume weak materialism or physicalism

That is the big choice in the rational conception of a possible reality. God = Matter, or God ≠ Matter.

>> So we agree that I can't prove it and it would in no way effect my decision to say yes to the doctor or yes to being frozen even if I could. So what are we arguing about?

> Good question. Once you agree that we cannot prove Mechanism, we agree. That was the point where you seemed to disagree.

I've said 99 times that nobody can prove they're conscious and nobody ever will, and I've said 99 time that nobody needs to prove it to say yes to the doctor, which is what you call Mechanism. 

Caution. There is a difference between “I cannot prove I am conscious” and  “I cannot prove mechanism”.

I cannot prove that I am conscious, but I can know that I am conscious.

I cannot prove mechanism, but I cannot know that it is true, before doing the experience, and I cannot prove mechanism, even after the experience.

It is a theological axioms, in the sense that it is a belief in a form of reincarnation. It requires some leap of faith, both for its truth, but also for the choice of the substitution level, and of course for the competence of the doctor.

>> I define "magic carpet" as a rug that can fly. Like you I give no hint as to how to build such a thing but unlike you and your "Löbian machine" at least from my description you can recognize a magic carpet for what it is if you happen to see one. But neither you or I or Löb has any way of telling if something is a "Löbian machine" or not.  Which means the "Löbian machine" idea can not help anyone understand anything.

 

> You loss me here.

Which word didn't you understand? The only one I don't is "Löbian machine”

?

I have given the definition recently. A Lôbian machine is a universal machine believing (asserting) the theorem of RA, and the induction axioms. Its provability logic is the one given by the modal logic G and G*. They are called Löbian, because the main axiom of G is the formula of Löb: []([]p->p)->[]p. 

Typical exemple are diverse version of Peano arithmetic, and all its consistent extensions, or theories in which we can build interpretation of Peano axioms, like ZF.  

 

 >> Turing explained in complete detail exactly how to build one of his machines, but neither you or anybody else has ever provided a hint as to how to make one of these things, you don't even tell us how we can recognize a Löbian machine if we see one as you don't say what the machine looks like or what it can do or but only what it "knows". In contrast Turing told us that not all machines are Turing Machines and taught us how to tell the difference. So it's not surprising that, at least according to Google, nobody but you believes the  Löbian machine concept to be useful and uses it.

> No. It is a key chapter in mathematical logic,

How odd that both Google and Bing know nothing about a key chapter in mathematical logic!

That is an argument per authority. 

 

> Of course if you know how to build a Turing machine from Turing’s theory,

And I do.  

> you can build a Löbian machine with the same ease. 

But I don't know how to construct a working Löbian machine

Build a Turing machine (the set of quadruplets) emulating a theorem prover of PA, or ZF.

Any digital machine capable of proving elementary theorem on its own functioning, and disposing on some induction axiom is a Löbian machine.

If you can build a Turing machine, you can build a Löbian machine, because it is just a particular case of Turing machine, or pattern of the Game of Life, or a fortran program.

and I don't even know how I'd recognize it if I saw one.

Nobody can do that, except for some very particular one, like PA, ZF, ...

I'd ask you to tell me how to construct such a device or at least tell me how I can differentiate between a Löbian machine and a non-Löbian machine

Like all programs or digital machine, we can construct some having some attribute,like Löbianity, but there is no no algorithm to differentiate them systematically. It is like the insolubility of the word problem in group theory.

but I know there is not a snowball's chance in hell of you ever doing that. Instead you'll just type out some ASCII characters and claim that is a machine.

On the contrary, I will give you some ASCII, but like for the numbers, I will insist you understand that they are not symbols, but mathematical object obeying some laws, etc.

 

> I use the purely mathematical notion of machine, like Turing an all computer scientist.

NO!! Turing told us EXACTLY how to make a real machine,

I am talking about Turing paper in computability theory. Not Turing’s building a “real machine” to win the war against the Germans.

Yes, for pedagogical reason, the Turing formalism looks more like a human (BTW), which was the goal. But even Turing will use the von Neuman model of computation to implement his “Turing machine” (which are mathematical object, indeed it is Turing who will prove them equivalent to lambda calculus, etc.

and the fact that it gave birth to a multi trillion dollar industry is proof he was on to something. When I see a multi trillion dollar (or even a multi hundred dollar) Löbian machine industry I'll know you were right. I'm not holding my breath.

Some AI are already Löbian, and Boyer and Moore have programmed one explicitly. All self-referentially correct machine believing in enough of arithmetic is Löbian.

You make dismissive and negative remarks which have no relevance with the discovery I try to share.

 

> That is not Aristotle theology.

Bruno, I don't give a rats ass what is or what is not Aristotle theology.

But Aristotle Theology seems to be your theology. It is the doctrine asserting that there is a physical universe irreducible to numbers (contra Pythagorus, or ideas contra Plato). 

Aristotle theology is what I called also “weak materialism”: the belief in Matter (with a big M).

>> Nobody in the history of the world as been able to calculate 2+2 without using matter that obeys the laws of physics and I further claim that even matter can't make a calculation unless it is organized in the ways Turing described and a mathematical textbook, even a very good one, is not one of those ways, that's why nobody replaces circuit boards with textbooks in their computers.

> A test book is not a program. 

And no program in the history of the world has ever calculated 2+2 without the help of a computer

A computer is a universal number. That is what Truing has discovered. 

A Turing machine is a set of quadruplets, and a universal Turing machine is a special set of quadruplet such that if you put n and m on the machine’s “tape”, she will compute phi_n(m), where phi_i is the enumeration of the partial functions computed by the Turing machines.

Yes, in appearance, there is a Turing universal reality, and a physical computer is an implementation of a universal number through some subset of the physical laws. But to understand the sequel, you need to understand that a computer is not the same as a physical computer. A computer, or universal Turing machine, is a special set of quadruplets, codable in numbers.

made of matter that obeys the laws of physics. Yes hardware needs software but software needs hardware just as much. 

You come back with your assumption that some hardware would be more real than other, but then you have to tell me what it is, and how it interfere with the computations in arithmetic.

All you need is a universal machinery, but a tiny segment of the arithmetical reality has been proved to be enough, and Gödel did already 99,9% of the proof of this in 1931.

> What on earth are you talking about?! The atoms that made up you last year have been replaced with new atoms and yet you are still conscious (or at least I am) therefore there is no need to take every atom into account.

> Assuming mechanism,

Therefore if you don't assume mechanism then you Bruno Marchal are not conscious.

That does not follow.

Therefore you Bruno Marchal had better assume mechanism

It is my working hypothesis. But I grant consciousness to non-mechanist people. Indeed, arithmetic contains an infinity of subject believing that mechanism is false.

 > but the point is that we cannot prove it.

So tell me, do you think It's a little silly to keep making the same point to somebody if they have already agreed with it over and over and over and over again? 

> Not that I want defend communism, but I will still be open to the idea, if it is not imposed by force.

Communism says the state can take all my stuff so it can be equally distributed (although some people are more equal than others), but if I disagree with that idea and don't want anybody to take my stuff then the state must use force, and history has certainly shown they are not shy about doing exactly that. In the 20th century communism was tried in many countries and every single time it has lead to disaster. Of the 4 greatest monsters of the 20th century 3 of them, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, were communists.

But in the European countries we have socialist and communist party, and up to now, they have respected the democracy and the rule of laws. The problem is not communism, or western-liberalism, the problems are bandits and dictators, or con man exploiting fears, etc.

> if my mind operate at the level of gluons, (which I agree is newly plausible), 

I would say that is astronomically implausible!  

I agree, but when doing science, that has to be taken into account, like in quantum computation theory we need to take into account the difference between probability one, and probability one minus epsilon, etc.

 > it might be that the replacement is made following the instructions present in my gluons, and replacing them without going through the usual natural process would not work. 

You can't replace atoms without replacing gluons and your last year atoms have been replaced. 

Yes, but my friend who got gluons form chicken want to fly … (grin).

> You are the one who insist to use God in the christian sense.

OK, so in the language of Brunospeak the following statement is true "Christians think God does not exist". And in Clarkspeak (which is just like English except it reverses the meaning of the words "yes" and "no") if I asked "do you agree 100% with every word I've ever written" you would answer "yes”.

You just show your ignorance. You fight with all your force to maintain the statu quo for the Church. You belong to the soldier who protect the confessional authoritarian theologian against the bastard greek pagan philosophers who rise the doubt in the mind of the student. You are the best guardian of the Church most important dogma: Matter.

Mechanism, well understood, is more atheist than you: no Creator, no Creation, just a universal dreamer lost and multiplied in the arithmetical reality.

 

> It looks like brunospeak (and ad hominem term, BTW) 

You never named your new made up language and I'm sorry if you don't like "Brunospeak" but I've got to call it something and I certainly can't call it English with so many radical new definitions of very important words.

But you confess never have read any neoplatonicians (a quite vast literature), so are you sure that you are not just radicalising yourself with respect of anyone who know at the least that pagan theology has existed long before christianism?

You make me an honnor that I do not deserve. It is not Brunospeak, it is Platospeak. Plato & Many Co.

Eventually, it the PAs in RA, also.

I didn't know what else to call it, if you have another name for your new language I'll use it,

Try PlotinusSpeak.

although I won't bother to learn the language itself because a language known to only one man is not of much use.  

It is used by all metaphysicians capable of doubting the Christian Dogma (which came after 529) or the Muslim dogma (which can after 1248).

If you don't like Brunospeak I have a suggestion, how about Newspeak?

> you admit never having read Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry, Damascius, 

Because I have better things to do with my time than to read the ramblings of people who didn't know where the sun went at night. Apparently you don't have anything better to do. 

From A is wrong on this, you deduce that A is wrong of that. 

Not valid.

>> Being frozen might or might not work but it will certainly not make anybody deader, so I don't see how it could have a moral dimension at all.

> If it does not work, and impose it to somebody, you are killing that somebody. The moral dimension is related to “thou shall not kill”.

Instead of freezing a cadaver would it be more moral to put it in the ground and let it be eaten by worms or burn it up in a furnace?  

The pioneer of immortality will go to hell.

Why? Because they will give their Gödel number to everybody (an infinity of humans, notably)/

Why? Because they are born before the absolute quantum encryption encoding, discover in 4000, which guaranties no one can copy you. That will make the humans in between 2000 and 4000 the prey of all sadists in the multiverse …

Maybe. Just a reason to be better burn the cadaver, instead of taking the risk to give your code to unknown people.

>> Without matter that obeys the laws of physics you can't perform ANY operation on words, simple or otherwise.

 

> That is your religion, again and again.

In Brunospeak (or Newspeak) perhaps it is, you're the expert on that not me.

Yes, you invoke your ontological commitment all the time. 

Bruno

> It is my definition of atheist: the believer in Matter.  

And that is a good illustration of why I had to invent the word "Brunospeak".

> I guess I'm more religious than you, at least in Brunospeak. 

> Of course you are more religious. You believe in in grey amorphous Blob of indeminate size.

And that is yet another example of why I had to invent the word "Brunospeak".

John K Clark

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 1:29 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>>>> You're atoms are different from what they were a year ago, if you have survived that brain transplant operation with your consciousness intact (and only you know if it has)

 

> >>OK. That is my point.

>> No, I wish it were but that is not your point, if it were you wouldn't have made the following silly remark.

> Which remark?

Saying Mechanism is probably untrue and then "saying that you survive a digital substitution at some level, is the hypothesis/axiom of Mechanism".

 

> Avoid term like “silly”.

I promise to avoid the word "silly" if you promise to avoid being silly.

>> For god's sake! You don't need mathematical notation to figure out if you are conscious or not or to figure out that if you've already survived one brain transplant, and you have, then there is no reason to think you won't survive another one. 

> You are not at the right level. When we do a theory [...]

The fact that I am conscious is not a theory. The fact that you are conscious is a theory, a theory that will never be proven.

> the theory RA (Robinson arithmetic) [...]

 

.... has nothing to do with what we were discussing.

> Being shown mistaken is an honour in science,

Not always, not if you can be shown to be wrong with trivial ease, and certainly not if you don't change your mind when shown to be wrong. The pious refused to change their view that everything went around the Earth even when they looked at Jupiter's moons through Galileo's telescope, and I very much doubt Plato or Aristotle would have changed their view that heavy objects fell faster than light ones even if somebody demonstrated before their very eyes that they don't. And likewise you are not one bit impressed by the fact that every atom in your brain has already been substituted by another atom and yet you've survived. That is exactly what you call Mechanism but continue to insist Mechanism is a very dodgy idea.

And that Bruno is why I am unable to do as you request and avoid the word "silly".

>> you are not Mr. Science and you are not Mr. English so you can't expect to unilaterally change the meaning of important words and still effectively communicate.   

 

> In science we let anyone redefine any term in any theory.

And here we have yet another example of why I am unable to avoid the use of the word "silly". I John K Clark hereby decree that "God" is now defined to mean "physics is the ultimate reality". Thus I can say with absolute certainty that in the language of Clarkspeak Bruno Marchal is an atheist because he does not believe in God. I can also say that John K Clark is being very very silly.

 > You can define god by what remains in case the physical universe appears to be an illusion, even if a persistent one (to quote Einstein).

The Einstein quote that you've just mangled so horribly comes from a personal letter not a scientific paper and has nothing to do with God, the correct Einstein quote is:

 "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

> I cannot prove that I am conscious, but I can know that I am conscious.

Yes

> I cannot prove mechanism, even after the experience.

True.

 

> It is a theological axioms [...]

I don't know what "it" is and please don't bother to tell me because whatever "it" may be I can safely ignore "it" because i have better things to do with my time then study the creation myths of bronze age tribes.

>> I define "magic carpet" as a rug that can fly. Like you I give no hint as to how to build such a thing but unlike you and your "Löbian machine" at least from my description you can recognize a magic carpet for what it is if you happen to see one. But neither you or I or Löb has any way of telling if something is a "Löbian machine" or not.  Which means the "Löbian machine" idea can not help anyone understand anything.

 

> You loss me here.

>>Which word didn't you understand? The only one I don't is "Löbian machine”

> ?

! 

> I have given the definition recently.

And I have given a definition of a flying carpet recently. I have not told you how to build a flying carpet and you have not told me how to build a "Löbian machine". That's why I didn't call it a "Flying Carpet Machine". However I DID at least tell you how to recognize a flying carpet if you happen to see one, but you are unable to tell me how to recognize a "Löbian machine" even if I stumble over one. Therefore by calling it a "machine" you have grossly misrepresented what you are actually able to do.

> A Lôbian machine is a universal machine believing [...]

How do I build a machine that believes in something and how can I determine that I've built it correctly? 

>(asserting) the theorem of RA, and the induction axioms. Its provability logic is the one given by the modal logic G and G*. They are called Löbian, because the main axiom of G is the formula of Löb: []([]p->p)->[]p. 

" []([]p->p)->[]p"  is NOT a machine, it is not even close to being a machine, it is just a sequence of ASCII characters that you typed out.

 >>> Turing explained in complete detail exactly how to build one of his machines, but neither you or anybody else has ever provided a hint as to how to make one of these things, you don't even tell us how we can recognize a Löbian machine if we see one as you don't say what the machine looks like or what it can do or but only what it "knows". In contrast Turing told us that not all machines are Turing Machines and taught us how to tell the difference. So it's not surprising that, at least according to Google, nobody but you believes the  Löbian machine concept to be useful and uses it.

>> No. It is a key chapter in mathematical logic,

>How odd that both Google and Bing know nothing about a key chapter in mathematical logic!

> That is an argument per authority. 

Yes but you almost make that sound like all arguments from authority are bad. When I read of an experiment in Nature or Science I know they were probably performed competently and are correct even if I have not personally repeated the experiment because I trust the judgement of the editors of those journals, and I trust their judgement because of induction, they were usually right in the past so they will probably be right in the future. And if nobody in the field of mathematics or computer science finds the "Löbian machine" idea to be useful and Google and Bing tells me nobody has, then it probably isn't. 

  

>> I don't know how to construct a working Löbian machine

> Build a Turing machine

Which one? There are lots and lots of different Turing Machines. 

> emulating a theorem prover of PA, or ZF.  Any digital machine capable of proving elementary theorem on its own functioning, and disposing on some induction axiom is a Löbian machine.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Computers (aka Turing Machines) have been able to prove theorems since the 1950s,  but no system can prove itself to be consistent, and if it is consistent (even if it can't prove it) then it is incomplete. And I don't understand "disposing on some induction axiom".

> If you can build a Turing machine, you can build a Löbian machine,

No I can't build a Löbian machine because I don't have a clue as to how to program my Turing Machine and neither do you. You can't even tell me how many states a 2 symbol Turing Machine would be needed to become a Löbian machine much less specify the particular Turing Machine that would work. Nor did you tell me how I can tell the difference between a Löbian machine that works and a Löbian machine that doesn't work. So how can I debug the program?

 

>> and I don't even know how I'd recognize it if I saw one.

> Nobody can do that,

I know, that's why your Löbian machine idea is of absolutely no use to anybody for anything except generating hot air.

>> but I know there is not a snowball's chance in hell of you ever doing that. Instead you'll just type out some ASCII characters and claim that is a machine.

> On the contrary, I will give you some ASCII, but like for the numbers, I will insist you understand that they are not symbols, but mathematical object 

Those "mathematical objects" have no effect whatsoever on the physical world, that's why INTEL couldn't make computers out of them and had to use atoms made silicon that obey the laws of physics instead. And that means physics can clearly do something that "mathematical objects" can NOT do.

> >>I use the purely mathematical notion of machine, like Turing an all computer scientist.

>> NO!! Turing told us EXACTLY how to make a real machine,

> I am talking about Turing paper in computability theory. Not Turing’s building a “real machine” to win the war against the Germans.

I am talking about a paper tape made of atoms and a read/write head with just 2 symbols that may or may not eventually stop depending on the sequence of symbols on the paper tape.

> Yes, for pedagogical reason, the Turing formalism looks more like a human (BTW), which was the goal. But even Turing will use the von Neuman model of computation to implement his “Turing machine” 

It's the same principle but for practical reasons Turing used vacuum tubes  rather than a paper tape, it's faster. Mechanical calculator or modern iPhone, at the most fundamental level all computers can always be reduced down to a Turing machine.

 

>indeed it is Turing who will prove them equivalent to lambda calculus

Godel always maintained that Turing's accomplishment was greater than that of Alonzo Church for the very reason's I've been talking about. Church's idea was purely mathematical and Turing's idea could also be thought about in an abstract way, but unlike Church Turing's concept could be implemented physically too. You can't do any lambda Calculus unless you've already got a working Turing Machine to do it on.

> Aristotle Theology seems to be your theology.

That statement is not true in English but it is true in Brunospeak at least for today. I think. However that language mutates so swiftly that it may or may not be true tomorrow.

> Aristotle theology is what I called [...]

Sorry, I just can't keep up with the changing meaning of "Aristotle theology".

> You come back with your assumption that some hardware would be more real than other, but then you have to tell me what it is,

If I emulate Windows on my iMac and the emulator dies my iMac is still fine, if the operating system of my iMac dies the microprocessor chip in my computer is still fine. 

> and how it interfere with the computations in arithmetic.

It's called "Physics".

>> Communism says the state can take all my stuff so it can be equally distributed (although some people are more equal than others), but if I disagree with that idea and don't want anybody to take my stuff then the state must use force, and history has certainly shown they are not shy about doing exactly that. In the 20th century communism was tried in many countries and every single time it has lead to disaster. Of the 4 greatest monsters of the 20th century 3 of them, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, were communists.

> But in the European countries we have socialist and communist party, and up to now, they have respected the democracy and the rule of laws.

The communist party in Europe respects the rule of law today because they have no choice, they are no longer in power; they sure didn't respect it when they were.

>>> if my mind operate at the level of gluons, (which I agree is newly plausible), 

>> I would say that is astronomically implausible!  

> I agree, but when doing science, that has to be taken into account,

No! A scientist can NOT investigate every astronomically implausible thing, if he did he'd never get anywhere.

>> OK, so in the language of Brunospeak the following statement is true "Christians think God does not exist". And in Clarkspeak (which is just like English except it reverses the meaning of the words "yes" and "no") if I asked "do you agree 100% with every word I've ever written" you would answer "yes”.

> You fight with all your force to maintain the statu quo for the Church. You belong to the soldier who protect the confessional authoritarian theologian against the bastard greek pagan philosophers 

My Brunospeak is very poor and you're the world expert so I'll just take your word that in Brunospeak the above statement is true.

>> Instead of freezing a cadaver would it be more moral to put it in the ground and let it be eaten by worms or burn it up in a furnace?  

 

> The pioneer of immortality will go to hell. Why? Because they will give their Gödel number to everybody (an infinity of humans, notably)/ Why? Because they are born before the absolute quantum encryption encoding, discover in 4000, which guaranties no one can copy you.

Your Gödel number is very large but is no closer to being infinite than the number 2 is, so somebody can just try them all and put all of them in hell with me,  and then we can argue about this forever. Or maybe they already have and we are there right now. 

By the way, your Godel number is DIGITAL. 

John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

On 13 Jul 2019, at 20:42, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 1:29 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>>>> You're atoms are different from what they were a year ago, if you have survived that brain transplant operation with your consciousness intact (and only you know if it has)

 

> >>OK. That is my point.

>> No, I wish it were but that is not your point, if it were you wouldn't have made the following silly remark.

> Which remark?

Saying Mechanism is probably untrue

Where did I say that. You lost me.

and then "saying that you survive a digital substitution at some level, is the hypothesis/axiom of Mechanism".

>> For god's sake! You don't need mathematical notation to figure out if you are conscious or not or to figure out that if you've already survived one brain transplant, and you have, then there is no reason to think you won't survive another one. 

> You are not at the right level. When we do a theory [...]

The fact that I am conscious is not a theory.

Right. It is a first person experience. 

The fact that you are conscious is a theory, a theory that will never be proven.

Right. 

> the theory RA (Robinson arithmetic) [...]

 

.... has nothing to do with what we were discussing.

