A purely relational ontology?

[Pierz]

I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about  a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world. Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of). 

To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones. I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.) 

What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments. They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated. “Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.

Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.

One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.

Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch:  “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”

We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation.  Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything  around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.

Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious. The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties. 

Grateful for any comments/critiques.

[Cosmin Visan]

Red is red.

[Philip Thrift]

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 4:12:33 AM UTC-5, Cosmin Visan wrote:

Red is red.

See I red.   (yoda for "I see red") 

@philipthrift

[Cosmin Visan]

Actually, the correct ontological form is "I am red." (excluding the entire emergent structure of the final experience of red)

[Philip Thrift]

"I experience [seeing] red"

or "I am experiencing red"

I can get.

@philipthrift

[Telmo Menezes]

Hi Pierz,

On Tue, Jun 18, 2019, at 04:15, Pierz wrote:

I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about  a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world.

Right. I think this points to a fundamental fact that is overlooked in the dominant scientific paradigm of our age: that we are embedded in reality. We are participants, looking at it from the inside. The contemporary paradigm gives the utmost importance to the "third-person view" of reality, which is nothing more than a model, if not a fantasy.

The edifice collapses once you try to explain consciousness, because this third person view model forces us to explain consciousness as an emergent property of matter, and that doesn't work. An overlooked simple possibility is that separating the notions of "consciousness" and "reality" is nonsensical. There is no evidence of any "reality" outside of conscious experience, nor can there be.

I am not saying that there is no value in the third-person view, on the contrary, it leads to myriad interesting things, namely the computer I am using to type this email. But we have to be able to see models for what they are.

Consider a camera lens. I want to take a photo of something, which is to say, I want to compress a 3D object into some 2D representation. Different lenses provide different mappings, but there is no way to avoid the fact that, no matter what lens you choose, something is lost. At the same time, there is no "correct lens". They just produce different mapping, that may be more or less useful depending on the situation.

There are no cells, hearts, stars, atoms, people, societies, markets, ants, music or any other such category outside of human language. These are words that point to human mental models. These models please us, and we keep playing the game. Sometimes we find even better models, but we are doing nothing but coming up with new, perhaps better lenses. Ultimately, I think this is an infinite game.

Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of). 

I have the utmost respect and interest in Physics, but I think that contemporary physicists suffer from the problem of having convinced themselves that their field, and their filed alone, can produce "the correct lens". Most scientific fields have a lot to learn from Physics when it comes to rigor, but at the same time physicists underestimate how much easier it is to achieve rigor when you are dealing with very low levels of complexity (as compared to Biology, Psychology, Sociology and so on).

I think it would be good if Physics found its way back to a more humble and wise position, being proud of the great lenses it creates, but understanding that we also need other lenses in our toolkit.

Another thing I think is that the epistemic boundaries of current scientific fields have reached a point of diminishing returns, and we really should take seriously the project of crossing these boundaries without sacrificing rigor -- the elusive dream of interdisciplinarity without bullshit.

To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.

I agree.

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.

I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter. I think this is the only way out of the fact that we are observing an object from the inside, so self-referentiality is unavoidable. This is also why I claim that computer science might be more fundamental than Physics, because computer science is the field with the tools to tackle self-referentiality / recursion. But again, I am being silly. Perhaps it is just another lens.

I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.) 

What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments.

My only problem with this idea is how quickly it goes over "relationships between organisms and their environments", as if there is some clear distinction or boundary between the two categories. Right now I am looking at this text, in my computer screen, and I am me looking at my computer screen. This is true of all objects we know. When we say apple, we mean "a human being's experience of an apple", even if we are not consciously aware of that. But we say "apple" for short.

They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated.

Exactly.

“Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.

I think so too.

Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.

One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.

Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch:  “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”

We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation.  Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything  around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.

Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious.

I do not think that this is what Bruno claims. In fact, most of what you write seems compatible with what Bruno says, but he will correct me if I am wrong.

Telmo.

The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties. 

Grateful for any comments/critiques.

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[Cosmin Visan]

Self-reference is not the same as recursion. I invite you to read my paper "The Self-Referential Aspect of Consciousness", or for the full picture my book "I Am": https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan

On Tuesday, 18 June 2019 13:58:49 UTC+3, telmo wrote:

 self-referentiality / recursion.

[Terren Suydam]

Hi Pierz,

Your writings remind me very much of the work of Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher who similarly shifted ontology from identity to relation, and explored many interesting consequences of making that shift. My exposure to him came from the excellent Philosophize This podcast, which dedicated 5 episodes to Deleuze. If you're interested, check out the first episode here.