> Being shown mistaken is an honour in science,

Not always, not if you can be shown to be wrong with trivial ease, and certainly not if you don't change your mind when shown to be wrong. The pious refused to change their view that everything went around the Earth even when they looked at Jupiter's moons through Galileo's telescope, and I very much doubt Plato or Aristotle would have changed their view that heavy objects fell faster than light ones even if somebody demonstrated before their very eyes that they don't. And likewise you are not one bit impressed by the fact that every atom in your brain has already been substituted by another atom and yet you've survived. That is exactly what you call Mechanism but continue to insist Mechanism is a very dodgy idea.

I never said that Mechanism is a dodgy idea. I explains that it is incompatible with (weak) materialism (the belief matter has a irreducible ontology) and that the test (notably quantum mechanics) confirms Mechanism, and refute (weak) materialism.

And that Bruno is why I am unable to do as you request and avoid the word "silly".

>> you are not Mr. Science and you are not Mr. English so you can't expect to unilaterally change the meaning of important words and still effectively communicate.   

 

> In science we let anyone redefine any term in any theory.

And here we have yet another example of why I am unable to avoid the use of the word "silly". I John K Clark hereby decree that "God" is now defined to mean "physics is the ultimate reality". Thus I can say with absolute certainty that in the language of Clarkspeak Bruno Marchal is an atheist because he does not believe in God. I can also say that John K Clark is being very very silly.

 > You can define god by what remains in case the physical universe appears to be an illusion, even if a persistent one (to quote Einstein).

The Einstein quote that you've just mangled so horribly comes from a personal letter not a scientific paper and has nothing to do with God, the correct Einstein quote is:

 "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

That is another quote. My quote is from a letter to Besso’s wife after his death. The two citations are correct.

> I cannot prove that I am conscious, but I can know that I am conscious.

Yes

> I cannot prove mechanism, even after the experience.

True.

So we agree.

 

> It is a theological axioms [...]

I don't know what "it" is and please don't bother to tell me because whatever "it" may be I can safely ignore "it" because i have better things to do with my time then study the creation myths of bronze age tribes.

Theology is used in the greek Indian sense. It is by definition the fundamental science. It is useful to do this to make clear we are open to change our mind on the fundamental ontology.

People saying that they have no religion, or that theology is a nonsense are usually those who are not aware that in science all beliefs are made into hypothesis, with the attempt to get clear means of evaluations.

>> I define "magic carpet" as a rug that can fly. Like you I give no hint as to how to build such a thing but unlike you and your "Löbian machine" at least from my description you can recognize a magic carpet for what it is if you happen to see one. But neither you or I or Löb has any way of telling if something is a "Löbian machine" or not.  Which means the "Löbian machine" idea can not help anyone understand anything.

 

> You loss me here.

>>Which word didn't you understand? The only one I don't is "Löbian machine”

> ?

! 

> I have given the definition recently.

And I have given a definition of a flying carpet recently. I have not told you how to build a flying carpet and you have not told me how to build a "Löbian machine". That's why I didn't call it a "Flying Carpet Machine". However I DID at least tell you how to recognize a flying carpet if you happen to see one, but you are unable to tell me how to recognize a "Löbian machine" even if I stumble over one.

Give me a mean to recognise a program computing the factorial function.

Therefore by calling it a "machine" you have grossly misrepresented what you are actually able to do.

Please reread the definition of machine, programs, words, etc.

> A Lôbian machine is a universal machine believing [...]

How do I build a machine that believes in something and how can I determine that I've built it correctly? 

>(asserting) the theorem of RA, and the induction axioms. Its provability logic is the one given by the modal logic G and G*. They are called Löbian, because the main axiom of G is the formula of Löb: []([]p->p)->[]p. 

" []([]p->p)->[]p"  is NOT a machine, it is not even close to being a machine, it is just a sequence of ASCII characters that you typed out.

 >>> Turing explained in complete detail exactly how to build one of his machines, but neither you or anybody else has ever provided a hint as to how to make one of these things, you don't even tell us how we can recognize a Löbian machine if we see one as you don't say what the machine looks like or what it can do or but only what it "knows". In contrast Turing told us that not all machines are Turing Machines and taught us how to tell the difference. So it's not surprising that, at least according to Google, nobody but you believes the  Löbian machine concept to be useful and uses it.

>> No. It is a key chapter in mathematical logic,

>How odd that both Google and Bing know nothing about a key chapter in mathematical logic!

> That is an argument per authority. 

Yes but you almost make that sound like all arguments from authority are bad. When I read of an experiment in Nature or Science I know they were probably performed competently and are correct even if I have not personally repeated the experiment because I trust the judgement of the editors of those journals, and I trust their judgement because of induction, they were usually right in the past so they will probably be right in the future. And if nobody in the field of mathematics or computer science finds the "Löbian machine" idea to be useful and Google and Bing tells me nobody has, then it probably isn't. 

  

>> I don't know how to construct a working Löbian machine

> Build a Turing machine

Which one? There are lots and lots of different Turing Machines. 

Any one proving the same theorems as PA, or ZF, etc.

> emulating a theorem prover of PA, or ZF.  Any digital machine capable of proving elementary theorem on its own functioning, and disposing on some induction axiom is a Löbian machine.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Computers (aka Turing Machines) have been able to prove theorems since the 1950s,  but no system can prove itself to be consistent, and if it is consistent (even if it can't prove it) then it is incomplete. And I don't understand "disposing on some induction axiom”.

It means having such induction axioms. Wait for the glossary, but clearly, you are not trying to understand, but to confuse people.

> If you can build a Turing machine, you can build a Löbian machine,

No I can't build a Löbian machine because I don't have a clue as to how to program my Turing Machine and neither do you.

Why do you say that. It is done in all details in some of may papers and in the PhD thesis. And it is easy. You keep criticising the most easy parts which makes no problem except for Sunday philosophers.

You can't even tell me how many states a 2 symbol Turing Machine would be needed to become a Löbian machine

Once you know how to write the programs, (which is very easy in Prolog, just copy the axioms),  you know that a Turing machine will do the task.

much less specify the particular Turing Machine that would work. Nor did you tell me how I can tell the difference between a Löbian machine that works and a Löbian machine that doesn't work. So how can I debug the program?

Have you read “Forevery undecided “ by Raymond Smullyan as I suggested? What I call Löbian machine, or better Löbian number, is what he called there a reflexive reasoner of type 4.

Buy the book by George Boolos on that very subject.

Try to understand, indeed of being negative for no reason that we could see. 

 

>> and I don't even know how I'd recognize it if I saw one.

> Nobody can do that,

I know, that's why your Löbian machine idea is of absolutely no use to anybody for anything except generating hot air.

>> but I know there is not a snowball's chance in hell of you ever doing that. Instead you'll just type out some ASCII characters and claim that is a machine.

> On the contrary, I will give you some ASCII, but like for the numbers, I will insist you understand that they are not symbols, but mathematical object 

Those "mathematical objects" have no effect whatsoever on the physical world,

I don’t assume a physical world, and eventually, I show we can’t assume it.

You cannot invoke your ontological commitment. You do the creationist mistake.

Bruno

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[John Clark]

Bruno Marchal  Wrote:

That's why INTEL couldn't make computers out of them and had to use atoms made silicon that obey the laws of physics instead. And that means physics can clearly do something that "mathematical objects" can NOT do.

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 5:32 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> I never said that Mechanism is a dodgy idea. I explains that it is incompatible with (weak) materialism (the belief matter has a irreducible ontology) and that the test (notably quantum mechanics) confirms Mechanism, and refute (weak) materialism.

All I can get out of the above mishmash is that by "matter" you mean anything that does have a  irreducible ontology, presumably reducible to mathematics. But if that is the case you have been unable to explain why matter can do things that mathematics can't, such as perform calculations that INTEL can make money off of.  

>> The Einstein quote that you've just mangled so horribly comes from a personal letter not a scientific paper and has nothing to do with God, the correct Einstein quote is:

 "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

>That is another quote. My quote is from a letter to Besso’s wife after his death. The two citations are correct.

That famous letter was written to Michele Besso's family and the entire quote is:

 "Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion."

Einstein died one month later. Perhaps you were thinking of a letter Einstein wrote a year before in which he said the Bible was "pretty childish". He also said:

 “If something is in me that can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it.”

If that's what the word means, but of course it isn't, then I'm religious too.

>> I cannot prove that I am conscious, but I can know that I am conscious.

>Yes

> I cannot prove mechanism, even after the experience.

>>True.

> So we agree.

For one nanosecond we agree but it won't last long because we can't even agree on the meaning of very common English words and you insist on inventing a new language that nobody but you has bothered to learn. To make things even worse you don't even bother to invent new words but instead steal words already in use by English that mean entirely different things.

> Theology is used in [...]

Forget it, I have no desire to learn Brunospeak.

> People saying that they have no religion, or that theology is a nonsense

No, they are simply speaking in English not Brunospeak 

>> I have given a definition of a flying carpet recently. I have not told you how to build a flying carpet and you have not told me how to build a "Löbian machine". That's why I didn't call it a "Flying Carpet Machine". However I DID at least tell you how to recognize a flying carpet if you happen to see one, but you are unable to tell me how to recognize a "Löbian machine" even if I stumble over one.

> Give me a mean to recognise a program computing the factorial function.

A good start would be to input 14 and see if the output is 87,178,291,200.

 

> Please reread the definition of machine, programs, words, etc.

As I said, I have known what the definition of those words are in English for many decades and I don't give a hoot in hell what they mean in Brunospeak. 

  

>>>> I don't know how to construct a working Löbian machine

> >>Build a Turing machine

>> Which one? There are lots and lots of different Turing Machines. 

> Any one proving the same theorems as PA, or ZF.etc

There are an infinite number of mathematical statements, since the 1950's we've had Turing Machines that could prove some of them but not all. Does it have to prove the Riemann hypothesis or P=NP? How many internal states does the Turing Machine you're talking about need? By "etc" do you mean the particular axiomatic system used in the proof is not important?

 

> Wait for the glossary,

A glossary would not be needed it you just wrote in a language where words meant what a common dictionary says they mean and that was used by more than one person. 

 

> You can't even tell me how many states a 2 symbol Turing Machine would be needed to become a Löbian machine

> Once you know how to write the programs, (which is very easy in Prolog, just copy the axioms),  you know that a Turing machine will do the task.

Then stop procrastinating and tell me how many states a 2 symbol Turing Machine would need to become a Löbian machine. And now that you've narrowed things down to just an astronomically huge number tell me which one is actually a Löbian machine and how I can tell if it's working properly. 

 

> Have you read “Forevery undecided “ by Raymond Smullyan as I suggested?

I read that decades ago long before I ever heard of you.

>> Those "mathematical objects" have no effect whatsoever on the physical world,

> I don’t assume a physical world,

That's OK, the physical world just continues on making calculations and making money for INTEL regardless of if you assume it or not. And that is something pure mathematics can not do.

 John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

The quote are not correct. The format is hard to manage. I try, but apology if I missed some of your point.

On 14 Jul 2019, at 12:31, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

Bruno Marchal  Wrote:

That's why INTEL couldn't make computers out of them and had to use atoms made silicon that obey the laws of physics instead. And that means physics can clearly do something that "mathematical objects" can NOT do.

What precisely?

With mechanism, physics comes from the first person indeterminacy, which is already not Turing emulable per se (without emulating the multiplication of the observers). 

So, physics, indeed, can clearly do something that mathematics cannot do, but that does not mean that such a something is not explainable by mathematics.

The ambiguous term is “do” here.

> >>I use the purely mathematical notion of machine, like Turing an all computer scientist.

>> NO!! Turing told us EXACTLY how to make a real machine,

> I am talking about Turing paper in computability theory. Not Turing’s building a “real machine” to win the war against the Germans.

I am talking about a paper tape made of atoms and a read/write head with just 2 symbols that may or may not eventually stop depending on the sequence of symbols on the paper tape.

I recall the definition of a Turing machine: it is a set of quadruples. There is no tape needed, except as a pedagogical tool. There is no assumption about atoms, or time, space, etc. Chapter 4 of the Dover book on computability by Martin Davis, makes this mathematically clear in his chapter four, by embedding rigorously the definition and theory of the Turing machine in arithmetic.

> Yes, for pedagogical reason, the Turing formalism looks more like a human (BTW), which was the goal. But even Turing will use the von Neuman model of computation to implement his “Turing machine” 

It's the same principle but for practical reasons Turing used vacuum tubes  rather than a paper tape, it's faster. Mechanical calculator or modern iPhone, at the most fundamental level all computers can always be reduced down to a Turing machine.

>indeed it is Turing who will prove them equivalent to lambda calculus

Godel always maintained that Turing's accomplishment was greater than that of Alonzo Church for the very reason's I've been talking about.

Not at all. Gödel already knew that his own notion of computability was arithmetical. But he thought it was not *universal*? After reading Turing’s paper, he got that his own definition of computable was universal, but then he can be said that Gödel is the first to get the idea that computation and computability are purely arithmetical notion.

Church's idea was purely mathematical and Turing's idea could also be thought about in an abstract way, but unlike Church Turing's concept could be implemented physically too.

But then, automatically you can implement the Church lambda expression too. There is a recursive (computable) isomorphism between all programming language or Turing complete system. The Church’s lambda expressions can emulate any Turing machine, and vice versa. That is how programming language works.

You can't do any lambda Calculus unless you've already got a working Turing Machine to do it on.

You can implement lambda calculus directly into a Suze- von Neumann register machine. The physical computers are such register machine, not Turing machine.

All universal system are equivalents, with respect to computability (not provability, which will distinguish the persons).

> Aristotle Theology seems to be your theology.

That statement is not true in English but it is true in Brunospeak at least for today. I think. However that language mutates so swiftly that it may or may not be true tomorrow.

Do you or not believe in irreducible physical reality?

It seems so when you argue, like above, that a computation is real only if implemented in that “physical reality”.

> Aristotle theology is what I called [...]

Sorry, I just can't keep up with the changing meaning of "Aristotle theology”.

ICome on John. I have use that expression always with the same meaning. It is the belief in the second God, like some called it: the clearly most fundamental belief of Aristotle: a primary material/physical universe. Aristotle is the inventor of that hypothesis, although some could argue that Democritus was close, and some others. But my point is not historical, and even Aristotle begun to doubt it in his “metaphysics”. Yet, Christinaism will erase all doubt, and makes (weak) materialism into a dogma.

> You come back with your assumption that some hardware would be more real than other, but then you have to tell me what it is,

If I emulate Windows on my iMac and the emulator dies my iMac is still fine, if the operating system of my iMac dies the microprocessor chip in my computer is still fine. 

> and how it interfere with the computations in arithmetic.

It's called "Physics".

>> Communism says the state can take all my stuff so it can be equally distributed (although some people are more equal than others), but if I disagree with that idea and don't want anybody to take my stuff then the state must use force, and history has certainly shown they are not shy about doing exactly that. In the 20th century communism was tried in many countries and every single time it has lead to disaster. Of the 4 greatest monsters of the 20th century 3 of them, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, were communists.

> But in the European countries we have socialist and communist party, and up to now, they have respected the democracy and the rule of laws.

The communist party in Europe respects the rule of law today because they have no choice, they are no longer in power; they sure didn't respect it when they were.

No problem with this.

>>> if my mind operate at the level of gluons, (which I agree is newly plausible), 

>> I would say that is astronomically implausible!  

> I agree, but when doing science, that has to be taken into account,

No! A scientist can NOT investigate every astronomically implausible thing, if he did he'd never get anywhere.

The point is not that he has to verify this, just to take into account he has not verify this.

>> OK, so in the language of Brunospeak the following statement is true "Christians think God does not exist". And in Clarkspeak (which is just like English except it reverses the meaning of the words "yes" and "no") if I asked "do you agree 100% with every word I've ever written" you would answer "yes”.

 
> You fight with all your force to maintain the statu quo for the Church. You belong to the soldier who protect the confessional authoritarian theologian against the bastard greek pagan philosophers 

My Brunospeak is very poor and you're the world expert so I'll just take your word that in Brunospeak the above statement is true.

>> Instead of freezing a cadaver would it be more moral to put it in the ground and let it be eaten by worms or burn it up in a furnace?  

 

> The pioneer of immortality will go to hell. Why? Because they will give their Gödel number to everybody (an infinity of humans, notably)/ Why? Because they are born before the absolute quantum encryption encoding, discover in 4000, which guaranties no one can copy you.

Your Gödel number is very large but is no closer to being infinite than the number 2 is, so somebody can just try them all and put all of them in hell with me,  and then we can argue about this forever. Or maybe they already have and we are there right now. 
By the way, your Godel number is DIGITAL. 

Nor with this. Good!

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 14 Jul 2019, at 23:46, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 5:32 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> I never said that Mechanism is a dodgy idea. I explains that it is incompatible with (weak) materialism (the belief matter has a irreducible ontology) and that the test (notably quantum mechanics) confirms Mechanism, and refute (weak) materialism.

All I can get out of the above mishmash is that by "matter" you mean anything that does have a  irreducible ontology, presumably reducible to mathematics.

Mishmash =ad hominem.

But more seriously I can’t make sense of what you say.

It is only the primitive matter which is assumed in (weak) materialism.

It does not exist with Mechanism, and it is only the *appearances* of matter which is reducible to mathematics.

But if that is the case you have been unable to explain why matter can do things that mathematics can't, such as perform calculations that INTEL can make money off of.  

But this is what I explain. “The appearance of matter” is explained by the first person indeterminacy on all computations going through my actual states. This explains matter, (perhaps wrongly, but that remains to be seen or verified) and we got already the explanation why it does much more than number and computations, indeed, it looks like it runs an infinity of computations, something arguably confirmed by the discovery of quantum mechanics.

>> The Einstein quote that you've just mangled so horribly comes from a personal letter not a scientific paper and has nothing to do with God, the correct Einstein quote is:

 "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

>That is another quote. My quote is from a letter to Besso’s wife after his death. The two citations are correct.

That famous letter was written to Michele Besso's family and the entire quote is:

 "Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.”

I stand corrected. It is rather coherent with Einstein’s physicalism. Note at least he was aware that physicalism was a religion. But that is another point. My source was not reliable, and it was the citation corrected above that he wrote to Besso.  Sorry.

Einstein died one month later. Perhaps you were thinking of a letter Einstein wrote a year before in which he said the Bible was "pretty childish”.

Einstein was against dogma, especially religious dogma. But it took Gödel to eventually made Eisntein realising that mathematics was not a language, and could attract people interested in fundamental questioning. Yet, he was always aware that his belief in a physical universe, and his feeling that it was amenable to reason, was a sort of faith. 

He also said:

 “If something is in me that can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it.”

Yes. 

If that's what the word means, but of course it isn't, then I'm religious too.

I have never doubt this. But Einstein was not dogmatic on this. He was religious like a neoplatonist. No dogma, but theories that we can test? Now, Einstein was not interested in consciousness and theology, and unlike Gödel, was not interested in attempting to introduce rigour in theology.

>> I cannot prove that I am conscious, but I can know that I am conscious.

>Yes

> I cannot prove mechanism, even after the experience.

>>True.

> So we agree.

For one nanosecond we agree but it won't last long because we can't even agree on the meaning of very common English words and you insist on inventing a new language that nobody but you has bothered to learn.

The exact contrary. I am an ultra-conservative. I use the language of those who invented science, and never sold any of its branche to political power. We have lost this in 529, where the “doubters”, especially in theology where exiled, banished, killed, etc.

You call it “brunospeak” just because you seem to never have read even one platonician. 

You are more annoyed when we agree that when you disagree, which says something on your (religious?) agenda.

To make things even worse you don't even bother to invent new words but instead steal words already in use by English that mean entirely different things.

That is what I criticise in the insttionalised religion in occident. They took the theories of the greeks, unfortunately the incorrect one (with respect mechanism) and made the fairy tales, the dogma, and the violent radicalism, like the soviet did with biology and matter, actually.

You defend that stealing by the pseudo-religion. You confirm my thesis that atheism is the protector of the christian religious dogma. You forbid the change of their definition, when in science, we change the definition rompers to papers, all the time.

> Give me a mean to recognise a program computing the factorial function.

A good start would be to input 14 and see if the output is 87,178,291,200.

And if after a billions year we still don’t have the output?

And how could you be sure it will be correct on the factorial of 87,178,291,200.

By Rice theorem, the set of number i, such that phi_i(x) = factorial(x) is a non computable set. There is no algorithmic mean to get the semantic of a program from its code.

 

> Please reread the definition of machine, programs, words, etc.

As I said, I have known what the definition of those words are in English for many decades and I don't give a hoot in hell what they mean in Brunospeak. 

In this case, it is not my speak, but the speak of computer science.

  

>>>> I don't know how to construct a working Löbian machine

> >>Build a Turing machine

>> Which one? There are lots and lots of different Turing Machines. 

> Any one proving the same theorems as PA, or ZF.etc

There are an infinite number of mathematical statements, since the 1950's we've had Turing Machines that could prove some of them but not all. Does it have to prove the Riemann hypothesis or P=NP? How many internal states does the Turing Machine you're talking about need? By "etc" do you mean the particular axiomatic system used in the proof is not important?

 

> Wait for the glossary,

A glossary would not be needed it you just wrote in a language where words meant what a common dictionary says they mean and that was used by more than one person. 

 

> You can't even tell me how many states a 2 symbol Turing Machine would be needed to become a Löbian machine

> Once you know how to write the programs, (which is very easy in Prolog, just copy the axioms),  you know that a Turing machine will do the task.

Then stop procrastinating and tell me how many states a 2 symbol Turing Machine would need to become a Löbian machine. And now that you've narrowed things down to just an astronomically huge number tell me which one is actually a Löbian machine and how I can tell if it's working properly. 

You make non relevant and distracting remark. See my French long version for LISP  programs illustrating this, or read the combinators thread to see how to build combinators doing this.

A Löbian combinator, or a Löbian Turing machine is a long and hideous, but very easy exercise. 

 

> Have you read “Forevery undecided “ by Raymond Smullyan as I suggested?

I read that decades ago long before I ever heard of you.

So you might have know what is a löbian machine long after knowing may work. It is a very standard notion, so important that there are no two books given them the same name. 

All formal theory extending any essentially undecidable theory is Löbian. The Uniform reflexive Wagner structure  are Löbian, the boolean tops with naturel number-objevt are Löbian.

I nice definition, easy to use in our context, is that a machine is Löbian if it can prove all statement with the shape A -> []A, with A being an arbitrary sigma_1 arithmetical sentences.

A simple (and larger) definition is any machine close for the Löb rule of inference []A -> A / A. Löb’s original theorem is that PA is close for that rule. It solved a question auld by Henkin which was “GOdel’s sentences, asserting their non provability in PA (or PM, ZF, …) are true and non provable (assuming PA, ZF, … consistent), what can we say about the sentences asserting their provability?

That is not entirely obvious, and Löb’s answer was that they are all true (and thus provable).

In contrast, sentence affirming they are sigma_1-true are usually false, although some can be true.

>> Those "mathematical objects" have no effect whatsoever on the physical world,

> I don’t assume a physical world,

That's OK, the physical world just continues on making calculations and making money for INTEL regardless of if you assume it or not. And that is something pure mathematics can not do.

I just said that I do not assume a physical world.  Obviously, I do believe in a physical universe, even more so when I derive its existence/appearance from arithmetic.

You cannot do money, or energy with pure mathematics, but with mechanism, the point is that mathematics can explain why we do sharable dreams in which we have the experience of money and energy.

Bruno 

 John K Clark

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 8:25 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> physics, indeed, can clearly do something that mathematics cannot do

Correct.

 

> but that does not mean that such a something is not explainable by mathematics.

Correct again. The English language can be used to explain how the sun produces vast amounts of energy but no language including mathematics can produce vast amounts of energy, to do that you need 2*10^30 kg of Hydrogen.

> The ambiguous term is “do” here.

Nothing ambiguous about it. If INTEL wishes calculations to *do* something, like make money for example, then only matter can *do* those calculations.

> I recall the definition of a Turing machine: it is a set of quadruples. There is no tape needed, except as a pedagogical tool. There is no assumption about atoms, or time, space, etc.

As I said in my previous post, it's easy to translate Turing's idea into mathematics that is just as abstract as Church's lambda calculus and just as incapable of actually *doing* anything; however unlike Church Turing can do more than that, Turing's  idea can also be incorporated into physics and then and only then can you *do" something with the calculation . A "Lambda Machine" is just as fictitious as a "Löbian machine", but Turing Machines are real, I'm using one right now.

 

>> Godel always maintained that Turing's accomplishment was greater than that of Alonzo Church for the very reason's I've been talking about.

> Not at all. Gödel already knew that his own notion of computability was arithmetical. But he thought it was not *universal*? After reading Turing’s paper, he got that his own definition of computable was universal, but then he can be said that Gödel is the first to get the idea that computation and computability are purely arithmetical notion.

Godel said Church's idea of what a calculation is was:

"thoroughly unsatisfactory while Turing's was most satisfactory and correct beyond any doubt. We had not perceived the sharp concept of mechanical procedures sharply before Turing, who brought us to the right perspective. The resulting definition of the concept of mechanical by the sharp concept of performable by a Turing machine is both correct and unique. Moreover it is absolutely impossible that anybody who understands the question and knows Turing’s definition should decide for a different concept."

Even Alonzo Church admitted Turing's way was superior:  

"Computability by a Turing machine has the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness in the ordinary (not explicitly defined) sense evident immediately."

The Church-Turing Thesis

 

> The Church’s lambda expressions can emulate any Turing machine, and vice versa.

Incorrect. A Turing Machine can do Lambda Calculus but Lambda Calculus can't even add 2+2 without the help of a Turing Machine.

> That is how programming language works.

A language can't *do* anything unless someone or something can hear and understand the language, but a Turing machine is not a language, as the name implies it is a machine.

>You can implement lambda calculus directly into a Suze- von Neumann register machine

Sure, As I said, a Turing Machine can do Lambda Calculus and a Von Neumann computer is a Turing Machine, but without that Turing Machine the Lambda Calculus will *do* precisely nothing.

>> Sorry, I just can't keep up with the changing meaning of "Aristotle theology”.

> Come on John. I have use that expression always with the same meaning. It is the belief in the second God,

Bruno I can honestly say if you've mentioned a "second God" before I do not recall it. And please don't tell me what that is because I've given up, I just can't keep up with the changing meaning of "Aristotle theology”

John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Jul 2019, at 23:02, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 8:25 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> physics, indeed, can clearly do something that mathematics cannot do

Correct.

 

> but that does not mean that such a something is not explainable by mathematics.

Correct again. The English language can be used to explain how the sun produces vast amounts of energy but no language including mathematics can produce vast amounts of energy, to do that you need 2*10^30 kg of Hydrogen.

> The ambiguous term is “do” here.

Nothing ambiguous about it. If INTEL wishes calculations to *do* something, like make money for example, then only matter can *do* those calculations.

> I recall the definition of a Turing machine: it is a set of quadruples. There is no tape needed, except as a pedagogical tool. There is no assumption about atoms, or time, space, etc.

As I said in my previous post, it's easy to translate Turing's idea into mathematics that is just as abstract as Church's lambda calculus and just as incapable of actually *doing* anything; however unlike Church Turing can do more than that, Turing's  idea can also be incorporated into physics and then and only then can you *do" something with the calculation . A "Lambda Machine" is just as fictitious as a "Löbian machine", but Turing Machines are real, I'm using one right now.

Do is ambiguous, and a Truing machine is as much mathematical than a lambda expression.

Imagine that you are in a video game. In that game you have to build a city and *do* many things, like collecting taxes, or doing some work to earn money, which is of course virtual by construction here. Yet, you do money, despite the environment is virtual. When you manage the money, it seems material, but you know that this is not the case. Now, the whole video game is executed through pure number relation (indeed sigma_1 one) in the arithmetical reality (in the tiny part that you need to assume to give sense to the word “digital machine”). And if Mechanism is assumes on the top of this, your own activity in the video game is emulated also in virtue of some (sigma_1) relations. In that case you can see that although you need to do work, and manipulate some apparent matter to do apparent money, it does not need to exist. 

Unless … you tell me that we need some matter to make that happening accompany by genuine consciousness, but then you need to add some non Turing emulable for your consciousness, not emulable by the number relations and thus by any Turing machine (the number relation are Turing complete), and this means that you can no more say “yes” to the digitalist doctor.

 

>> Godel always maintained that Turing's accomplishment was greater than that of Alonzo Church for the very reason's I've been talking about.

> Not at all. Gödel already knew that his own notion of computability was arithmetical. But he thought it was not *universal*? After reading Turing’s paper, he got that his own definition of computable was universal, but then he can be said that Gödel is the first to get the idea that computation and computability are purely arithmetical notion.

Godel said Church's idea of what a calculation is was:

"thoroughly unsatisfactory while Turing's was most satisfactory and correct beyond any doubt. We had not perceived the sharp concept of mechanical procedures sharply before Turing, who brought us to the right perspective. The resulting definition of the concept of mechanical by the sharp concept of performable by a Turing machine is both correct and unique. Moreover it is absolutely impossible that anybody who understands the question and knows Turing’s definition should decide for a different concept."

Even Alonzo Church admitted Turing's way was superior:  

"Computability by a Turing machine has the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness in the ordinary (not explicitly defined) sense evident immediately."

The Church-Turing Thesis

 

> The Church’s lambda expressions can emulate any Turing machine, and vice versa.

Incorrect. A Turing Machine can do Lambda Calculus but Lambda Calculus can't even add 2+2 without the help of a Turing Machine.

See the combinator thread for a precise disproof of this. All what a Turing machine can do (computation and processes), can be done by a combinator, and thus by a lambda expression.

I have shown, in all details how we can compute any partial computable function with the combinators S and K, and S and K are trivially emulate by the the two lambda expression [x][y]x and [x][y][z]xz(yz). So, just those 2 lambda expressions are Turing universal.

Church would not have claimed that his lambda calculus defined all computable functions if they were unable to compute all partial computable functions.

By the compilation theorem, you can build a recursive bijection between all lambda expressions and all Turing machines.

By the interpreter theorem, you can build a lambda expression emulating a universal Turing machine, and vice versa. They are recursively isomorphic, with resect to computability and emulability. 

> That is how programming language works.

A language can't *do* anything unless someone or something can hear and understand the language, but a Turing machine is not a language, as the name implies it is a machine.

You can see it as a language, as you can see a programming language as a means to define digital machine, always in their original mathematical sense.

You assume that there is an irreducible (and of course Turing universal) material reality. I do not. 

Invoking an ontological commitment in science is not valid, and begs the question. 

>You can implement lambda calculus directly into a Suze- von Neumann register machine

Sure, As I said, a Turing Machine can do Lambda Calculus and a Von Neumann computer is a Turing Machine,

Strictly speaking, no. A von Neumann computer is better seen as a boolean graph, with a delay and splitting instructions. By the complier theorem, they are recursively isomorphic, with the Turing formalism, but as much than with lambda expression, post production system, Conway’s game of life, etc.

All such system determine what I call a universal machinery, that is: a computable enumeration of all partial computable functions, which is noted by phi_i (i = 0, 1, 2, …).

but without that Turing Machine the Lambda Calculus will *do* precisely nothing.

They do exactly the same computations, and they emulate exactly the same digital processes. They are both purely mathematical concept, and both can be implemented in any Turing universal subpart of the physical reality.

>> Sorry, I just can't keep up with the changing meaning of "Aristotle theology”.

> Come on John. I have use that expression always with the same meaning. It is the belief in the second God,

Bruno I can honestly say if you've mentioned a "second God" before I do not recall it. And please don't tell me what that is because I've given up, I just can't keep up with the changing meaning of "Aristotle theology”

Just find one post where I would have said something different about Aristotle theology, which, since day one on this list, is the doctrine which assumes some irreducible (to math for example) substance/matter (called Primary matter by Aristotle).

Bruno 

John K Clark

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 7:24 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>>As I said in my previous post, it's easy to translate Turing's idea into mathematics that is just as abstract as Church's lambda calculus and just as incapable of actually *doing* anything; however unlike Church Turing can do more than that, Turing's  idea can also be incorporated into physics and then and only then can you *do" something with the calculation . A "Lambda Machine" is just as fictitious as a "Löbian machine", but Turing Machines are real, I'm using one right now.

> Do is ambiguous,

Nothing ambiguous about it. If INTEL wishes calculations to *do* something, like make money for example, then only matter can *do* those calculations.

 

> and a Truing machine is as much mathematical than a lambda expression.

A Turing Machine is compatible with both pure mathematics and pure physics, but Lambda Calculus is compatible only with pure mathematics. 

> Imagine that you are in a video game. In that game you have to build a city and *do* many things, like collecting taxes, [...] In that case you can see that although you need to do work, and manipulate some apparent matter to do apparent money, it does not need to exist. 

Bitcoins exist.

> Unless … you tell me that we need some matter to make that happening 

I am telling you that matter is needed to make that happen, in this case the matter in the microprocessor of the computer that is running the video game that is using Bitcoins as money.   

> accompany by genuine consciousness,

  Consciousness? What the hell does that have to do with the price of eggs?  

 

> or doing some work to earn money, which is of course virtual by construction here.

Money is whatever fungible thing that people in a society agree has worth. In general people have not agreed that money used in a video game has worth unless it happens to be Bitcoins, Ethereum, Ripple or some other well known Cryptocurrency. But Bitcoin mining software printed in a book can generate no money (if it could Bitcoin would suffer a rather serious inflation problem) it must be incorporated into a computer made of matter before that software can *do* anything. 

> Now, the whole video game is executed through pure number relation

Incorrect.  The whole video game is executed through voltage differences in the microprocessor. We can use the language of mathematics to help us understand how those voltage differences effect each other, and we can if we wish interpret those voltage differences as numbers.

> Church would not have claimed that his lambda calculus defined all computable functions

That's why Godel thought Turing's work was superior to Church's and even Church admitted that: 

"Computability by a Turing machine has the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness in the ordinary (not explicitly defined) sense evident immediately."

 

>> A Turing Machine can do Lambda Calculus but Lambda Calculus can't even add 2+2 without the help of a Turing Machine.

> See the combinator thread for a precise disproof of this.

Ah yes, that legendary post of yours that plugs all the holes in your theory and proves that everything I've said is wrong, the post that you've been talking about for the better part of a decade, the post that NOBODY HAS EVER SEEN.

> You assume that there is an irreducible (and of course Turing universal) material reality.

See my precise disproof of this in my own legendary post.

>> Sure, As I said, a Turing Machine can do Lambda Calculus and a Von Neumann computer is a Turing Machine,

> Strictly speaking, no. A von Neumann computer is better seen as a boolean graph,

BULLSHIT! The logical operation of every computer ever made can be reduced to a Turing Machine.

 

> with a delay and splitting instructions. By the complier theorem, they are recursively isomorphic, with the Turing formalism, but as much than with lambda expression, post production system, Conway’s game of life,

The first program I ever wrote was an implementation of Conway’s game of life and I debugged it and ran it on a Turing Machine.

 >>but without that Turing Machine the Lambda Calculus will *do* precisely nothing.

> They do exactly the same computations,

Without a Turing Machine Lambda Calculus can't *do* diddly-squat, it's just a sequence of ASCII characters printed in a book doing no calculations or anything else except gather dust. Even Alonzo Church admitted that but you cannot. 

>>Bruno I can honestly say if you've mentioned a "second God" before I do not recall it. And please don't tell me what that is because I've given up, I just can't keep up with the changing meaning of "Aristotle theology”

>Just find one post where I would have said something different about Aristotle theology,

Ironically to rebut my accusation that you keep changing the meaning of "Aristotle theology" you introduced the concept of  "Aristotle's second God"; I've never heard anybody mention that before, but I admit you know more about Greek silly ideas than I do. 

 John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

On 16 Jul 2019, at 15:51, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 7:24 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>>As I said in my previous post, it's easy to translate Turing's idea into mathematics that is just as abstract as Church's lambda calculus and just as incapable of actually *doing* anything; however unlike Church Turing can do more than that, Turing's  idea can also be incorporated into physics and then and only then can you *do" something with the calculation . A "Lambda Machine" is just as fictitious as a "Löbian machine", but Turing Machines are real, I'm using one right now.

> Do is ambiguous,

Nothing ambiguous about it. If INTEL wishes calculations to *do* something, like make money for example, then only matter can *do* those calculations.

 

> and a Truing machine is as much mathematical than a lambda expression.

A Turing Machine is compatible with both pure mathematics and pure physics, but Lambda Calculus is compatible only with pure mathematics. 

Why? The so called LISP machine implements combinators and lambda expression as much in a physical way that a von Neumann machine can emulate a Turing machine.

The Turing machine formalism is recursively isomorphic to the lambda expressions. They are both mathematical, and can implement each others. And they can both be implemented in subset of physical laws, in direct ways.

> Imagine that you are in a video game. In that game you have to build a city and *do* many things, like collecting taxes, [...] In that case you can see that although you need to do work, and manipulate some apparent matter to do apparent money, it does not need to exist. 

Bitcoins exist.

> Unless … you tell me that we need some matter to make that happening 

I am telling you that matter is needed to make that happen, in this case the matter in the microprocessor of the computer that is running the video game that is using Bitcoins as money. 

But why? 

Why to make that assumption, which introduce a metaphysical concepts for which there is no evidences at all, which comes from an extraordinary extrapolation, which makes the mind-body problem unsolvable (or at least unsolved), and for which there has never been any evidence?

 

> accompany by genuine consciousness,

  Consciousness? What the hell does that have to do with the price of eggs?  

You are the one saying that we need matter for a computation to happen (and I infer “to support genuine consciousness”). If not, then it is even more weird why you want for matter, given that the computation are realised in arithmetic, so that relatively to any universal number, all computations happens.

Without consciousness, there is no definition of the Indexical Digital Mechanist hypothesis. There is still CT, but “yes doctor” does no more make sense, nor first person view, etc.

 

> or doing some work to earn money, which is of course virtual by construction here.

Money is whatever fungible thing that people in a society agree has worth. In general people have not agreed that money used in a video game has worth unless it happens to be Bitcoins, Ethereum, Ripple or some other well known Cryptocurrency. But Bitcoin mining software printed in a book can generate no money (if it could Bitcoin would suffer a rather serious inflation problem) it must be incorporated into a computer made of matter before that software can *do* anything. 

> Now, the whole video game is executed through pure number relation

Incorrect.  The whole video game is executed through voltage differences in the microprocessor.

You can implement it, but it is an mathematical fact, even an arithmetical facts that Fortran interpret the video game in arithmetic, as well as a program simulating the Milky Way, at the level of strings, itself emulating the voltage difference in some micro-processor itself emulating that video game. And with the indexical mechanist hypothesis, I don’t see how the arithmetical simulation would be less conscious than the emulation in some physical reality. We just don’t know a priori if such a physical reality exists or even make sense (eventually we will know it does not make sense).

We can use the language of mathematics to help us understand how those voltage differences effect each other, and we can if we wish interpret those voltage differences as numbers.

In your theory which assumes a physical universe. But then the reasoning will show that you need infinitely many informations to “attach” your consciousness to that physical universe, and you can no more say “yes” to the digitalist doctor, without invoking magic in the mind, which would be a coming back to substantial dualism, and, needless to say, abandoning Digital Mechanism.

> Church would not have claimed that his lambda calculus defined all computable functions

That's why Godel thought Turing's work was superior to Church's and even Church admitted that: 

"Computability by a Turing machine has the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness in the ordinary (not explicitly defined) sense evident immediately.”

But that concerns only the pedagogy. Now, in metaphysics, the Turing formalism seems to be misleading, because we can see that *some* physicalist can get the wrong idea that a computation is a physical notion, which both Turing and  Church would disagree with.

 

>> A Turing Machine can do Lambda Calculus but Lambda Calculus can't even add 2+2 without the help of a Turing Machine.

> See the combinator thread for a precise disproof of this.

Ah yes, that legendary

Ad hominem.  Boring.

post of yours that plugs all the holes in your theory and proves that everything I've said is wrong, the post that you've been talking about for the better part of a decade, the post that NOBODY HAS EVER SEEN.

I just said that I have proven that the giving of the lambda expressions [x][y]x (which does the same job as K) and [x][y][z]xz(yz) (which does the same job as S) are Turing universal, and thus can emulate all Turing machines.

> You assume that there is an irreducible (and of course Turing universal) material reality.

See my precise disproof of this in my own legendary post.

>> Sure, As I said, a Turing Machine can do Lambda Calculus and a Von Neumann computer is a Turing Machine,

> Strictly speaking, no. A von Neumann computer is better seen as a boolean graph,

BULLSHIT! The logical operation of every computer ever made can be reduced to a Turing Machine.

True but irrelevant. Actually it makes my point, but usually, thanks to our physical laws (and transistors) the boolean operation will be used to simulate a Turing machines. A Turing machine is the given of a set of quadruplets, which is more complex than a logical gate.

 

> with a delay and splitting instructions. By the complier theorem, they are recursively isomorphic, with the Turing formalism, but as much than with lambda expression, post production system, Conway’s game of life,

The first program I ever wrote was an implementation of Conway’s game of life and I debugged it and ran it on a Turing Machine.

Give the quadruplets. 

 >>but without that Turing Machine the Lambda Calculus will *do* precisely nothing.

> They do exactly the same computations,

Without a Turing Machine Lambda Calculus can't *do* diddly-squat, it's just a sequence of ASCII characters printed in a book doing no calculations or anything else except gather dust. Even Alonzo Church admitted that but you cannot. 

A Turing machine is a set of quadruplet, that you represent usually by a sequence of ASCII characters. There is no difference with a lambda expression at all. 

>>Bruno I can honestly say if you've mentioned a "second God" before I do not recall it. And please don't tell me what that is because I've given up, I just can't keep up with the changing meaning of "Aristotle theology”

>Just find one post where I would have said something different about Aristotle theology,

Ironically to rebut my accusation that you keep changing the meaning of "Aristotle theology" you introduced the concept of  "Aristotle's second God"; I've never heard anybody mention that before, but I admit you know more about Greek silly ideas than I do. 

The first God is Aristotle first mover. It is deism more than theism, in fact. But Aristotle main fundamental contribution in theology, which is still alive today and is the base of the current theological paradigm is his idea that there is a primary (irreducible to anything else) material reality. That is what I call Aristotelian theology, and that is what you are using above to make people thinking that a physical material universe is need to make computation happening. 

Bruno 

 John K Clark

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 11:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> A Turing Machine is compatible with both pure mathematics and pure physics, but Lambda Calculus is compatible only with pure mathematics. 

 

Why?

Ask Alonzo Church the inventor of Lambda Calculus who admitted it's true, and so did Godel. 

 

> The so called LISP machine implements combinators and lambda expression

LISP machines were just Turing Machines that incorporated common subroutines used in the LISP language in HARDWARE to enabled them to run faster, but by the early 1990's microprocessors had gotten so fast that cheap home computers ran faster than any dedicated LISP machine and that's why nobody makes them anymore. 

 

>>I am telling you that matter is needed to make that happen, in this case the matter in the microprocessor of the computer that is running the video game that is using Bitcoins as money. 

> But why? 

Why what?

> Why to make that assumption,

What assumption?

  >> Consciousness? What the hell does that have to do with the price of eggs?  

> You are the one saying that we need matter for a computation to happen

Because every computation ever observed in the history of the world has required matter.

> (and I infer “to support genuine consciousness”).

And every time in the history of the world a change in consciousness resulted in a change in the physical state of a brain and a change in the physical state of a brain resulted in a change in consciousness.

> If not, then it is even more weird why you want for matter, given that the computation are realised in arithmetic,

And not once in the history of the world has anyone observed a computation being made in nothing but a change in arithmetic. In fact nobody has ever observed a change in arithmetic period.

>>>  the whole video game is executed through pure number relation

>> Incorrect.  The whole video game is executed through voltage differences in the microprocessor.

> You can implement it,

You've got it backwards. The numbers don't emulate the voltages in the microprocessor, the voltages in the microprocessor emulate the numbers.

>> We can use the language of mathematics to help us understand how those voltage differences effect each other, and we can if we wish interpret those voltage differences as numbers.

> In your theory which assumes a physical universe.

The only thing I assume is that if something works then it works and if something doesn't work then it doesn't work. Making calculations with the help of matter works, making calculations without matter doesn't work.

And that is your cue to refute what I just said by referring to a textbook that will never be able to calculate 2+2.

> See the combinator thread for a precise disproof of this.

Ah yes, that legendary post

 

>Ad hominem.  Boring.

What's boring is your referring to posts that don't exist, your constant whining and using that incredibly pompous Latin phrase. 

>> post of yours that plugs all the holes in your theory and proves that everything I've said is wrong, the post that you've been talking about for the better part of a decade, the post that NOBODY HAS EVER SEEN.

> I just said that I have proven that the giving of the lambda expressions [x][y]x (which does the same job as K) and [x][y][z]xz(yz)

I agree, "[x][y]x" does indeed *do* the same job as "K) and [x][y][z]xz(yz)" because both ASCII sequences *do* precisely NOTHING and 0=0 so they both *do* exactly the same thing. Nothing.

>>The logical operation of every computer ever made can be reduced to a Turing Machine.

>True but irrelevant.

How in the world is that fact irrelevant?!

> Actually it makes my point, but usually, thanks to our physical laws (and transistors) the boolean operation will be used to simulate a Turing machines.

Boolean operations don't simulate Turing Machines, Turing Machines simulate Boolean operations.

>> Ironically to rebut my accusation that you keep changing the meaning of "Aristotle theology" you introduced the concept of  "Aristotle's second God"; I've never heard anybody mention that before, but I admit you know more about Greek silly ideas than I do. 

> The first God is Aristotle first mover it is [...]

Bruno, I did ask you not to tell me, I've given up keeping track of your constantly mutating definitions of common words and invented phrases and acronyms used by nobody but you. 

John K Clark    

[Philip Thrift]

LISP machines were just Turing Machines that incorporated common subroutines used in the LISP language in HARDWARE to enabled them to run faster, but by the early 1990's microprocessors had gotten so fast that cheap home computers ran faster than any dedicated LISP machine and that's why nobody makes them anymore. 

 

John K Clark    

I was in the lab that did that. :) :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments#Artificial_intelligence

For the Explorer, a special 32-bit Lisp microprocessor was developed, which was used in the Explorer II and the TI MicroExplorer (a Lisp Machine on a NuBus board for the Apple Macintosh).

(The money for the chip came from DARPA.)

In general, PLT semantics  (denotational, operational, axiomatic) of computing is substrate independent, but in UCNC there is the beginning of "intrinsic" semantics (physical, experiential).

@philipthrift

[Telmo Menezes]

On Thu, Jul 18, 2019, at 20:09, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 11:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> A Turing Machine is compatible with both pure mathematics and pure physics, but Lambda Calculus is compatible only with pure mathematics. 

 

Why?

Ask Alonzo Church the inventor of Lambda Calculus who admitted it's true, and so did Godel. 

 

> The so called LISP machine implements combinators and lambda expression

LISP machines were just Turing Machines that incorporated common subroutines used in the LISP language in HARDWARE to enabled them to run faster, but by the early 1990's microprocessors had gotten so fast that cheap home computers ran faster than any dedicated LISP machine and that's why nobody makes them anymore.

Nobody ever used the Turing Machine as an architecture for computation, outside of theoretical domains. Not even Turing himself, for the simple reason that it would be terribly inefficient. Even though it is possible to build a finite Turing Machine, it was always meant to be a model of computation that made it easy to talk about its theoretical aspects.

Computers to this day mostly follow the Von Neumann architecture, with its familiar CPU, memory unit, I/O bus, etc. Due to economic effects related to production at scale, it is very hard to change the underlying architecture of general computation once one takes hold. The fact that we us Von Neumann machines instead of LISP machines or connection machines is probably just a historical accident more than anything else.

Things are now starting to change, due to the adoption of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), first for real time 3D rendering (computer games) and then for Machine Learning tasks. GPUs are in fact a different architecture, highly parallelizable, while Von Neumann is ultimately sequential (the illusion of parallelism is created by the Operating System). Modern computers, including the one you are probably using, are already hybrid-architecture, with parallel Von Neumann machines (multiple CPUs) + GPUs. If you play a modern computer game, you will be enjoying the collaborative efforts of these two (three?) architectures.

It seems clear to me that Turing Machines, Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are just implementations of something which is purely abstract -- computation.

You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave with modern language.

Telmo.

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[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 3:52:05 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

...

You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave with modern language.

Telmo.

I've been perplexed for 50 years how the idea of immaterialism (that there is something other than matter) came to be.

The so-called abstractions - like the definition of the Turing machine you read in a textbook - are just fictions. But fictions can be useful. Maybe there should be a better word for useful fictions. Math is as good as any, for part of that anyway.

The old guys, Thales, Democritus, Epicurus, were curious about matter. Where did this bizarre trend towards immaterialism come from?

The original sin of philosophy occurred when mathematical and mental (and computational) entities were abstracted away from their material home.

@pphilipthrift

[Quentin Anciaux]

Le ven. 19 juil. 2019 à 12:18, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> a écrit :

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 3:52:05 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

...

You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave with modern language.

Telmo.

I've been perplexed for 50 years how the idea of immaterialism (that there is something other than matter) came to be.

The so-called abstractions - like the definition of the Turing machine you read in a textbook - are just fictions. But fictions can be useful. Maybe there should be a better word for useful fictions. Math is as good as any, for part of that anyway.

The old guys, Thales, Democritus, Epicurus, were curious about matter. Where did this bizarre trend towards immaterialism come from?

How is trend to believe there is only matter (what is it ?) came to be ? How is the believe in *only matter* not bizarre ? It is as bizarre as anything reality is... I don't see materialism as less bizarre than anything about the nature of reality... as if we knew what reality was... It seems to me it's the people who believe there are some beliefs about reality which are *not* bizarre that are bizarre.

Quentin

The original sin of philosophy occurred when mathematical and mental (and computational) entities were abstracted away from their material home.

@pphilipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jul 2019, at 10:51, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

On Thu, Jul 18, 2019, at 20:09, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 11:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> A Turing Machine is compatible with both pure mathematics and pure physics, but Lambda Calculus is compatible only with pure mathematics. 

 

Why?

Ask Alonzo Church the inventor of Lambda Calculus who admitted it's true, and so did Godel. 

 

> The so called LISP machine implements combinators and lambda expression

LISP machines were just Turing Machines that incorporated common subroutines used in the LISP language in HARDWARE to enabled them to run faster, but by the early 1990's microprocessors had gotten so fast that cheap home computers ran faster than any dedicated LISP machine and that's why nobody makes them anymore.

Nobody ever used the Turing Machine as an architecture for computation, outside of theoretical domains. Not even Turing himself, for the simple reason that it would be terribly inefficient. Even though it is possible to build a finite Turing Machine, it was always meant to be a model of computation that made it easy to talk about its theoretical aspects.

Computers to this day mostly follow the Von Neumann architecture, with its familiar CPU, memory unit, I/O bus, etc. Due to economic effects related to production at scale, it is very hard to change the underlying architecture of general computation once one takes hold. The fact that we us Von Neumann machines instead of LISP machines or connection machines is probably just a historical accident more than anything else.

Things are now starting to change, due to the adoption of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), first for real time 3D rendering (computer games) and then for Machine Learning tasks. GPUs are in fact a different architecture, highly parallelizable, while Von Neumann is ultimately sequential (the illusion of parallelism is created by the Operating System). Modern computers, including the one you are probably using, are already hybrid-architecture, with parallel Von Neumann machines (multiple CPUs) + GPUs. If you play a modern computer game, you will be enjoying the collaborative efforts of these two (three?) architectures.

It seems clear to me that Turing Machines, Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are just implementations of something which is purely abstract -- computation.

You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave with modern language.

You are right. I would say, contra Clark, that today a lot of work is concentrated to implementing the lambda calculus into graph reduction machine, making them directly related to natural physical implementations. This allows to keep the functional approach to computation, respect a big amount of the so-called “functional abstraction” which makes easier to specify the denotational semantics of the programs. The Lisp machine was born with such idea at its roots. 

The Turing machine can be said more theoretical than Lambda calculus, and their close cousins: the combinators. But the Turing machine are pedagogically very simple, although, as I have illustrated with the combinators, much less tedious to be used to prove the Turing universality, although it has become the most used in textbook, not because they are more physical or natural, but more close to the human, and *that* is what convince Gödel of the Turing-Church thesis.

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jul 2019, at 12:18, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 3:52:05 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

...

You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave with modern language.

Telmo.

I've been perplexed for 50 years how the idea of immaterialism (that there is something other than matter) came to be.

That is “immaterialism” in the sense of the dualist philosophers of mind.

I use the term materialism in the sense of weak materialism: the belief in irreducible matter, i.e. the belief that we have to assume matter (that we cannot explain it without assuming it). Weak Materialism has been introduced in science by Aristotle, and taken for granted since, but Plato was the one who show skepticism toward it. 

The so-called abstractions - like the definition of the Turing machine you read in a textbook - are just fictions. But fictions can be useful. Maybe there should be a better word for useful fictions. Math is as good as any, for part of that anyway.

The old guys, Thales, Democritus, Epicurus, were curious about matter. Where did this bizarre trend towards immaterialism come from?

Plato, who was inspired by Pythagorus, although he cites him only once. That tendency will be fought by Aristotle, and came back with Middle-Platonism (also called Neopythagoreanism) and then with the Neoplatonist (Plotinus).

The original sin of philosophy occurred when mathematical and mental (and computational) entities were abstracted away from their material home.

Assuming that such thing exist. No problem, my point is only that it contradicts Digital Mechanism. Well, I argue also that thanks to the quantum mechanics without reduction (Everett) the experimental evidences favours much more Mechanism and its immaterialism (in the strong sense of NON-weak-materialislm!).

The many-histories view of QM is already a subset of the many-histories which exist in arithmetic. The question is only to see if there are not too much histories, and why the statistics admit the “destructive interference” so that the measure can make sense, and this has been explained through the translation of the definition of matter by Platinus in arithmetic, which gives directly quantum logic.

Bruno

@pphilipthrift

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[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 5:50:11 AM UTC-5, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

Le ven. 19 juil. 2019 à 12:18, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> a écrit :

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 3:52:05 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

...

You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave with modern language.

Telmo.

I've been perplexed for 50 years how the idea of immaterialism (that there is something other than matter) came to be.

The so-called abstractions - like the definition of the Turing machine you read in a textbook - are just fictions. But fictions can be useful. Maybe there should be a better word for useful fictions. Math is as good as any, for part of that anyway.

The old guys, Thales, Democritus, Epicurus, were curious about matter. Where did this bizarre trend towards immaterialism come from?

How is trend to believe there is only matter (what is it ?) came to be ? How is the believe in *only matter* not bizarre ? It is as bizarre as anything reality is... I don't see materialism as less bizarre than anything about the nature of reality... as if we knew what reality was... It seems to me it's the people who believe there are some beliefs about reality which are *not* bizarre that are bizarre.

Quentin

The original sin of philosophy occurred when mathematical and mental (and computational) entities were abstracted away from their material home.

@pphilipthrift

I just don't believe in anything immaterial, or supernatural - like God, or ghosts. It is a fact a lot of people do. Some just are prone to believe in the immaterial/supernatural:

         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimaterialism

@philipthrift

 

[Bruno Marchal]

I think we agree to disagree on this. It is not so much that personally I am more sure that 6 divides 18, than say any extrapolation from nature like F = GmM/r^2, it is also that my working hypothesis is digital mechanism, which requires beliefs equivalent to arithmetic, like the axioms Kxy = x, and Sxyz = xz(yz), or x + 0 = x.

The advantage of mechanism is that it transforms the mind body problem into a mathematical body problem, and its solution makes the Mechanist hypothesis testable, and indeed confirmed up to now.

By assuming the existence of (primary) Matter, you loss the possibility to explain it, and you loss the mean to use the mechanist theory of mind, without providing a conceptually clear non-mechanist theory of mind.

Bruno

 

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[Quentin Anciaux]

I understand, but *how* your beliefs are *not* bizarre ? Do you know what reality is ?

 

@philipthrift

 

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[Telmo Menezes]

Hi Philip,

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 10:18, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 3:52:05 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

...

You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave with modern language.

Telmo.

I've been perplexed for 50 years how the idea of immaterialism (that there is something other than matter) came to be.

I was listening to a podcast the other day where Sam Harris interviewed his own wife. For those who don't know, Sam Harris is a neuroscientist who became rather famous for being an outspoken atheist, and writing books such as "The End of Faith". Sam's wife wrote a book about the hard problem of consciousness. They both discussed in the beginning their perplexity at how so many of their highly-educated friends did not seem to understand the hard problem of consciousness and, more precisely, how materialism completely fails to account for the first-person view of reality or, in other words, the fact that "the light are on" inside of us.

I invite you to listen if you have some patience for it:

https://samharris.org/podcasts/159-conscious/

You will listen to two people who could not be less suspect of believing in ghosts or any other kind of similar woo.

I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect consciousness.

On a side note: people have been citing John Clark as the hard-nosed personality who keeps Bruno's crazy ideas in check, but notice that beyond some weird political confluence of opposed personalities (who really only have in common their personal disgust for Bruno), John Clark himself agrees with me on this: that our own subjective experience is the most important thing there is, and that consciousness cannot be detected by scientific instruments. He will contradict me if I am wrong about this.

The so-called abstractions - like the definition of the Turing machine you read in a textbook - are just fictions. But fictions can be useful. Maybe there should be a better word for useful fictions. Math is as good as any, for part of that anyway.

I looked up the definition of "fiction" and found this:

fiction

/ˈfɪkʃ(ə)n/

noun: fiction; plural noun: fictions

1. 1.
   

   literature in the form of prose, especially novels, that describes imaginary events and people.
   

   synonyms:

   novels, stories, creative writing, imaginative writing, works of the imagination, prose literature, narration, story telling; More romance, fable "the traditions of British fiction"

   antonyms:

   non-fiction

2. 2.
   

   something that is invented or untrue.
   

   "they were supposed to be keeping up the fiction that they were happily married"
   

   synonyms:

   fabrication, invention, lies, fibs, concoction, trumped-up story, fake news, alternative fact, untruth, falsehood, fantasy, fancy, illusion, sham, nonsense; vulgar slangbullshit; vulgar slangbulldust "the president dismissed the allegation as absolute fiction"

Both definitions appeal to abstractions. By your reasoning, these abstractions are also fiction. The very notion of "Truth" for example, is a mathematical abstraction, and thus a fiction. So it not only that these abstractions are useful, as you say, but they seem to be *necessary* for us to talk about reality. Don't you find that strange?

The old guys, Thales, Democritus, Epicurus, were curious about matter. Where did this bizarre trend towards immaterialism come from?

The original sin of philosophy occurred when mathematical and mental (and computational) entities were abstracted away from their material home.

Maybe I have my history of philosophy all wrong, but I think that materialism in its modern format is a very recent development. Which says nothing about its truth status, I am just pointing this out because you seem to suggest that what you call "immaterialism" is some recent weird trend.

Telmo.

@pphilipthrift

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[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 6:28:10 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

...

By assuming the existence of (primary) Matter, you lose the possibility to explain it, and you loss the mean to use the mechanist theory of mind, without providing a conceptually clear non-mechanist theory of mind.

Bruno

If a mathematical/logical theory can explain experience (the catchall for consciousness, selfness, qualia, etc.) then that is that and we an all go home.

(If we didn't have experience, then we wouldn't be worrying about in the first place!)

But if it can't, then it is something itself needs a home, and that home is matter,

(Unless experiences are ghosts from an immaterial realm.)

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 6:31:53 AM UTC-5, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

Le ven. 19 juil. 2019 à 13:02, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> a écrit :

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 5:50:11 AM UTC-5, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

Le ven. 19 juil. 2019 à 12:18, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> a écrit :

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 3:52:05 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

...

You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave with modern language.

Telmo.

I've been perplexed for 50 years how the idea of immaterialism (that there is something other than matter) came to be.

The so-called abstractions - like the definition of the Turing machine you read in a textbook - are just fictions. But fictions can be useful. Maybe there should be a better word for useful fictions. Math is as good as any, for part of that anyway.

The old guys, Thales, Democritus, Epicurus, were curious about matter. Where did this bizarre trend towards immaterialism come from?

How is trend to believe there is only matter (what is it ?) came to be ? How is the believe in *only matter* not bizarre ? It is as bizarre as anything reality is... I don't see materialism as less bizarre than anything about the nature of reality... as if we knew what reality was... It seems to me it's the people who believe there are some beliefs about reality which are *not* bizarre that are bizarre.

Quentin

The original sin of philosophy occurred when mathematical and mental (and computational) entities were abstracted away from their material home.

@pphilipthrift

I just don't believe in anything immaterial, or supernatural - like God, or ghosts. It is a fact a lot of people do. Some just are prone to believe in the immaterial/supernatural:

         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimaterialism

I understand, but *how* your beliefs are *not* bizarre ? Do you know what reality is ?

 

Well matter is bizarre enough on its own.

Read the latest science news on new discoveries in materials science.  

I don't see why you would want to add ghosts into the mix.

@philipthrift

[Quentin Anciaux]

Where did I talk about ghosts ? nowhere, but you did.

I'm only talking about your assertion your beliefs are not *bizarre* (contrary to others who are bizarre)... I'm just saying they are bizarre (your beliefs) as anything about reality is. So can you explain why yours are not *bizarre* and others are.

@philipthrift

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[Philip Thrift]

I'm using "useful fiction" here of course as in the fictionalist philosophy of mathematics:

   https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism-mathematics/

Materialism goes back to ancient Greece and India. Immaterialism goes back (at least) to Plato ("theory of 'Forms'"). Plato for philosophy is like the Adam of original sin.

On consciousness and matter, see of course

   https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 7:51:04 AM UTC-5, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

Le ven. 19 juil. 2019 à 14:45, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> a écrit :

Well matter is bizarre enough on its own.

Read the latest science news on new discoveries in materials science.  

I don't see why you would want to add ghosts into the mix.

Where did I talk about ghosts ? nowhere, but you did.

I'm only talking about your assertion your beliefs are not *bizarre* (contrary to others who are bizarre)... I'm just saying they are bizarre (your beliefs) as anything about reality is. So can you explain why yours are not *bizarre* and others are.

If one believe in immaterial entities (that are beyond being just fictional, like Sherlock Holmes, or numbers), those are ghosts one believes in.

I'm just saying it's bizarre to me. But a lot of people believe in ghosts, or whatever they name the immaterial entities they believe in.

@philipthrift 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jul 2019, at 15:04, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 7:51:04 AM UTC-5, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

Le ven. 19 juil. 2019 à 14:45, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> a écrit :

Well matter is bizarre enough on its own.

Read the latest science news on new discoveries in materials science.  

I don't see why you would want to add ghosts into the mix.

Where did I talk about ghosts ? nowhere, but you did.

I'm only talking about your assertion your beliefs are not *bizarre* (contrary to others who are bizarre)... I'm just saying they are bizarre (your beliefs) as anything about reality is. So can you explain why yours are not *bizarre* and others are.

If one believe in immaterial entities (that are beyond being just fictional, like Sherlock Holmes, or numbers),

I gently and politely confessed that you make me laugh a little bit, by classifying Sherlock Holmes and the numbers together to oppose them to Ghosts.

You know, there has been an incredible event last century. When the mathematicians made sense of analysis, working motivated by the math needed to solve the Heat equation, they build a rather powerful theory, set theory, which assumes the existence of infinity, which unfortunately appears to be inconsistant. They thought they could be able to secure it by working no more about sets, but about the numbers/words used to describe them, so that they could secure the use of infinity in mathematics, by the secure finite realm of numbers and words, which was felt at that time as the most secure thing conceivable. That was the goal of the Hilbert’s program: to secure the use of fictive infinities through the concrete natural number relations (that everybody learn in high school).

But then came Gödel, 1931 (albeit already in Emil Post personal notes in 1922, for the main thing up to “my discovery” and even the difficulties!)

Gödel, who like all mathematicians considered elementary arithmetic has indeed the most secure thing ever, showed that this small amount of security is already unable to justify that security, still less the calling of the infinite or the infinities.

A total reversal occurs in logic and mathematics. Tarski dared to propose a theory of truth, and others developed a theory (Model Theory) where, mathematicians used the infinities to secure the construction made when starting with words and numbers, and shown extraordinary relation between both. 

It gives almost a severe criteria of the difference between science and religion/metaphysics, which indeed is the same as the one of the universal machine itself: 

 - science is when you can express your idea in first order logic

- religion is when you need second order logic, and that leads to informal, but non testable or checkable arguments (yet is quite efficacious).

That is related with the fact that with mechanism we can and must (actually) assume “only” the natural numbers, or the words, or the finite sets, and all the rest, that is: analysis, set theory, physics belongs to the phenomenology (yet partially sharable) of the numbers trying to understand themselves.

So, as I told you already, I am OK with mathematics is fiction/religion/theology already, like physics, except for arithmetic.

One day I might try to explain why the natural numbers are as much undefinable than consciousness.

Before Gödel we thought we could secure the infinities with the finite numbers, but after Gödel we use the infinities to measure how much the finite numbers are incontrollable and get incredibly complex semantic. 

A semantic is just that, a use of infinity to make sense of a number/words/code/machine …

I bought recently a chef-d’oeuvre in set theory, in french (for a change) “Théorie des Ensembles”(set theory) by Patrick Dehornois. It contains also a good chapter on mathematical logic, including RA, PA, in first and second order logic. 

In computer science, the semantic are given by infinities, which can be seen as real numbers, and descriptive set theory is related to recursion (computability) theory, almost like complex analysis is used in (extensional) Number Theory.

I might explain the Goldstein sequence (well explained in Dehornois’ book), which illustrate “quickly” the role of the infinite ordinals to tell us something about a machine/program/word/finite-things.

The computations with oracle are sort of (relatively constructive) real numbers. You can see an analogy, machine being natural number, but then you have the computation which does not stop, but with clear finite loops, like with a rational number 0,131313131313.., and the computation which never stop, but are “creative”, which never repeat themselves, like the square root of 2, or pi, or e.

those are ghosts one believes in.

The existence of gost is complementary to all this. A materialist will imagine that a ghost is made of just unknown matter. An immaterialist will take it as a possible new case of prestidigitalism, as the universal number can make us believe many things, which makes the research possible and interesting.

To be sure, the term ghost is not pretty well defined in the literature. 

My favorite ghost movie is the Korean movie “Hello Ghost”.

I'm just saying it's bizarre to me. But a lot of people believe in ghosts, or whatever they name the immaterial entities they believe in.

A materialist believer in ghosts could believe that a ghost is a bunch of fermions and bosons, or superstrings. Just arranged differently.

In the Aristotelian (*weakly* materialist) context, immaterial is often used for “inexistent”, but we have to decide of the ontology first, and then explain other existence in terms of what is assumed. My point is that with mechanism, assuming more than Arithmetic leads to insuperable difficulties in the phenomenologies.

To avoid confusion it is important to keep in mind that I use the term materialism always in the weak-materialist sense: a materialist is a believe/assumer in Matter, and an immaterialist is someone agnostic if not rather skeptical about such Matter (not someone believing in some “immaterialist fantaisies”).

And by a scientist, I mean someone who does not object to the use of elementary arithmetic. For example, he does not change his kids’ schools when he learned that they are taught elementary arithmetic. That is the amount needed for realism, even if set theory and richer theory are needed to get the gist of the phenomenologies, which are the interesting things.

Matter is not a simple or clear concept. The only progress is that with quantum mechanics, physicists are aware that matter is not a simple and clear concept. I do love looking many video in cosmology, but I do think that the physical universe has a simple purely mathematical reason, and the recent explosion of our ignorance in arithmetic (like illustrated by the theory of degrees of unsolvability) makes me just questioning all metaphysics, and more open to the simplest one, like the (Neo)Pythagorean one.

Bruno

@philipthrift 

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[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 4:52 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> Nobody ever used the Turing Machine as an architecture for computation,

Everybody's architecture for computation without exception can be reduced to a Turing Machine and nobody has ever found anything simpler, aka more fundamental, that could be implemented physically.     

 

> outside of theoretical domains. Not even Turing himself, for the simple reason that it would be terribly inefficient.

Yes, obviously a paper tape would be very very slow so for economic reasons a vast number of bells and whistles are added, but those are all just a matter of engineering convenience, so if you're just talking about philosophy, and for most on this list that's all they're interested in, then they are all irrelevant.  

> Computers to this day mostly follow the Von Neumann architecture,

Most do some don't, such as Dataflow Machines or Graph Reduction Machines. But talking about the difference between Von Neumann architecture and non Von Neumann architecture is like talking about the difference between a steam engine and a gasoline engine while Turing was talking about the laws of thermodynamics. 

> It seems clear to me that Turing Machines, Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are just implementations of something which is purely abstract -- computation.

Turing Machines are in a more fundamental category than the other two. All Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Machines but not all Turing Machines are Van Neumann Machines or GPUs.

> You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations,

All theories need experimental conformation and the above theory has been tested many times and the results have always been negative, people have dreamed of computation but nothing happens, the law of the conservation of mass/energy has always remained true regardless of dreams.

 John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 6:18 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been perplexed for 50 years how the idea of immaterialism (that there is something other than matter) came to be.

If matter (nouns) exist then something other than matter must exist too, namely the relationship between matter (adjectives). I think both John Clark and Philip Thrift are adjectives not nouns despite what our grade school teachers told us.

John K Clark

[Telmo Menezes]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 16:01, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 4:52 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> Nobody ever used the Turing Machine as an architecture for computation,

Everybody's architecture for computation without exception can be reduced to a Turing Machine and nobody has ever found anything simpler, aka more fundamental, that could be implemented physically.

Well... meet the domino computer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_computer

     

 

> outside of theoretical domains. Not even Turing himself, for the simple reason that it would be terribly inefficient.

Yes, obviously a paper tape would be very very slow so for economic reasons a vast number of bells and whistles are added, but those are all just a matter of engineering convenience, so if you're just talking about philosophy, and for most on this list that's all they're interested in, then they are all irrelevant.  

> Computers to this day mostly follow the Von Neumann architecture,

Most do some don't, such as Dataflow Machines or Graph Reduction Machines. But talking about the difference between Von Neumann architecture and non Von Neumann architecture is like talking about the difference between a steam engine and a gasoline engine while Turing was talking about the laws of thermodynamics. 

Exactly, that is my point.

> It seems clear to me that Turing Machines, Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are just implementations of something which is purely abstract -- computation.

Turing Machines are in a more fundamental category than the other two. All Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Machines but not all Turing Machines are Van Neumann Machines or GPUs.

The only equivalence used in Computer Science is in completeness: Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Complete, in the sense that they are as general a computational device as a Turing Machine. I never heard or read anyone before claiming that Turing Machines are physically more fundamental, in the sense that they are at some root of a category to which modern digital computers belong. My question to you then, is this:

How do you decide if something is a Turing Machine or not? Is Domino a Turing Machine? What about my brain? What about the billiard ball computer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-ball_computer

> You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations,

All theories need experimental conformation and the above theory has been tested many times and the results have always been negative, people have dreamed of computation but nothing happens, the law of the conservation of mass/energy has always remained true regardless of dreams.

Most people can remember having dreams, I imagine you can too. Then you know that your brain is somehow capable of generating a "fake" reality just for you. So can you ever prove to yourself that you are not dreaming?

Telmo.

 John K Clark

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[Philip Thrift]

"Relationism" (reality is relations. or relations are real in their own right) is another immaterialism. Relations (adjectives) are merely mathematically contrived fictions.

Anyone who says relations are existing immaterial entities couldn't possible criticize Bruno Marchal's theory.

@philipthrift

[spudb...@aol.com]

Ok philosophy head games. 

We come dancing back to Cartesian Dualism. This is not the way Rene DesCarte would've contanenced me doing this, but think that there are in this happy multiverse, or, awesomely big universe, diff sectors of matter. There! One emerged before the other. How might we prove this? Physics and astronomy, tests, and observation. Now, ask yourself does it work it intellectually and emotionally for thee??  These are the sorts of things that cause you and your compadres here on Everything, to draw breath. 

For me (and nobody else on this group) Research or conjectures on all this, either produces a afterlife which satisfies me, or it does other pleasing things, like being a new energy source, or make space travel easy, or make galactic travel at impossible speeds. For the other members of this forum, the ones with the 1000 kiloton cerebrums, it does not. You guys do math, or logic, or physics, or other things the cerebral do, when the come out and play. To which I say, Rock on Garth!

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[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 1:33 PM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> How do you decide if something is a Turing Machine or not? 

X is a Turing Machine if and only if for any given input to X there exists a Turing Machine that will produce the same output as X does with the same input.

> Is Domino a Turing Machine? 

A Domino computer is.

> What about my brain?

It's a Turing Machine.

 > What about the billiard ball computer?

It's a Turing Machine.

> The only equivalence used in Computer Science is in completeness: Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Complete, in the sense that they are as general a computational device as a Turing Machine.

Only?! If X is Turing Complete then a Turing Machine can emulate X and X can emulate a Turing Machine.

> I never heard or read anyone before claiming that Turing Machines are physically more fundamental,

Do you know of anything simpler that can make calculations than read a square, erase what you read and then print either a 0 or a 1 on it depending on your state, then change into another state depending on what you read, then either halt or move right or left and read another square.

 John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 1:37:30 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

Do you know of anything simpler that can make calculations than read a square, erase what you read and then print either a 0 or a 1 on it depending on your state, then change into another state depending on what you read, then either halt or move right or left and read another square.

 John K Clark

Maybe a combinator logic machine:

Common combinators in JavaScript

https://gist.github.com/Avaq/1f0636ec5c8d6aed2e45

@philipthrift

[Dan Sonik]

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 12:33:05 PM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 16:01, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 4:52 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> Nobody ever used the Turing Machine as an architecture for computation,

Everybody's architecture for computation without exception can be reduced to a Turing Machine and nobody has ever found anything simpler, aka more fundamental, that could be implemented physically.

Well... meet the domino computer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_computer

     

 

> outside of theoretical domains. Not even Turing himself, for the simple reason that it would be terribly inefficient.

Yes, obviously a paper tape would be very very slow so for economic reasons a vast number of bells and whistles are added, but those are all just a matter of engineering convenience, so if you're just talking about philosophy, and for most on this list that's all they're interested in, then they are all irrelevant.  

> Computers to this day mostly follow the Von Neumann architecture,

Most do some don't, such as Dataflow Machines or Graph Reduction Machines. But talking about the difference between Von Neumann architecture and non Von Neumann architecture is like talking about the difference between a steam engine and a gasoline engine while Turing was talking about the laws of thermodynamics. 

Exactly, that is my point.

> It seems clear to me that Turing Machines, Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are just implementations of something which is purely abstract -- computation.

Turing Machines are in a more fundamental category than the other two. All Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Machines but not all Turing Machines are Van Neumann Machines or GPUs.

The only equivalence used in Computer Science is in completeness: Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Complete, in the sense that they are as general a computational device as a Turing Machine. I never heard or read anyone before claiming that Turing Machines are physically more fundamental, in the sense that they are at some root of a category to which modern digital computers belong. My question to you then, is this:

How do you decide if something is a Turing Machine or not? Is Domino a Turing Machine? What about my brain? What about the billiard ball computer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-ball_computer

> You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations,

All theories need experimental conformation and the above theory has been tested many times and the results have always been negative, people have dreamed of computation but nothing happens, the law of the conservation of mass/energy has always remained true regardless of dreams.

Most people can remember having dreams, I imagine you can too. Then you know that your brain is somehow capable of generating a "fake" reality just for you. So can you ever prove to yourself that you are not dreaming?

Telmo.

This takes a bit of practice to develop the habit, but if you do it long enough you can actually "wake up" in your dreams and become lucid. (And conversely, prove you are not dreaming when awake.)  During your day to day wakeful life, three or four times a day, look at a piece of text... then look away for a few seconds, then look back at the text. When awake, the text you read will be the same on each sample, because the text is "real" and exists. In your dream, if you do this, you will find that the text changes each time you try to read it again. Probably because your brain cannot make a persistent, law like reality on its own, but needs something (i.e. reality) to remain consistent. Try it! It's fun... 

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[Brent Meeker]

On 7/19/2019 3:18 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 3:52:05 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

...

You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave with modern language.

Telmo.

I've been perplexed for 50 years how the idea of immaterialism (that there is something other than matter) came to be.

The so-called abstractions - like the definition of the Turing machine you read in a textbook - are just fictions. But fictions can be useful. Maybe there should be a better word for useful fictions. Math is as good as any, for part of that anyway.

The old guys, Thales, Democritus, Epicurus, were curious about matter. Where did this bizarre trend towards immaterialism come from?

It came from death; from observing that there was no difference between a dead man and that same man who was alive a few minutes ago except that the former was missing something, some animation, some spirit, some magic sauce.   And this thing seemed to go temporarily missing if you took a blow to the head.  It didn't seem to be matter because it couldn't be detected leaving the body at death.   And yet you could lie perfectly still and still have this internal narrative and feelings.

Brent

The original sin of philosophy occurred when mathematical and mental (and computational) entities were abstracted away from their material home.

@pphilipthrift

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[Brent Meeker]

On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
> I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and
> arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot
> doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is
> immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect
> consciousness.

That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious,
unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day.  The myth that
consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be
understood) and part an exaggerated demand for understanding. There's no
scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron
either.  But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory
that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering
about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement
and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 4:51:22 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 7/19/2019 3:18 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 3:52:05 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

...

You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave with modern language.

Telmo.

I've been perplexed for 50 years how the idea of immaterialism (that there is something other than matter) came to be.

The so-called abstractions - like the definition of the Turing machine you read in a textbook - are just fictions. But fictions can be useful. Maybe there should be a better word for useful fictions. Math is as good as any, for part of that anyway.

The old guys, Thales, Democritus, Epicurus, were curious about matter. Where did this bizarre trend towards immaterialism come from?

It came from death; from observing that there was no difference between a dead man and that same man who was alive a few minutes ago except that the former was missing something, some animation, some spirit, some magic sauce.   And this thing seemed to go temporarily missing if you took a blow to the head.  It didn't seem to be matter because it couldn't be detected leaving the body at death.   And yet you could lie perfectly still and still have this internal narrative and feelings.

Brent

The original sin of philosophy occurred when mathematical and mental (and computational) entities were abstracted away from their material home.

@pphilipthrift

-

Epicurus was an advancement soon forgotten:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/

Had a description of nature based on atomistic materialism, and a naturalistic account of evolution.

On the basis of a radical materialism which dispensed with transcendent entities such as the Platonic Ideas or Forms, he could disprove the possibility of the soul’s survival after death, and hence the prospect of punishment in the afterlife.

Soul atoms are particularly fine and are distributed throughout the body, and it is by means of them that we have sensations and the experience of pain and pleasure. Body without soul atoms is unconscious and inert, and when the atoms of the body are disarranged so that it can no longer support conscious life, the soul atoms are scattered and no longer retain the capacity for sensation.

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 3:14 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Do you know of anything simpler that can make calculations than read a square, erase what you read and then print either a 0 or a 1 on it depending on your state, then change into another state depending on what you read, then either halt or move right or left and read another square.

John K Clark

> Maybe a combinator logic machine:

Common combinators in JavaScript

https://gist.github.com/Avaq/1f0636ec5c8d6aed2e45

Where is the physical implementation?  JavaScript needs hardware, without that it's just a sequence of squiggles that can't calculate 2+2. A Turing Machine IS hardware.

 John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TuringMachine.html

"A Turing machine is a theoretical computing machine invented by Alan Turing (1937) to serve as an idealized model for mathematical calculation." 

A Turing machine is a mathematical entity,

i.e., a Turing machine is a fictional object.

@philipthrift 

[Brent Meeker]

On 7/19/2019 9:00 AM, John Clark wrote:

Turing Machines are in a more fundamental category than the other two. All Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Machines but not all Turing Machines are Van Neumann Machines or GPUs.

They are only Turing Machine if you define "Turing Machines" by what functions that can be computed, i.e. the extensional definition that is abstracted away from the procedure of computing.  In terms of the procedure of computing, the procedure defined by Alan Turing is different from that of von Neumann computers and GPUs.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 7/19/2019 3:14 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

Soul atoms are particularly fine and are distributed throughout the body, and it is by means of them that we have sensations and the experience of pain and pleasure. Body without soul atoms is unconscious and inert, and when the atoms of the body are disarranged so that it can no longer support conscious life, the soul atoms are scattered and no longer retain the capacity for sensation.

Where do they go under anesthesia?

Brent

[Samiya Illias]

On 20-Jul-2019, at 5:24 AM, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 7/19/2019 3:14 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

Soul atoms are particularly fine and are distributed throughout the body, and it is by means of them that we have sensations and the experience of pain and pleasure. Body without soul atoms is unconscious and inert, and when the atoms of the body are disarranged so that it can no longer support conscious life, the soul atoms are scattered and no longer retain the capacity for sensation.

Excerpt from Human: Body or Soul? 

https://signsandscience.blogspot.com/2017/05/human-body-or-soul.html 

Preamble

Who are we? Are we our body or are we our soul or is it a combination of the two? Do we have an existence independent of our body? When we die, do we leave the body, or does life leave us? Who is the I we are so fond of? What are we made of? What do the scriptures say? 

The Bible and The Quran both inform us that we are made of dust: 

[Bible, Genesis 3:19] In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

[Al-Quran, ar-Rum 30:20] And among His Signs (is) that He created you from dust then behold! You (are) human beings dispersing. 

We all know that we have a body that is composed of earthly materials.  Religious people generally believe that they are a SOUL that is temporarily staying in the body.  Atheists do not believe in the existence of a SOUL.  

Jews, Christians and Muslims (People of the Book) shroud and bury the body of their dead. Hindus (Polytheists) burn many of their dead and crush the remaining bones into dust. More on Funeral Rites in References and Further Reading at the end of this post. 

From the Bible, we learn that the prophets Jacob and Joseph were concerned about their body after their death, and asked for it to NOT to be left in Egypt. From a saying attributed to Prophet Muhammad, we learn that breaking the bone of a dead person is similar to breaking the bone of a living person ... 

.

.

.

REST IN PEACE 

What does the phrase Rest in Peace really mean? What are we wishing or praying for the dead? It seems that there is an intermediate existence, after death and before resurrection, in the graves: 

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا لَا تَتَوَلَّوْا قَوْمًا غَضِبَ اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِمْ

 قَدْ يَئِسُوا مِنَ الْآخِرَةِ كَمَا يَئِسَ الْكُفَّارُ مِنْ أَصْحَابِ الْقُبُورِ

O you who believe! do not make friends with a people with whom Allah is wroth; indeed they despair of the hereafter as the unbelievers despair of those in tombs. 

 [Al-Quran 60:13, Translator: Shakir] 

Our earthly residence is further confirmed:

Have not We made the earth a receptacle (For the) living and (the) dead, 

[Al-Quran 77:25 – 26] 

And not equal (are) the living and not the dead. Indeed, Allah causes to hear whom He wills, and not you can make hear (those) who (are) in the graves. 

[Al-Quran 35:22] 

From Genesis 47:29 – 30, we know that Jacob asked to be buried in Canaan. Why not Egypt where he died? 

From Genesis 50:25 we learn that Jacob’s son Joseph asked for his bones to be taken away from Egypt when God liberates the children of Israel. Why? 

From the Quran, we learn that the Pharaoh, who drowned in Exodus, and his people are routinely shown the Fire: 

The Fire; they are exposed to it morning and evening. And (the) Day (will be) established the Hour, "Cause to enter (the) people (of) Firaun (in the) severest punishment." 

[Al-Quran 40:46]  

Q102 (Surah at-Takathur) informs us that we will surely see Hellfire when we reach the graves. Q19:68-72 informs us that each one of us must come to the Fire. From Q7:40 we learn that the guilty will not be able to escape and ascend to the gates of the sky/heaven until the camel passes through the eye of the needle, and from Q15:44 we learn that Hell has seven gates. There are seven permanent lava lakes on Earth. (A video of a lava lake at National Geographic) We learn from Q18:98-100 that when the promise comes to pass, Hell will be exposed to view. Several ayaat across the Quran inform us that the mountains will be removed then. Q78:20-22 explicitly states that when that happens, Hell is lying in wait.   

Lo! as for those whom the angels take (in death) while they wrong their NAFS, (the angels) will ask: In what were ye engaged? They will say: We were oppressed in the land. (The angels) will say: Was not Allah's earth spacious that ye could have migrated therein? As for such, their habitation will be hell, an evil journey's end; Except the feeble among men, and the women, and the children, who are unable to devise a plan and are not shown a way. As for such, it may be that Allah will pardon them. Allah is ever Clement, Forgiving. Whoso migrateth for the cause of Allah will find much refuge and abundance in the earth, and whoso forsaketh his home, a fugitive unto Allah and His messenger, and death overtaketh him, his reward is then incumbent on Allah. Allah is ever Forgiving, Merciful. 

[Al-Quran 4:97-100, Translator: Pickthall] 

...

.

.

.

[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jul 2019, at 14:40, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 6:28:10 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

...

By assuming the existence of (primary) Matter, you lose the possibility to explain it, and you loss the mean to use the mechanist theory of mind, without providing a conceptually clear non-mechanist theory of mind.

Bruno

If a mathematical/logical theory can explain experience (the catchall for consciousness, selfness, qualia, etc.) then that is that and we an all go home.

The experience is explained in the CTM. It is a semantical fixed point. It explains why machine will introduce a word to describe a truth that they know but cannot prove to others or even define in any 3p way.

(If we didn't have experience, then we wouldn't be worrying about in the first place!)

But if it can't, then it is something itself needs a home, and that home is matter,

But the whole point is that it can. Machines have already a quite rich theory of consciousness, and even God when taken in the original large sense (not in the fairy tales sense which is con artistry).

Bruno

(Unless experiences are ghosts from an immaterial realm.)

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

That makes sense. We are not numbers, but relative numbers, that is number in relation (assuming Digital Mechanism).

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jul 2019, at 19:31, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 16:01, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 4:52 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> Nobody ever used the Turing Machine as an architecture for computation,

Everybody's architecture for computation without exception can be reduced to a Turing Machine and nobody has ever found anything simpler, aka more fundamental, that could be implemented physically.

Well... meet the domino computer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_computer

     

 

> outside of theoretical domains. Not even Turing himself, for the simple reason that it would be terribly inefficient.

Yes, obviously a paper tape would be very very slow so for economic reasons a vast number of bells and whistles are added, but those are all just a matter of engineering convenience, so if you're just talking about philosophy, and for most on this list that's all they're interested in, then they are all irrelevant.  

> Computers to this day mostly follow the Von Neumann architecture,

Most do some don't, such as Dataflow Machines or Graph Reduction Machines. But talking about the difference between Von Neumann architecture and non Von Neumann architecture is like talking about the difference between a steam engine and a gasoline engine while Turing was talking about the laws of thermodynamics. 

Exactly, that is my point.

> It seems clear to me that Turing Machines, Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are just implementations of something which is purely abstract -- computation.

Turing Machines are in a more fundamental category than the other two. All Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Machines but not all Turing Machines are Van Neumann Machines or GPUs.

The only equivalence used in Computer Science is in completeness: Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Complete, in the sense that they are as general a computational device as a Turing Machine. I never heard or read anyone before claiming that Turing Machines are physically more fundamental, in the sense that they are at some root of a category to which modern digital computers belong. My question to you then, is this:

How do you decide if something is a Turing Machine or not? Is Domino a Turing Machine? What about my brain? What about the billiard ball computer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-ball_computer

In a sense, the Turing machine is the most abstract way to see a (information treating) machine, making it possible to see any such machine as a Turing machine, That is what convince Gödel, as the human themselves is directly a Turing machine unless we suppose that there is no substitution level. This is due to the fact that we have simple label for the state of the machine, and that state can be a brain state, or a combinator, or whatever.

I remind that a Turing machine has a set of symbols for the state, q1, q2, q3, etc.. defining what the machine do in each state when in front of any inputs. That is very general.

But of course you are right, that does not make the machine fundamentally physical, on the contrary, it makes it more abstract, and as such, as much arithmetical than physical (if that word could be defined without Mechanism).

Bruno

> You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations,

All theories need experimental conformation and the above theory has been tested many times and the results have always been negative, people have dreamed of computation but nothing happens, the law of the conservation of mass/energy has always remained true regardless of dreams.

Most people can remember having dreams, I imagine you can too. Then you know that your brain is somehow capable of generating a "fake" reality just for you. So can you ever prove to yourself that you are not dreaming?

Telmo.

 John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

Excellent point :)

And I believe in love and hate, and I believe those are not made of fermions and bosons, despite they can incarnate love and hate situations, but number relations can too (necessarily of we assume digital mechanism).

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jul 2019, at 20:36, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 1:33 PM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> How do you decide if something is a Turing Machine or not? 

X is a Turing Machine if and only if for any given input to X there exists a Turing Machine that will produce the same output as X does with the same input.

That works for a lambda expression to. But a Turing machine is NOT (literally) a lambda expression. 

A Turing machine is a set of quadruplets.

You confuse the mathematical notion of Turing machine, with its general sense, which can be sued to say that any digital machine can be seen as a Turing machine, by labelling all its states, and construct the corresponding finite table (quadruplets), but we can do this for any Turing complete formalism, even if it is more pedagogical to use Turing’s formalisme for this.

> Is Domino a Turing Machine? 

A Domino computer is.

> What about my brain?

It's a Turing Machine.

 > What about the billiard ball computer?

It's a Turing Machine.

> The only equivalence used in Computer Science is in completeness: Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Complete, in the sense that they are as general a computational device as a Turing Machine.

Only?! If X is Turing Complete then a Turing Machine can emulate X and X can emulate a Turing Machine.

All universal machine/formalisme can emulate all universal machine/formalism.

> I never heard or read anyone before claiming that Turing Machines are physically more fundamental,

Do you know of anything simpler that can make calculations than read a square, erase what you read and then print either a 0 or a 1 on it depending on your state, then change into another state depending on what you read, then either halt or move right or left and read another square.

Yes, combinators are simpler, and lambda expression too. It is just simple substation. Can you imagine something simpler that 

K x y = x

S x y z = x z (y z)

?

Bruno

 John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

Yes, or lambda, or the game of life.

Also, simplicity does not make something more physical, but arguably more arithmetical, more close to the Turing universal system made from natural numbers and just addition and multiplication (and logic! A simple adding+multiplying machine is not Turing universal, it lacks the logic). Combinators use only Kxy = x and Sxyz = xz(yz), no need of logic!

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Telmo Menezes]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 22:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>
>
> On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
> > I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and
> > arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot
> > doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is
> > immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect
> > consciousness.
>
> That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious,
> unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day.

Yes, but all of this doctor-stuff takes place in the theater of your own consciousness. There is no evidence of any reality beyond conscious experience. We only know about the first person, not the third. The problem with the materialist / emergentist framing of consciousness is that it demotes what is directly known in favor of a model (third person objective reality), of which we don't really know the ontological status.

> The myth that
> consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be
> understood)

I know, this idea that we have been going from a process of humbling experiences, by discovering that the earth is not the center of the universe, and then how infinitesimally small we are compared to the all shebang, and then that we are just animals, etc. Several of my friends are very attached to this idea. They love to think poetically about "how insignificant they feel" when they realize how small we are, how devoid of anything special. I have to be honest, I don't particularly care for any of this stuff one way or the other.

I don't know if we are special. Compared to what? All I say is that all that appears to exist, exists within my conscious experience. The rest, I can always doubt. What is this "I" I refer to? Also don't know. I suspect it's the same "I" you refer to, but in a different branch, in a different set of circumstances. These things that I am saying are tautologies, trivial observations. The fact that some people find them so absurd or perplexing makes me thing that there is religious belief involved, even though the religion in question does not necessarily have a name.

> and part an exaggerated demand for understanding. There's no
> scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron
> either.  But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory
> that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering
> about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement
> and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.

The idea of a wave function of an electron, scientific instruments, detectors, mystery mongering, all of this takes place -- at least for me, and I know of nothing else -- within the phenomenon I am curious about. That's what makes it special.

Telmo.

> Brent

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jul 2019, at 23:30, Dan Sonik <dania...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 12:33:05 PM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 16:01, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 4:52 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> Nobody ever used the Turing Machine as an architecture for computation,

Everybody's architecture for computation without exception can be reduced to a Turing Machine and nobody has ever found anything simpler, aka more fundamental, that could be implemented physically.

Well... meet the domino computer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_computer

     

 

> outside of theoretical domains. Not even Turing himself, for the simple reason that it would be terribly inefficient.

Yes, obviously a paper tape would be very very slow so for economic reasons a vast number of bells and whistles are added, but those are all just a matter of engineering convenience, so if you're just talking about philosophy, and for most on this list that's all they're interested in, then they are all irrelevant.  

> Computers to this day mostly follow the Von Neumann architecture,

Most do some don't, such as Dataflow Machines or Graph Reduction Machines. But talking about the difference between Von Neumann architecture and non Von Neumann architecture is like talking about the difference between a steam engine and a gasoline engine while Turing was talking about the laws of thermodynamics. 

Exactly, that is my point.

> It seems clear to me that Turing Machines, Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are just implementations of something which is purely abstract -- computation.

Turing Machines are in a more fundamental category than the other two. All Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Machines but not all Turing Machines are Van Neumann Machines or GPUs.

The only equivalence used in Computer Science is in completeness: Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Complete, in the sense that they are as general a computational device as a Turing Machine. I never heard or read anyone before claiming that Turing Machines are physically more fundamental, in the sense that they are at some root of a category to which modern digital computers belong. My question to you then, is this:

How do you decide if something is a Turing Machine or not? Is Domino a Turing Machine? What about my brain? What about the billiard ball computer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-ball_computer

> You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations,

All theories need experimental conformation and the above theory has been tested many times and the results have always been negative, people have dreamed of computation but nothing happens, the law of the conservation of mass/energy has always remained true regardless of dreams.

Most people can remember having dreams, I imagine you can too. Then you know that your brain is somehow capable of generating a "fake" reality just for you. So can you ever prove to yourself that you are not dreaming?

Telmo.

This takes a bit of practice to develop the habit, but if you do it long enough you can actually "wake up" in your dreams and become lucid.

See my long text “Conscience and Mechanism” which contains a full chapter on dreams, lucid dreaming, contra lucid dreaming.

I note my dreams since 1970, and have train myself in Lucid dreaming. You can augment the frequency, but the more you do it, the more you augment the frequency of “contra-lucid” dreams, which are dreams where you convince yourself that you are awake. 

In fact, at some point, almost all lucid dreams are followed by a “false awakening”. At some point, every lucid dreams where followed by my writing the dreams in my diary and then waking up again, and writing the dream, and waking up again, and this in sometimes long succession of false awakening, where each time I was about sure to be “at last really awake.

So, we can’t use lucidity to convince ourself that we can know in any way that we are awake.

So, we can know that we are dreaming, but we cannot know that we are awake, except in the weal Theatetus sense of believing to be awaken and being awaken.

(And conversely, prove you are not dreaming when awake.) 

Which is what I am just denying. 

During your day to day wakeful life, three or four times a day, look at a piece of text... then look away for a few seconds, then look back at the text. When awake, the text you read will be the same on each sample, because the text is "real" and exists. In your dream, if you do this, you will find that the text changes each time you try to read it again. Probably because your brain cannot make a persistent, law like reality on its own, but needs something (i.e. reality) to remain consistent. Try it! It's fun… 

It is very fun, but the brain can fail you completely. In one dream, I was dying so badly that I conclude that I was not dreaming, and that I was in the usual so real reality (just because I did not fly well!).

Also, I have done the experience with “looking at a text”, and conclude I was obviously awake, and it is only after the (real I suppose) awakening that I notice that the text was changing and even in a very bizarre way, but in the dream, that seems boringly normal and an evidence I was awake.

We can do dream which are utterly irrational. In a dream I panicked because I thought I found a totally convincing proof that the modus ponens was not valid, and the reason was the shape and color of the curtain. Yet, in other dreams, I found correct proof of some mathematical statement. All cases are possible.

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

> On 20 Jul 2019, at 00:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>> I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect consciousness.
>
> That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious, unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day. The myth that consciousness is a mystery is part hubris

Then mechanism cures that “hubris”. It could be hubris at Descartes’ time, where many thought that consciousness was a human thing, and animals have no souls. But today, many attribute consciousness to many animals, and mechanism makes the point that consciousness begins with Turing universality, and self-consciousness with Gödel-Löbianity.

> (we are too special to be understood) and part an exaggerated demand for understanding.

With mechanism, consciousness is simple, as it is explained by the distinction between all modes of the self that the machine can be aware of. The problem which remains is only in deriving the “stable persistent and sharable dreams” from the web of dreams in arithmetic (which cannot be avoided if you accept to link consciousness to the person related to the relevant computations).

> There's no scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron either. But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.

Assuming a physical reality, but in that case mechanism becomes inconsistent, as I have shown.

Consciousness is simple, because computer science somehow predicts it, easily from incompleteness + Theaetetus.

It is matter the real hard problem in the mind-body problem, but we are not aware of this, a bit like fishes are not well placed to talk on water.

Bruno




>
> Brent

>
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[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Jul 2019, at 00:14, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 4:51:22 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 7/19/2019 3:18 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 3:52:05 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:

...

You insist that nobody has been able to produce a computer without using matter. I agree. What you refuse to consider is the possibility that matter is the dream of computations, and not the other way around. Whatever we are, it seems clear that we are bound to perceive reality as made of matter, but it doesn't follow that matter is the ultimate reality. This is just Plato's Cave with modern language.

Telmo.

I've been perplexed for 50 years how the idea of immaterialism (that there is something other than matter) came to be.

The so-called abstractions - like the definition of the Turing machine you read in a textbook - are just fictions. But fictions can be useful. Maybe there should be a better word for useful fictions. Math is as good as any, for part of that anyway.

The old guys, Thales, Democritus, Epicurus, were curious about matter. Where did this bizarre trend towards immaterialism come from?

It came from death; from observing that there was no difference between a dead man and that same man who was alive a few minutes ago except that the former was missing something, some animation, some spirit, some magic sauce.   And this thing seemed to go temporarily missing if you took a blow to the head.  It didn't seem to be matter because it couldn't be detected leaving the body at death.   And yet you could lie perfectly still and still have this internal narrative and feelings.

Brent

The original sin of philosophy occurred when mathematical and mental (and computational) entities were abstracted away from their material home.

@pphilipthrift

-

Epicurus was an advancement soon forgotten:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/

Had a description of nature based on atomistic materialism, and a naturalistic account of evolution.

On the basis of a radical materialism which dispensed with transcendent entities such as the Platonic Ideas or Forms, he could disprove the possibility of the soul’s survival after death, and hence the prospect of punishment in the afterlife.

The idea that there is no afterlife looks like wishful thinking to me. I tend to not believe that God is a punisher, but with mechanism the afterlife could be very close to the state you get to when dying, and dying under totoure might send you in the arithmetical help. We can hope of jumps though, but nothing is obvious here, and mechanism makes torture more bad than it already is.

Also, what is radical materialism? You do need relation between the material objects to get machines and organisms, and I am not sure your matter theory can work without using some (immaterial) ideas.

Soul atoms are particularly fine and are distributed throughout the body, and it is by means of them that we have sensations and the experience of pain and pleasure. Body without soul atoms is unconscious and inert, and when the atoms of the body are disarranged so that it can no longer support conscious life, the soul atoms are scattered and no longer retain the capacity for sensation.

This looks like Lavoisier atoms of cold and hot.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

Of course not. The definition given by Turing is that A Turing machine is a quintuplets, but se use simpler quadruplets since, and usually with only two symbols for the tape symbols alphabet.

You can see an hardware computer as a abstract immaterial Turing machine implemented in a subset of the physical law, but that does not make the Turing machine notion into a physical notion, only into a physically implementable notion.

Bruno

 John K Clark

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[Telmo Menezes]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 18:37, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 1:33 PM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> How do you decide if something is a Turing Machine or not? 

X is a Turing Machine if and only if for any given input to X there exists a Turing Machine that will produce the same output as X does with the same input.

Ok, but then you can replace "Turing Machine" above with "von Neumann Machine" or "GPU" and it still works.

> Is Domino a Turing Machine? 

A Domino computer is.

> What about my brain?

It's a Turing Machine.

 > What about the billiard ball computer?

It's a Turing Machine.

> The only equivalence used in Computer Science is in completeness: Van Neumann Machines and GPUs are Turing Complete, in the sense that they are as general a computational device as a Turing Machine.

Only?! If X is Turing Complete then a Turing Machine can emulate X and X can emulate a Turing Machine.

Yes, but the Turing Machine has no special status in relation to any other Turing complete system.

> I never heard or read anyone before claiming that Turing Machines are physically more fundamental,

Do you know of anything simpler that can make calculations than read a square, erase what you read and then print either a 0 or a 1 on it depending on your state, then change into another state depending on what you read, then either halt or move right or left and read another square.

Simple in what sense? I can think of physical implementations of computers that simpler in the sense that they do not require some sort of writing device, motors to move the tape, some sort of sensor to read the state, then some mechanism to make the decision on how to activate the motors and writing device. I gave you one: Domino. It only requires objects falling over other objects. Or the billiard ball computer, which only requires the physical collision of balls inside tubes. I'm sure it is possible to create computational surfaces made of lattices of very simple molecules. A network of thershold-activated units that allows for backward links is Turing complete.

The Turing Machine is not the simplest implementation of a physical computer, it is (perhaps?) the simplest implementation that uses explicit memory and sequential computations. These two things make it easier for us to reason about its computations, and that is all. It is not the "fundamental" computer.

Telmo.

 John K Clark

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[Philip Thrift]

Do the body (physical) atoms of the brain work exactly the same when the brain/body is under anesthesia as before?

The soul (psychical) atoms are working only when the body (physical) atoms are working, according to Epicurus.

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

On Saturday, July 20, 2019 at 2:58:02 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 19 Jul 2019, at 14:40, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 6:28:10 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

...

By assuming the existence of (primary) Matter, you lose the possibility to explain it, and you loss the mean to use the mechanist theory of mind, without providing a conceptually clear non-mechanist theory of mind.

Bruno

If a mathematical/logical theory can explain experience (the catchall for consciousness, selfness, qualia, etc.) then that is that and we an all go home.

The experience is explained in the CTM. It is a semantical fixed point. It explains why machine will introduce a word to describe a truth that they know but cannot prove to others or even define in any 3p way.

(If we didn't have experience, then we wouldn't be worrying about in the first place!)

But if it can't, then it is something itself needs a home, and that home is matter,

But the whole point is that it can. Machines have already a quite rich theory of consciousness, and even God when taken in the original large sense (not in the fairy tales sense which is con artistry).

Bruno

(Unless experiences are ghosts from an immaterial realm.)

The "machinist" approach to (theory of) consciousness is the one taken at MIRI and CSAIL/MIT, with higher-order (modal) programming language theory, theorem provers, and fixed-point (monadic) semantics.

I think it's ultimately incomplete. 

@philiptrhift

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 6:33 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> A Turing machine is a mathematical entity,

According to my dictionary a "entity" is an independent thing with distinct properties, in this case one of those properties is it can be implemented PHYSICALLY, a property that a sequence of squiggles in Lambda Calculus does not have.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 4:18 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> X is a Turing Machine if and only if for any given input to X there exists a Turing Machine that will produce the same output as X does with the same input.

> That works for a lambda expression to.

No it does not work because machines have inputs and outputs but "lambda expressions" have neither and are just a sequence of squiggles that never change and mean nothing unless a brain made of matter that obeys the laws of physics is added into the mix.  

> You confuse the mathematical notion of Turing machine, with its general sense,

You confuse the fact that a "general sense" can't *do* anything but a machine can. And a paper tape and read/write head doesn't know or need to know anything about mathematical notation other than 1 and 0. It just knows it can print one of those two symbols and then either halt or move right or left; and that's all it needs.

>All universal machine/formalisme can emulate all universal machine/formalism.

What in the world is machine/formalism?! It sounds to me like big/little or possible/impossible or "this statement is false".

>> Do you know of anything simpler that can make calculations than read a square, erase what you read and then print either a 0 or a 1 on it depending on your state, then change into another state depending on what you read, then either halt or move right or left and read another square.

> Yes, combinators are simpler, and lambda expression too. It is just simple substation. Can you imagine something simpler that 

K x y = x

S x y z = x z (y z)

?

Yes, I can indeed imagine something simpler than that, seventeen times simpler to be exact, it is this:

*

I only used one ASCII character while you used 17; my character can't calculate anything but neither can your 17.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 4:54 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> Where is the physical implementation?  JavaScript needs hardware, without that it's just a sequence of squiggles that can't calculate 2+2. A Turing Machine IS hardware.

> Of course not. The definition given by Turing is [...]

The operation of a given diesel engine does not change if you change the definition of a diesel engine, and the same holds true for the engine designed by Mr.Turing. 

> a quintuplets

A diesel engine can produce work, the thermodynamic equations describing the operation of a diesel engine can not. A Turing Machine can make calculations, but "a quintuplets" can not.

 

> You can see an hardware computer as a abstract immaterial Turing machine

There is nothing abstract or immaterial about a paper tape and a read/write head, but everything is abstract and immaterial about a sequence of ASCII characters in Lambda calculus.

  John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine :

In his 1948 essay, "Intelligent Machinery", Turing wrote that his machine consisted of:

... an unlimited memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed.

So where is there a Turing machine with an actual infinite tape?

What building is it in that I can go see it?

@philipthrift. 

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 5:21 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

>> X is a Turing Machine if and only if for any given input to X there exists a Turing Machine that will produce the same output as X does with the same input.

> Ok, but then you can replace "Turing Machine" above with "von Neumann Machine" or "GPU" and it still works.

You could if you wanted to because unlike Lambda calculus Turing Machines, von Neumann Machines, and GPUs can all be implemented physically; but if you're only interested in philosophy then you wouldn't want to because you would just be inserting in tons of additional engineering details needed to make computers economically viable.   

Only?! If X is Turing Complete then a Turing Machine can emulate X and X can emulate a Turing Machine.

> Yes, but the Turing Machine has no special status in relation to any other Turing complete system.

It is the simplest Turing complete system.

 

>> Do you know of anything simpler that can make calculations than read a square, erase what you read and then print either a 0 or a 1 on it depending on your state, then change into another state depending on what you read, then either halt or move right or left and read another square.

> Simple in what sense?

The amount of information needed to describe its most basic operation.

> I can think of physical implementations of computers that simpler in the sense that they do not require some sort of writing device,

Any computer is going to need memory to store the program and usually there will be data too, and memory involves reading and writing.

 

> motors to move the tape,

Any computer with more than one bit of memory is going to need to move the place where it reads and writes.

> some sort of sensor to read the state,

Any computer is going to have to have internal states that change, and that change can't be random, the change must depend on its current state and the next bit of information it reads.

 

> then some mechanism to make the decision on how to activate the motors and writing device. I gave you one: Domino. It only requires objects falling over other objects. Or the billiard ball computer, which only requires the physical collision of balls inside tubes.

The position of the billiard balls are the memory and determine the state of the machine, however the 2D position of a billiard ball can't be described by just one bit of information as a square on Turing's tape can be. So a 2D billiard ball computer is considerably more complicated than a 1D paper tape, but if you like the billiard balls that's fine because unlike Lambda Calculus it can be implemented physically.

> I'm sure it is possible to create computational surfaces made of lattices of very simple molecules.

I'm sure of that too but there is nothing simple about molecules or the 2D surface of 3D lattices

> The Turing Machine is not the simplest implementation of a physical computer,

You haven't told me about a simpler one.

> it is (perhaps?) the simplest implementation that uses explicit memory and sequential computations.

If it has no memory and can't make sequential computations then you might have a calculator but you don't have a computer.

 

> These two things make it easier for us to reason about its computations, and that is all. It is not the "fundamental" computer.

If its the easiest for us to understand then it is the simplest, if it can't be made any simpler, any more elementary, without loosing important properties then it is fundamental because that's what the word means.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 9:41 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> So where is there a Turing machine with an actual infinite tape?

There are some things that a Turing Machine can not calculate and nothing else can either, it's been proven that the 1919th Busy Beaver Number can not be calculated even though it's known that the number exists and to is finite. Even the 5th Busy Beaver is probably non computable, we only know the first 4. For a computer to finish a calculation it must halt, so for every Turing Machine that has ever actually performed a calculation only a finite amount of tape has been used. If you programed a Turing Machine to find the 1919th Busy Beaver Number it would indeed use up an infinite amount of tape, but even then it wouldn't find that number.

John K Clark

[Brent Meeker]

On 7/20/2019 1:32 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 22:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>>
>> On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>> I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and
>>> arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot
>>> doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is
>>> immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect
>>> consciousness.
>> That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious,
>> unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day.
> Yes, but all of this doctor-stuff takes place in the theater of your own consciousness. There is no evidence of any reality beyond conscious experience.

So the doctors decision about you has nothing to do with reality. And
you see no problem with that kind of reasoning.  It appears to me that
you are willing to discount everything as evidence for anything else. 
All that counts as evidence is experience and it can only be evidence
for itself.

> We only know about the first person, not the third. The problem with the materialist / emergentist framing of consciousness is that it demotes what is directly known in favor of a model (third person objective reality), of which we don't really know the ontological status.

Ontologies are always model dependent.

>
>> The myth that
>> consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be
>> understood)
> I know, this idea that we have been going from a process of humbling experiences, by discovering that the earth is not the center of the universe, and then how infinitesimally small we are compared to the all shebang, and then that we are just animals, etc. Several of my friends are very attached to this idea. They love to think poetically about "how insignificant they feel" when they realize how small we are, how devoid of anything special. I have to be honest, I don't particularly care for any of this stuff one way or the other.

My point has nothing to do with humbling experiences.  It is that we
think we have understanding of a lot of physics because we can use to
for predictions.  But when a neuroscientist finds he can predict what a
subject will think when a certain brain point is stimulated that's
dismissed as not really evidence for a material basis for thought
because...well thought is special.  My point is that we demand some kind
of intuitively satisfying explanation of thought that is "better" than
mere prediction...yet in all the rest of science we think the ability to
predict means we know reality.  I think both are off the mark.

>
> I don't know if we are special. Compared to what? All I say is that all that appears to exist, exists within my conscious experience. The rest, I can always doubt.

What you doubt is what is inferred from your direct experience.  But
what is this process of inference?  Ideas pop into my consciousness with
no conscious inference of them all the time.

> What is this "I" I refer to? Also don't know. I suspect it's the same "I" you refer to, but in a different branch, in a different set of circumstances. These things that I am saying are tautologies, trivial observations. The fact that some people find them so absurd or perplexing makes me thing that there is religious belief involved, even though the religion in question does not necessarily have a name.
>
>> and part an exaggerated demand for understanding. There's no
>> scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron
>> either.  But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory
>> that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering
>> about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement
>> and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.
> The idea of a wave function of an electron, scientific instruments, detectors, mystery mongering, all of this takes place -- at least for me, and I know of nothing else -- within the phenomenon I am curious about. That's what makes it special.

And I'm suggesting that it is your curiosity that makes it special. If
you were that curious about why the wave function of an electron is what
Dirac said it is, if you were willing to just keep asking "Why?", you'd
find that special too.  Bruno wants this curiosity to bottom out on
computation because he thinks he understands computation.

Brent

>
> Telmo.
>
>> Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 7/20/2019 1:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jul 2019, at 00:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect consciousness.

That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious, unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day.  The myth that consciousness is a mystery is part hubris

Then mechanism cures that “hubris”. It could be hubris at Descartes’ time, where many thought that consciousness was a human thing, and animals have no souls. But today, many attribute consciousness to many animals, and mechanism makes the point that consciousness begins with Turing universality, and self-consciousness with Gödel-Löbianity.

(we are too special to be understood) and part an exaggerated demand for understanding.

With mechanism, consciousness is simple, as it is explained by the distinction between all modes of the self that the machine can be aware of. 

That's where I disagree.  These two propositions cannot both be true:

1) Consciousness is what I directly experience without mediating inference.

2) Consciousness is the Loebian inference implicit in theories of computation (as defined by Bruno).

The problem which remains is only in deriving the “stable persistent and sharable dreams” from the web of dreams in arithmetic (which cannot be avoided if you accept to link consciousness to the person related to the relevant computations). 

What "person"?  Where did "person" come from?

There's no scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron either.  But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.

Assuming a physical reality, 

It's not an "assumption" when it's supported empirically.  You have logicians attitude that everything must start from axioms...which are assumptions.

but in that case mechanism becomes inconsistent, as I have shown.

No. You have argued it.  But your argument also implies that physics is necessary.   So if it shows physics is unreal, that's a contradiction.  So it's a reductio.  A reductio indicates something is wrong with the argument; but it doesn't tell you what.

Consciousness is simple, because computer science somehow predicts it, easily from incompleteness + Theaetetus.

You have assumed that you can define it to be something simple and then you argue that because this simple thing has one or two similarities to the very complex thing we experience as consciousness it is therefore the same thing.  Even though in addition to similarities it also has some glaring differences, such as being timeless, such as knowing all logical inferences, such as existing independent of a matter.

It is matter the real hard problem in the mind-body problem, but we are not aware of this, a bit like fishes are not well placed to talk on water.

You have made it the hard problem of your theory by simplifying away all the observable complexities of consciousness and assuming it is mere Platonic arithmetic.

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

Just like neurons.

I didn't know (Greek) atoms had any parts with which to work.

Brent

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 2:14 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> If matter (nouns) exist then something other than matter must exist too, namely the relationship between matter (adjectives). I think both John Clark and Philip Thrift are adjectives not nouns despite what our grade school teachers told us. John K Clark

> Anyone who says relations are existing immaterial entities couldn't possible criticize Bruno Marchal's theory.

I say if nouns exist then the properties of those nouns (adjectives) must exist too.

Bruno Marchal says nouns don't exist but adjectives do even though they're describing the properties of things that don't exist. 

I say that does not make one bit of sense.

Therefore I have demonstrated you are wrong, it is possible to criticize Bruno Marchal's theory. I just did it.

 John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

Sounds like you are a proponent of noun-adjective dualism!

(Just another version of a material-immaterial dualism.)

@philipthrift 

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 7:58 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Sounds like you are a proponent of noun-adjective dualism!

(Just another version of a material-immaterial dualism.)

Maybe but I really don't know. To tell the truth I haven't been keeping up to date on the latest philosophical bafflegab terminology. But if a dualist is somebody who thinks the words "noun" and "adjective" mean different things then I'm a dualist.  

 John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

But even on elementary arithmetic (and still less on anything less elementary) all effective theories are incomplete.

Incompleteness is rather reassuring, as it play a role for making the machine able to refute a large class of reductionist conception (on machine and numbers). 

Bruno

@philiptrhift

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[Philip Thrift]

In general

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/

Platonism is the view that there exist such things as abstract objects.

(see section on relations)

@philipthrift 

[Bruno Marchal]

Why would a set of quadruplets be more "physically implementable" than a lambda expression?

That makes no sense.  Both are first interpret in a von Neuman-Suze machine, and then physically intepreteted in a some physical boolean+ graph.

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Jul 2019, at 14:55, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 4:18 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> X is a Turing Machine if and only if for any given input to X there exists a Turing Machine that will produce the same output as X does with the same input.

> That works for a lambda expression to.

No it does not work because machines have inputs and outputs but "lambda expressions" have neither

What???

and are just a sequence of squiggles

Of course not, you make your repeated confusion between 2 and “2”, but you could do it for the universa Turing machine quadruplets.

that never change and mean nothing unless a brain made of matter that obeys the laws of physics is added into the mix.  

Only if the whole is blessed with Holy Spirit. 

You cannot invoke a metaphysical commitment in reasoning. 

> You confuse the mathematical notion of Turing machine, with its general sense,

You confuse the fact that a "general sense" can't *do* anything but a machine can. And a paper tape and read/write head doesn't know or need to know anything about mathematical notation other than 1 and 0. It just knows it can print one of those two symbols and then either halt or move right or left; and that's all it needs.

>All universal machine/formalisme can emulate all universal machine/formalism.

What in the world is machine/formalism?! It sounds to me like big/little or possible/impossible or "this statement is false".

>> Do you know of anything simpler that can make calculations than read a square, erase what you read and then print either a 0 or a 1 on it depending on your state, then change into another state depending on what you read, then either halt or move right or left and read another square.

> Yes, combinators are simpler, and lambda expression too. It is just simple substation. Can you imagine something simpler that 

K x y = x

S x y z = x z (y z)

?

Yes, I can indeed imagine something simpler than that, seventeen times simpler to be exact, it is this:

*

I only used one ASCII character while you used 17; my character can't calculate anything but neither can your 17.

In have no idea what you mean by “*”, but above you clearly confuse "K x y = x S x y z = x z (y z)” and K x y = x S x y z = x z (y z).

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

Or about Turing quintuplets. You keep confusing a digital machine, its code, its physical implementation, …

You are confused, and you are confusing the others. All universal machine are finite abstract set of quadruplets. The infinite tape and head “ are sort of super to make it easy to understand that the formalism imitate well a human doing a computation with a pen and paper.

All Digital machine/number are finite object. The universal Turing machine is one special finite set of quadruplets. See Turing’ papers, or any books on this.

Bruno

  John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

> On 20 Jul 2019, at 21:52, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 7/20/2019 1:32 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 19, 2019, at 22:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:
>>>
>>> On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>>> I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and
>>>> arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot
>>>> doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is
>>>> immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect
>>>> consciousness.
>>> That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious,
>>> unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day.
>> Yes, but all of this doctor-stuff takes place in the theater of your own consciousness. There is no evidence of any reality beyond conscious experience.
>
> So the doctors decision about you has nothing to do with reality.

That does not follow.

Bruno

> And you see no problem with that kind of reasoning. It appears to me that you are willing to discount everything as evidence for anything else. All that counts as evidence is experience and it can only be evidence for itself.
>
>> We only know about the first person, not the third. The problem with the materialist / emergentist framing of consciousness is that it demotes what is directly known in favor of a model (third person objective reality), of which we don't really know the ontological status.
>
> Ontologies are always model dependent.
>
>>
>>> The myth that
>>> consciousness is a mystery is part hubris (we are too special to be
>>> understood)
>> I know, this idea that we have been going from a process of humbling experiences, by discovering that the earth is not the center of the universe, and then how infinitesimally small we are compared to the all shebang, and then that we are just animals, etc. Several of my friends are very attached to this idea. They love to think poetically about "how insignificant they feel" when they realize how small we are, how devoid of anything special. I have to be honest, I don't particularly care for any of this stuff one way or the other.
>
> My point has nothing to do with humbling experiences. It is that we think we have understanding of a lot of physics because we can use to for predictions. But when a neuroscientist finds he can predict what a subject will think when a certain brain point is stimulated that's dismissed as not really evidence for a material basis for thought because...well thought is special. My point is that we demand some kind of intuitively satisfying explanation of thought that is "better" than mere prediction...yet in all the rest of science we think the ability to predict means we know reality. I think both are off the mark.
>
>>
>> I don't know if we are special. Compared to what? All I say is that all that appears to exist, exists within my conscious experience. The rest, I can always doubt.
>
> What you doubt is what is inferred from your direct experience. But what is this process of inference? Ideas pop into my consciousness with no conscious inference of them all the time.
>
>> What is this "I" I refer to? Also don't know. I suspect it's the same "I" you refer to, but in a different branch, in a different set of circumstances. These things that I am saying are tautologies, trivial observations. The fact that some people find them so absurd or perplexing makes me thing that there is religious belief involved, even though the religion in question does not necessarily have a name.
>>
>>> and part an exaggerated demand for understanding. There's no
>>> scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron
>>> either. But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory
>>> that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering
>>> about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement
>>> and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.
>> The idea of a wave function of an electron, scientific instruments, detectors, mystery mongering, all of this takes place -- at least for me, and I know of nothing else -- within the phenomenon I am curious about. That's what makes it special.
>
> And I'm suggesting that it is your curiosity that makes it special. If you were that curious about why the wave function of an electron is what Dirac said it is, if you were willing to just keep asking "Why?", you'd find that special too. Bruno wants this curiosity to bottom out on computation because he thinks he understands computation.
>
> Brent
>
>>
>> Telmo.
>>
>>> Brent
>
>

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Jul 2019, at 22:08, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 7/20/2019 1:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jul 2019, at 00:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect consciousness.

That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious, unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day.  The myth that consciousness is a mystery is part hubris

Then mechanism cures that “hubris”. It could be hubris at Descartes’ time, where many thought that consciousness was a human thing, and animals have no souls. But today, many attribute consciousness to many animals, and mechanism makes the point that consciousness begins with Turing universality, and self-consciousness with Gödel-Löbianity.

(we are too special to be understood) and part an exaggerated demand for understanding.

With mechanism, consciousness is simple, as it is explained by the distinction between all modes of the self that the machine can be aware of. 

That's where I disagree.  These two propositions cannot both be true:

1) Consciousness is what I directly experience without mediating inference.

2) Consciousness is the Loebian inference implicit in theories of computation (as defined by Bruno).

You must be careful as I did not say “1)” exactly, nor “2).

1) is that consciousness is immediately knowable, without the need of a reasoning to get the conclusion. It is typical of all experience. 

And 2) that immediate inference comes from the logic of [o]p =   []p & <>t & p, and is proved to be immediate by using the fact that [o]p does not entail [o][o]p. 

The problem which remains is only in deriving the “stable persistent and sharable dreams” from the web of dreams in arithmetic (which cannot be avoided if you accept to link consciousness to the person related to the relevant computations). 

What "person"?  Where did "person" come from?

The person defined by all the modes of the self imposed by incompleteness. So the person can be 3p identified with []p, and its first person is determined by []p &p, and the other hypostases. The observable is given by []p & <>p with p sigma_1, etc. 

There's no scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron either.  But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.

Assuming a physical reality, 

It's not an "assumption" when it's supported empirically. 

Show me the paper. The only test that I know is the one I have given. I think I am the first to show that this is even testable.

(Be careful Brent, I suspect you are taking the whole of physics as an empirical support of Primary Matter) but that is an assum^ption is metaphysics, not in physics.

You have logicians attitude that everything must start from axioms...which are assumptions.

In difficult metaphysical subject, that is wiser, to avoid confusion of level, etc. Yes. I studied logic for that very reason.

but in that case mechanism becomes inconsistent, as I have shown.

No. You have argued it.  But your argument also implies that physics is necessary.   So if it shows physics is unreal, that's a contradiction.  So it's a reductio.  A reductio indicates something is wrong with the argument; but it doesn't tell you what.

Physics became necessary in the phenomenology, and necessarily Not in the ontology. So there is no contradiction.

Consciousness is simple, because computer science somehow predicts it, easily from incompleteness + Theaetetus.

You have assumed that you can define it to be something simple

I assume YD + CT. 

and then you argue that because this simple thing has one or two similarities to the very complex thing we experience as consciousness it is therefore the same thing.

Absolutely not. I don’t do this even for the natural numbers, as we know that we cannot define them “univocally” at all.

  Even though in addition to similarities it also has some glaring differences, such as being timeless, such as knowing all logical inferences, such as existing independent of a matter.

To fuzzy. I can agree and disagree. I don’t see the relevance.

It is matter the real hard problem in the mind-body problem, but we are not aware of this, a bit like fishes are not well placed to talk on water.

You have made it the hard problem of your theory by simplifying away all the observable complexities of consciousness

I work in a theory, but after Gödel and Traski understanding of the essential undecidability of any theory in which there are universal machine, you cannot say that it is a simplification a priori.

and assuming it is mere Platonic arithmetic.

That is not assume. What is proved is that assuming more than arithmeti leads to inconsistency.

Bruno 

Brent

Bruno

Brent

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[Philip Thrift]

On Sunday, July 21, 2019 at 7:34:51 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jul 2019, at 13:55, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 6:33 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> A Turing machine is a mathematical entity,

According to my dictionary a "entity" is an independent thing with distinct properties, in this case one of those properties is it can be implemented PHYSICALLY, a property that a sequence of squiggles in Lambda Calculus does not have.

Why would a set of quadruplets be more "physically implementable" than a lambda expression?

That makes no sense.  Both are first interpret in a von Neuman-Suze machine, and then physically intepreteted in a some physical boolean+ graph.

Bruno

BTW here is the UTM implemented in different languages:

    https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine

@philipthrift 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 21 Jul 2019, at 13:48, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 2:14 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> If matter (nouns) exist then something other than matter must exist too, namely the relationship between matter (adjectives). I think both John Clark and Philip Thrift are adjectives not nouns despite what our grade school teachers told us. John K Clark

> Anyone who says relations are existing immaterial entities couldn't possible criticize Bruno Marchal's theory.

I say if nouns exist then the properties of those nouns (adjectives) must exist too.

Bruno Marchal says nouns don't exist

Never said this. Just to be clear.

All what I might ahem said is that IF we assume Mechanism, then Primary matter has no role that we can related to the observable (and so are like the invisible horse pulling the cars, or even contradictory (with very weak form of Occam).

Bruno

but adjectives do even though they're describing the properties of things that don't exist. 

I say that does not make one bit of sense.

Therefore I have demonstrated you are wrong, it is possible to criticize Bruno Marchal's theory. I just did it.

 John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Jul 2019, at 16:40, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 5:21 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

>> X is a Turing Machine if and only if for any given input to X there exists a Turing Machine that will produce the same output as X does with the same input.

> Ok, but then you can replace "Turing Machine" above with "von Neumann Machine" or "GPU" and it still works.

You could if you wanted to because unlike Lambda calculus Turing Machines, von Neumann Machines, and GPUs can all be implemented physically; but if you're only interested in philosophy then you wouldn't want to because you would just be inserting in tons of additional engineering details needed to make computers economically viable.   

Only?! If X is Turing Complete then a Turing Machine can emulate X and X can emulate a Turing Machine.

> Yes, but the Turing Machine has no special status in relation to any other Turing complete system.

It is the simplest Turing complete system.

 

>> Do you know of anything simpler that can make calculations than read a square, erase what you read and then print either a 0 or a 1 on it depending on your state, then change into another state depending on what you read, then either halt or move right or left and read another square.

> Simple in what sense?

The amount of information needed to describe its most basic operation.

> I can think of physical implementations of computers that simpler in the sense that they do not require some sort of writing device,

Any computer is going to need memory to store the program and usually there will be data too, and memory involves reading and writing.

 

> motors to move the tape,

Any computer with more than one bit of memory is going to need to move the place where it reads and writes.

> some sort of sensor to read the state,

Any computer is going to have to have internal states that change, and that change can't be random, the change must depend on its current state and the next bit of information it reads.

 

> then some mechanism to make the decision on how to activate the motors and writing device. I gave you one: Domino. It only requires objects falling over other objects. Or the billiard ball computer, which only requires the physical collision of balls inside tubes.

The position of the billiard balls are the memory and determine the state of the machine, however the 2D position of a billiard ball can't be described by just one bit of information as a square on Turing's tape can be. So a 2D billiard ball computer is considerably more complicated than a 1D paper tape, but if you like the billiard balls that's fine because unlike Lambda Calculus it can be implemented physically.

> I'm sure it is possible to create computational surfaces made of lattices of very simple molecules.

I'm sure of that too but there is nothing simple about molecules or the 2D surface of 3D lattices

> The Turing Machine is not the simplest implementation of a physical computer,

You haven't told me about a simpler one.

I did. (The combinators), but you have confuse them with words, which they are not. 

The theory of combinators is entirely axiomatised by 

The 2 axioms:

1) Kxy = x

2) Sxyz = xz(yz)

And the 3 rules

 3) If x = y and x = z, then y = z

 4) If x = y then xz = yz
 5) If x = y then zx = zy

You should be able to see that SKKx = x whatever combinator x represents. 

SKKx = Kx(Kx) by 2) 

Kx(Kx) = x by 1)

SKK compute the identity function.

See the combinator thread where I have proved the Turing universality. Or ask for more.

A precise logical specification of the Turing machine is much more complex.

Bruno

> it is (perhaps?) the simplest implementation that uses explicit memory and sequential computations.

If it has no memory and can't make sequential computations then you might have a calculator but you don't have a computer.

 

> These two things make it easier for us to reason about its computations, and that is all. It is not the "fundamental" computer.

If its the easiest for us to understand then it is the simplest, if it can't be made any simpler, any more elementary, without loosing important properties then it is fundamental because that's what the word means.

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 18 Jul 2019, at 22:08, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 11:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> A Turing Machine is compatible with both pure mathematics and pure physics, but Lambda Calculus is compatible only with pure mathematics. 

 

Why?

Ask Alonzo Church the inventor of Lambda Calculus who admitted it's true, and so did Godel. 

True for the pedagogy, false for the conceptual and mathematical complexity.

 

> The so called LISP machine implements combinators and lambda expression

LISP machines were just Turing Machines

Nonsense.

that incorporated common subroutines used in the LISP language in HARDWARE to enabled them to run faster, but by the early 1990's microprocessors had gotten so fast that cheap home computers ran faster than any dedicated LISP machine and that's why nobody makes them anymore. 

 

>>I am telling you that matter is needed to make that happen, in this case the matter in the microprocessor of the computer that is running the video game that is using Bitcoins as money. 

> But why? 

Why what?

Why assuming primary matter, what is it, and how would that make a computation more real than others?

> Why to make that assumption,

What assumption?

The assumption that there is a physical universe, and that in metaphysics we have to make that assumption.

Why do you assume that matter is not explainable from non physical notion?

  >> Consciousness? What the hell does that have to do with the price of eggs?  

> You are the one saying that we need matter for a computation to happen

Because every computation ever observed in the history of the world has required matter.

We have to explain observable by using “all computation”, when we assumed mechanism, which is what make your argument circular here.

I stop here, because I have already answered all other comments in other posts.

Bruno 

> (and I infer “to support genuine consciousness”).

And every time in the history of the world a change in consciousness resulted in a change in the physical state of a brain and a change in the physical state of a brain resulted in a change in consciousness.

> If not, then it is even more weird why you want for matter, given that the computation are realised in arithmetic,

And not once in the history of the world has anyone observed a computation being made in nothing but a change in arithmetic. In fact nobody has ever observed a change in arithmetic period.

>>>  the whole video game is executed through pure number relation

>> Incorrect.  The whole video game is executed through voltage differences in the microprocessor.

> You can implement it,

You've got it backwards. The numbers don't emulate the voltages in the microprocessor, the voltages in the microprocessor emulate the numbers.

>> We can use the language of mathematics to help us understand how those voltage differences effect each other, and we can if we wish interpret those voltage differences as numbers.

> In your theory which assumes a physical universe.

The only thing I assume is that if something works then it works and if something doesn't work then it doesn't work. Making calculations with the help of matter works, making calculations without matter doesn't work.

And that is your cue to refute what I just said by referring to a textbook that will never be able to calculate 2+2.

> See the combinator thread for a precise disproof of this.

Ah yes, that legendary post

 

>Ad hominem.  Boring.

What's boring is your referring to posts that don't exist, your constant whining and using that incredibly pompous Latin phrase. 

>> post of yours that plugs all the holes in your theory and proves that everything I've said is wrong, the post that you've been talking about for the better part of a decade, the post that NOBODY HAS EVER SEEN.

> I just said that I have proven that the giving of the lambda expressions [x][y]x (which does the same job as K) and [x][y][z]xz(yz)

I agree, "[x][y]x" does indeed *do* the same job as "K) and [x][y][z]xz(yz)" because both ASCII sequences *do* precisely NOTHING and 0=0 so they both *do* exactly the same thing. Nothing.

>>The logical operation of every computer ever made can be reduced to a Turing Machine.

>True but irrelevant.

How in the world is that fact irrelevant?!

> Actually it makes my point, but usually, thanks to our physical laws (and transistors) the boolean operation will be used to simulate a Turing machines.

Boolean operations don't simulate Turing Machines, Turing Machines simulate Boolean operations.

>> Ironically to rebut my accusation that you keep changing the meaning of "Aristotle theology" you introduced the concept of  "Aristotle's second God"; I've never heard anybody mention that before, but I admit you know more about Greek silly ideas than I do. 

> The first God is Aristotle first mover it is [...]

Bruno, I did ask you not to tell me, I've given up keeping track of your constantly mutating definitions of common words and invented phrases and acronyms used by nobody but you. 

John K Clark    

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 8:30 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

In general
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/
Platonism is the view that there exist such things as abstract objects.

That is an idiotic and meaningless definition, which is not at all unusual in philosophy. Meaning needs contrast but by that definition EVERYBODY believes in Platonism because (unless solipsism is true) everybody has thoughts and thoughts are abstract. And most people believe in other abstract stuff too, like big, fast, distant, and old.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 8:34 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> According to my dictionary a "entity" is an independent thing with distinct properties, in this case one of those properties is it can be implemented PHYSICALLY, a property that a sequence of squiggles in Lambda Calculus does not have.

 

> Why would a set of quadruplets be more "physically implementable" than a lambda expression?

It wouldn't, but a set of quadruplets is not the only or the best way to think about the operation of a Turing Machine, you can also think about it physically, something that you CAN NOT DO with Lambda Calculus. That's why computer makers don't put Lambda Calculus textbooks in their machines but instead put in silicon microprocessors that work the way Turing outlined.  And that's why Alan Turing is a hero among computer nerds and why Alonzo Church is not.

 John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 8:39 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> No it does not work because machines have inputs and outputs but "lambda expressions" have neither

> What???

 

No it does not work because machines have inputs and outputs but "lambda expressions" have neither 

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 8:46 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> >There is nothing abstract or immaterial about a paper tape and a read/write head, but everything is abstract and immaterial about a sequence of ASCII characters in Lambda calculus.

> Or about Turing quintuplets.

Turing quintuplets are abstract and immaterial, a Turing Machine is not.

 

> You keep confusing a digital machine, its code, its physical implementation, …

You keep confusing stuff that can *do* things from stuff that can not. A sequence of ASCII characters can't *do* anything unless it interacts with a brain made of matter that obeys the laws of physics, and the exact same thing is true of digital machine code. Lambda  Calculus and Turing quintuplets can't *do* anything unless they interact with the physical brain of a mathematician, but a Turing Machine needs nothing else that is physical because it is already physical. All by itself a Turing Machine can simulate Turing quintuplets but Turing quintuplets CAN NOT simulate a Turing Machine, therefore a Turing Machine is more profound and fundamental and Turing quintuplets are a superficial way to think about it.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 9:29 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> LISP machines were just Turing Machines

> Nonsense.

OK let me see if I've got this right: you think it is nonsense to believe that a Turing Machine could simulate a computer that became obsolete more than 30 years ago. Is that what you're saying? Is that the hill you're willing to die on?  

 

>>>>I am telling you that matter is needed to make that happen, in this case the matter in the microprocessor of the computer that is running the video game that is using Bitcoins as money. 

>>> But why? 

>> Why what?

> Why assuming primary matter,

I don't care if you assume "primary matter" or not regardless of what that piece of philosophical gobbledygook happens to mean today. I am just telling you that matter is needed to mine Bitcoins that you can use to buy stuff.

 

> what is it, and how would that make a computation more real than others?

A Bitcoin that can be used to buy a car is real, and a calculation used to mine that Bitcoin is more real than a calculation that lacks this Bitcoin mining car buying property.

> Why to make that assumption,

>> What assumption?

 

> The assumption that there is a physical universe, and that in metaphysics [...]

If you've taught me one thing it's that metaphysics is crap, so assume anything you like about it, I don't care.

John K Clark

 

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 9:22 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>>> The Turing Machine is not the simplest implementation of a physical computer,

>> You haven't told me about a simpler on

> I did. (The combinators),

No you did not. You showed me something simpler but it was not something that could make a calculation.

John K Clark

 

[Philip Thrift]

Other abstractions: ghostly, supernatural, demonic, godly, spiritual, mathematical, ...

If abstractions are not implemented 

      https://gustavus.edu/mcs/max/concrete-abstractions.html

 they remain merely fictions.

@philipthrift

[Philip Thrift]

A "machine" associated with the lambda calculus is the SECD machine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECD_machine

The machine was the first to be specifically designed to evaluate lambda calculus expressions. 

 

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 3:14 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

A "machine" associated with the lambda calculus is the SECD machine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECD_machine

The machine was the first to be specifically designed to evaluate lambda calculus expressions. 

And in the very first line of the article you recommend it calls it a "virtual machine". There is nothing virtual about a read write head and a paper tape, that sort of machine is as non-virtual as the diesel engine on a tug boat.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

virtual, hypothetical, theoretical, abstract - both the Turing machine and SECD machine are merely that.

No one in computer science refers to the Turing machine as an actual machine.

Turing machine, hypothetical computing device 

- https://www.britannica.com/technology/Turing-machine

A Turing machine refers to a hypothetical machine proposed by Alan M. Turing

- http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Turing_machine

A Turing machine is a theoretical computing machine 

- http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TuringMachine.html

A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation that defines an abstract machine, 

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

 

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

On 7/21/2019 6:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jul 2019, at 22:08, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 7/20/2019 1:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jul 2019, at 00:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect consciousness.

That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious, unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day.  The myth that consciousness is a mystery is part hubris

Then mechanism cures that “hubris”. It could be hubris at Descartes’ time, where many thought that consciousness was a human thing, and animals have no souls. But today, many attribute consciousness to many animals, and mechanism makes the point that consciousness begins with Turing universality, and self-consciousness with Gödel-Löbianity.

(we are too special to be understood) and part an exaggerated demand for understanding.

With mechanism, consciousness is simple, as it is explained by the distinction between all modes of the self that the machine can be aware of. 

That's where I disagree.  These two propositions cannot both be true:

1) Consciousness is what I directly experience without mediating inference.

2) Consciousness is the Loebian inference implicit in theories of computation (as defined by Bruno).

You must be careful as I did not say “1)” exactly, nor “2).

1) is that consciousness is immediately knowable, without the need of a reasoning to get the conclusion. It is typical of all experience.

How is that different than what I wrote?

And 2) that immediate inference comes from the logic of [o]p =   []p & <>t & p, and is proved to be immediate by using the fact that [o]p does not entail [o][o]p.

But that's not what you have said earlier.  You said that 2) was an axiom of consciousness.  "Immediate inference" is a contradiction in terms and I disagree that proofs define consciousness.

The problem which remains is only in deriving the “stable persistent and sharable dreams” from the web of dreams in arithmetic (which cannot be avoided if you accept to link consciousness to the person related to the relevant computations). 

What "person"?  Where did "person" come from?

The person defined by all the modes of the self imposed by incompleteness.

But that's a Bruno-definition.  It might have a grain of truth in it...but there is a huge gap to be spanned between that definition and the meaning of "person" in a simple sentence like "Bruno is a person".  Words have meanings and if you're going to introduce technical definitions of common words then you are obliged to show that the technical definition has the same extension.

So the person can be 3p identified with []p, and its first person is determined by []p &p, and the other hypostases. The observable is given by []p & <>p with p sigma_1, etc. 

There's no scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron either.  But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.

Assuming a physical reality, 

It's not an "assumption" when it's supported empirically. 

Show me the paper. The only test that I know is the one I have given. I think I am the first to show that this is even testable.

(Be careful Brent, I suspect you are taking the whole of physics as an empirical support of Primary Matter) but that is an assum^ption is metaphysics, not in physics.

You are the only person I know who ever mentions "primary matter"...and I know a lot of physicists.

You have logicians attitude that everything must start from axioms...which are assumptions.

In difficult metaphysical subject, that is wiser, to avoid confusion of level, etc. Yes. I studied logic for that very reason.

It is convenient, especially if you purport to give words special technical meanings which then divorces then from the experience that engendered them.

but in that case mechanism becomes inconsistent, as I have shown.

No. You have argued it.  But your argument also implies that physics is necessary.   So if it shows physics is unreal, that's a contradiction.  So it's a reductio.  A reductio indicates something is wrong with the argument; but it doesn't tell you what.

Physics became necessary in the phenomenology, and necessarily Not in the ontology. So there is no contradiction.

You equivocate on "ontology".  It means whatever exists.  But you want it to mean an axiomatic minimum.  But you're whole construction of the UD is phenomenology.  Arithmetic is the phenomenology of PA by your meaning.

Consciousness is simple, because computer science somehow predicts it, easily from incompleteness + Theaetetus.

You have assumed that you can define it to be something simple

I assume YD + CT. 

and then you argue that because this simple thing has one or two similarities to the very complex thing we experience as consciousness it is therefore the same thing.

Absolutely not. I don’t do this even for the natural numbers, as we know that we cannot define them “univocally” at all.

I didn't ask for a definition.  I asked for an argument that your "discussion with a perfect machine" has some relevance to my consciousness.

  Even though in addition to similarities it also has some glaring differences, such as being timeless, such as knowing all logical inferences, such as existing independent of a matter.

To fuzzy. I can agree and disagree. I don’t see the relevance.

What's fuzzy is the relevance of your theorizing to concrete experience.

It is matter the real hard problem in the mind-body problem, but we are not aware of this, a bit like fishes are not well placed to talk on water.

You have made it the hard problem of your theory by simplifying away all the observable complexities of consciousness

I work in a theory, but after Gödel and Traski understanding of the essential undecidability of any theory in which there are universal machine, you cannot say that it is a simplification a priori.

and assuming it is mere Platonic arithmetic.

That is not assume. What is proved is that assuming more than arithmeti leads to inconsistency.

ZFC is more than arithmetic.  Are you claiming it is inconsistent.  Your proof the UD instantiates consciousness, is the same as Borges library instantiates your life story.

Brent

Bruno 

Brent

Bruno

Brent

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 21 Jul 2019, at 17:17, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 8:34 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> According to my dictionary a "entity" is an independent thing with distinct properties, in this case one of those properties is it can be implemented PHYSICALLY, a property that a sequence of squiggles in Lambda Calculus does not have.

 

> Why would a set of quadruplets be more "physically implementable" than a lambda expression?

It wouldn't, but a set of quadruplets is not the only or the best way to think about the operation of a Turing Machine, you can also think about it physically, something that you CAN NOT DO with Lambda Calculus.

On the contrary, if you can interpret the quadruplet in a physical way, then it is even more simple to interpret a lambda expression physically, with a basic physical substitution.

That's why computer makers don't put Lambda Calculus textbooks in their machines but instead put in silicon microprocessors that work the way Turing outlined. 

Counter-examples; the graph reduction machines, the Lisp Machines, etc.

Bruno

And that's why Alan Turing is a hero among computer nerds and why Alonzo Church is not.

 John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

In (([x]xx)a) “a" is the input, and “aa" will be the output, being implemented physically or not.

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 21 Jul 2019, at 17:45, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 8:46 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> >There is nothing abstract or immaterial about a paper tape and a read/write head, but everything is abstract and immaterial about a sequence of ASCII characters in Lambda calculus.

> Or about Turing quintuplets.

Turing quintuplets are abstract and immaterial, a Turing Machine is not.

A Turing machine is a set of quintuplets.

 

> You keep confusing a digital machine, its code, its physical implementation, …

You keep confusing stuff that can *do* things

You keep assuming that such things exists. That is not part of my assumption. When we do metaphyics with the scientific method, we must be as much agnostic as possible.

from stuff that can not. A sequence of ASCII characters can't *do* anything unless it interacts with a brain made of matter that obeys the laws of physics, and the exact same thing is true of digital machine code.

Using Aristotle theology. Not only it is my favorite theology, but eventually, it is shown incompatible with the Digital Mechanist hypothesis.

Lambda  Calculus and Turing quintuplets can't *do* anything unless they interact with the physical brain of a mathematician,

Relatively to you, assuming you are made of primitive stuff. Begging the question, again. 

but a Turing Machine needs nothing else that is physical because it is already physical. All by itself a Turing Machine can simulate Turing quintuplets but Turing quintuplets CAN NOT simulate a Turing Machine,

You change the definition of Turing machine. A Turing machine is defined by either a set of quintuplets or quadruplets.

therefore a Turing Machine is more profound and fundamental and Turing quintuplets are a superficial way to think about it.

Even more so if your physical machine being is blessed with Holy Water … (grin).

I don’t believe in your god, John. And you can’t invoke It all the time to claim to refute an argument which does not assume it.

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 21 Jul 2019, at 18:37, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 9:29 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> LISP machines were just Turing Machines

> Nonsense.

OK let me see if I've got this right: you think it is nonsense to believe that a Turing Machine could simulate a computer that became obsolete more than 30 years ago. Is that what you're saying? Is that the hill you're willing to die on?  

 

>>>>I am telling you that matter is needed to make that happen, in this case the matter in the microprocessor of the computer that is running the video game that is using Bitcoins as money. 

>>> But why? 

>> Why what?

> Why assuming primary matter,

I don't care if you assume "primary matter" or not regardless of what that piece of philosophical gobbledygook happens to mean today. I am just telling you that matter is needed to mine Bitcoins that you can use to buy stuff.

Relatively to us, no-one doubt this, but that does not make it more or less real than the relative matter observable by people emulated in arithmetic (indeed, it is shown that can’t avoid from their first person points of view).

 

> what is it, and how would that make a computation more real than others?

A Bitcoin that can be used to buy a car is real, and a calculation used to mine that Bitcoin is more real than a calculation that lacks this Bitcoin mining car buying property.

In your theology. But when theology with the scientific method, we can’t assume a theology at the start. 

Well, you can do that, actually, and just continue the reasoning using mechanism, and get the contradiction. Then you have to abandon either mechanism, or your materialist ontology.

> Why to make that assumption,

>> What assumption?

That the God Matter is primitively real.

 

> The assumption that there is a physical universe, and that in metaphysics [...]

If you've taught me one thing it's that metaphysics is crap, so assume anything you like about it, I don't care.

Insulting and dismiss tone is the trick of those who have no arguments.

Bruno

John K Clark

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

Just false, unless you mean “physical computation”, but I am agnostic on this, and you should also, if you want to understand the reasoning and its conclusion.

Bruno

John K Clark

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

The physical Turing machine that Turing had in his mind was the human being, even a schoolboy using paper (the tape) and a pen (the write device).

You confuse the pedagogical sugar folklore with the conceptual notion aimed at.

You refer to a metaphysical being (ontological or primitive irreducible matter). That is not valid.

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 21 Jul 2019, at 22:33, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 7/21/2019 6:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jul 2019, at 22:08, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 7/20/2019 1:44 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jul 2019, at 00:04, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 7/19/2019 4:49 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

I share their perplexity. The idea of immaterialism is natural (and arises thousands of years ago), because the only thing that we cannot doubt (as Descartes pointed out) -- our consciousness -- is immaterial. There is not scientific instrument that can detect consciousness.

That's not really true. Of course doctors assess patients as conscious, unconscious, in coma, or brain dead every day.  The myth that consciousness is a mystery is part hubris

Then mechanism cures that “hubris”. It could be hubris at Descartes’ time, where many thought that consciousness was a human thing, and animals have no souls. But today, many attribute consciousness to many animals, and mechanism makes the point that consciousness begins with Turing universality, and self-consciousness with Gödel-Löbianity.

(we are too special to be understood) and part an exaggerated demand for understanding.

With mechanism, consciousness is simple, as it is explained by the distinction between all modes of the self that the machine can be aware of. 

That's where I disagree.  These two propositions cannot both be true:

1) Consciousness is what I directly experience without mediating inference.

2) Consciousness is the Loebian inference implicit in theories of computation (as defined by Bruno).

You must be careful as I did not say “1)” exactly, nor “2).

1) is that consciousness is immediately knowable, without the need of a reasoning to get the conclusion. It is typical of all experience.

How is that different than what I wrote?

Oh, sorry. You do agree with me. Of course, this is not 3p-immediate, the brain do some (3p) work to provide that 1p-immediacy.

And 2) that immediate inference comes from the logic of [o]p =   []p & <>t & p, and is proved to be immediate by using the fact that [o]p does not entail [o][o]p.

But that's not what you have said earlier.  You said that 2) was an axiom of consciousness.  "Immediate inference" is a contradiction in terms

Subjectively immediate. 

and I disagree that proofs define consciousness.

Me too. That’s why it is important to distinguish []p and []p & p. Proof is not enough, you need some semantic(fixed point), that is truth.

The problem which remains is only in deriving the “stable persistent and sharable dreams” from the web of dreams in arithmetic (which cannot be avoided if you accept to link consciousness to the person related to the relevant computations). 

What "person"?  Where did "person" come from?

The person defined by all the modes of the self imposed by incompleteness.

But that's a Bruno-definition. 

Not “definition”, but “theory”. Yes, we do a theory. It is very similar to the neoplatonic theory, and in this case, it is not my theory, but a theory no sound universal machine can miss.

See, in “conscience & mechanism”  the appendice on Artemov for a proof that []p&p is the only possible definition of rational (communicable) knowledge (a knowledge Kp such that Kp -> []p).

It might have a grain of truth in it...but there is a huge gap to be spanned between that definition and the meaning of "person" in a simple sentence like "Bruno is a person".  Words have meanings and if you're going to introduce technical definitions of common words then you are obliged to show that the technical definition has the same extension.

Which gap?

So the person can be 3p identified with []p, and its first person is determined by []p &p, and the other hypostases. The observable is given by []p & <>p with p sigma_1, etc. 

There's no scientific instrument that can detect the wave function of an electron either.  But with the electron we're happy to have an effective theory that tells us when the detector will click or not. Mystery mongering about consciousness makes us demand something more that mere measurement and prediction, something that doesn't exist for any theory.

Assuming a physical reality, 

It's not an "assumption" when it's supported empirically. 

Show me the paper. The only test that I know is the one I have given. I think I am the first to show that this is even testable.

(Be careful Brent, I suspect you are taking the whole of physics as an empirical support of Primary Matter) but that is an assum^ption is metaphysics, not in physics.

You are the only person I know who ever mentions "primary matter"...and I know a lot of physicists.

Physicists do not metaphysics.

The idea to call primary matter simply matter is Aristotelian theology. Once you believe in primary matter, or take this for granted, there is no more need of the term “primary” or “irreducible”. 

So, it is normal you don’t see often that distinction made, since 1500 years. That explains why I say that in metaphysics/theology, we have to backtrack 1500 years, to come back to scientific metaphysics, are that distinction is important.

You have logicians attitude that everything must start from axioms...which are assumptions.

In difficult metaphysical subject, that is wiser, to avoid confusion of level, etc. Yes. I studied logic for that very reason.

It is convenient, especially if you purport to give words special technical meanings which then divorces then from the experience that engendered them.

Like with space, time, atoms, in fundamental physics. That is normal and to be expected.

but in that case mechanism becomes inconsistent, as I have shown.

No. You have argued it.  But your argument also implies that physics is necessary.   So if it shows physics is unreal, that's a contradiction.  So it's a reductio.  A reductio indicates something is wrong with the argument; but it doesn't tell you what.

Physics became necessary in the phenomenology, and necessarily Not in the ontology. So there is no contradiction.

You equivocate on "ontology".  It means whatever exists. 

I have defined it by what we have to assume at the start. It is the fundamental, basic, ontology. With mechanism it will be K, S, KK, KS, … (or 0, S0, SS0, SSS0, …).

But you want it to mean an axiomatic minimum.  But you're whole construction of the UD is phenomenology.  Arithmetic is the phenomenology of PA by your meaning.

?

No, I assume numbers (or Turing-equivalent). And I have explained that we have to assume it (up to Turing equivalence).

The phenomenology is what is derived, and get different self-representation. In

 p

 []p

 []p & p

 []p & <>t

 []p & <>t & p

Only the first (p) defined the ontology.  The seven others give the phenomenology. The person is defined by what she believes, know, observe and feel.

If mechanism is correct, we must have quantum logics for ([]p & p) … when p is sigma_1 (the leaves of the universal dovetailing). I have shown that to be the case.

Consciousness is simple, because computer science somehow predicts it, easily from incompleteness + Theaetetus.

You have assumed that you can define it to be something simple

I assume YD + CT. 

and then you argue that because this simple thing has one or two similarities to the very complex thing we experience as consciousness it is therefore the same thing.

Absolutely not. I don’t do this even for the natural numbers, as we know that we cannot define them “univocally” at all.

I didn't ask for a definition.  I asked for an argument that your "discussion with a perfect machine" has some relevance to my consciousness.

That the question traced in the whole work, and ye, it seems it does, as it implies a quantum reality, and that is confirmed by our observation.

But the whole thing is relevant,t for your consciousness right at the start, because mechanism is an hypothesis on your consciousness (its invariance for some substitution), and the consequence are that  some theology is correct about you, and that concerns your life and perhaps some afterlife and “parallel life” too.

  Even though in addition to similarities it also has some glaring differences, such as being timeless, such as knowing all logical inferences, such as existing independent of a matter.

To fuzzy. I can agree and disagree. I don’t see the relevance.

What's fuzzy is the relevance of your theorizing to concrete experience.

What is missing?

That is a fuzzy remark that you could do even on E = mc^2, at a time. Or on string theory.

On the contrary, this explain why we are conscious, why we are confronted with a security/liberty issue, why we are confronted with an apparent reality, why it hurts, why qualia seems richer than quanta, why they are apparent many-histories when we look close, etc. All this in a theory which assume only “2+2=4 & Co.”, using the consciousness invariance to link the theory and the concrete experience.

Compare with physicalism, which eventually, when done rigorously enough, needs to eliminate or dismiss consciousness entirely.

It is matter the real hard problem in the mind-body problem, but we are not aware of this, a bit like fishes are not well placed to talk on water.

You have made it the hard problem of your theory by simplifying away all the observable complexities of consciousness

I work in a theory, but after Gödel and Traski understanding of the essential undecidability of any theory in which there are universal machine, you cannot say that it is a simplification a priori.

and assuming it is mere Platonic arithmetic.

That is not assume. What is proved is that assuming more than arithmeti leads to inconsistency.

ZFC is more than arithmetic. 

Sure, but ZFC itself is an arithmetical being, indeed a Löbian machine. But ZFC does not necessity believe in an ontological set theory, and indeed, that is what would lead to a contradiction (actually to an inflation of predictions).

Are you claiming it is inconsistent. 

ZFC is very plausibly consistent as a theory in mathematics, but inconsistent as an ontology in the mechanist psycho-theo-logy.

Your proof the UD instantiates consciousness, is the same as Borges library instantiates your life story.

Not at all. My proof is trivial from Mechanism.

And Borges library contains only texts. It does not run anything, unlike the Model of arithmetic.

You confuse the fact that “1+1=2” is contained in some book, and the fact that some reality satisfy the truth such sequence of symbols represent.

You confuse a theory and a model of the theory, but that is often the case with physicalists, as in physics the term “model” is often used in the sense of informal (with meaning) theory. Mathematical logic provides the means to avoid such confusion, and that distinction is the very base of all the work done in mathematical logic.

Bruno

Brent

Bruno 

Brent

Bruno

Brent

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