Terren

--

[Bruno Marchal]

On 18 Jun 2019, at 04:15, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about  a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality.

Hmm… Of course we can just enjoy life. Now, some people enjoy searching the fundamental reality and trying to get a testable refutable theory, so that they can improve their understanding by being shown wrong, or improved. In that case we bet that there is a fundamental reality, try a theory of it (the “fundamental” is taken as the “ontological” or the “primitive” that is what we have to assume to proceed.

For example, with Mechanism, we have to assume at least one universal machinery, without which there is no computer, nor Mechanist hypothesis possible. 

In this case, we know (the logicians know) that we cannot assume less than a universal machinery, because it is impossible to derive the existence of a universal machinery without assuming one. 

I use elementary arithmetic, because everyone is familiar with, and since 1931, we know that this implied the existence of all computations. A reasoning shows that we cannot assume more than a universal machinery, and that we have to derive the physical reality from it, in the form of a statistics on first person experience. We have to derive physics from the psychology/theology of numbers. The theology is itself already derived from arithmetic, through the work of Gödel, Löb, Solovay and others.

It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world.

Yes. Although science is born from the doubt about that stuff, which unfortunately has come back as a dogma, but that is just typical with the humans. 

Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete -

Simple and mechanistic are contradictory. I guess you use “mechanistic” in the pregödelian sense of mechanism. After Gödel, we know that neither number nor machine can have a complete theory. Tarski call such theories essentially undecidable, which really means that we must expect infinitely many surprises, new things, for which we will need new axioms. But with mechanism, the ontology is table and somehow complete: it is the sigma_1 truth, aka the universal dovetailing. 

what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation” -

Physics does not aboard the question of Reality. It gives tools to make predictions. It compress the description of nature. It has used in a non essential way Aristotle’s theology, which assumes that the observable is what is real. You are right that this cannot be done with quantum mechanics, nor with mechanism. That’s why quantum mechanics is far less astonishing for a computationalist than an Aristotelian believer, as we expect some mess below our substitution level.

the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly?

Most physicalist physicist would say that they expect a physical theory of everything:something which explains and unify all laws of physics. Then they will use, inconsistently Mechanism to say that they can explain everything. 

But this will not work, because if they assume mechanism, they are confronted to the UD, and understand that they laws of physics needs to be derived from the laws of computation and self-observation. 

Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics,

This is ambiguous. Mathematics, the *realm*, is far bigger than any mathematical *theories*.

Even just the arithmetical truth can only be scratched by *any* mathematical theories. Even a so rich theory than ZF + kappa can only scratched the arithmetical reality.

The use of world is also problematic. Is it the physical world? I think that when doing serious metaphysics, it is better to not commit oneself in any ontology unless it is needed. 

impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components.

The arithmetical reality is not reducible to any effective theory. Gödel showed this to be logical impossible.

With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem.

This is completely solved with Mechanism. As I just said above: we have to assume the combinators, or the numbers, or the lambda expression, or any other universal machinery. We cannot get them from any non universal thing. And without universal machinery or machine, we cannot express the Mechanist hypothesis.

With mechanism, the they of everything is already a sub theory of all know theory used in science.

If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that?

Physicist were hoping to get simple things, like particles, and explain all what is observable with them. That is reasonable, but does not work with mechanism. But it could work, a priori, with some non-mechanist theory, which of course is still an open option, despite the lack of evidences for it.

As I said, if the three logics corresponding to the material modes did not give a quantum logic, we might have reason to suppose mechanism wrong (or we are in a malevolent simulation).

What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me –

It has to have the laws that it has. Physics is a theorem in Mechanist theology. But contingent local historic-geographical realities remains.

suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of). 

Of course with mechanism, nothing observable is made of anything. Even a little piece off the vacuum is “made -of” the whole sigma_1 truth, in some metaphoric sense only.  

All there is are the numbers and their partial computable relations, and a physical object is a dream object, with not ontological existence, but it does obey the arithmetical laws of the observable, which appear to be quantum-like, and “many-world” like. Of course, those are still images, as the world are only, here, set of true proposition structured by special self-referential mode.

To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field.

I think Mechanism enforced this, with the benefits that we still have simple primitive entities defining all the relations needed, including the non well founded infinite relation that some entities can have with themselves. The internal phenomenology of very elementary arithmetic is provable unbounded, and it climbs on a transfinite of layers of complexity and unsolvability. It shows that *you* are fundamentally bigger than the observable physical and non physical realities. That corroborates the fact that reductionism provably fails in the mechanist theology. With the classical definition of the greek, starting by identifying rational belief with “provable” is a sound theory containing universal number/machineries, it becomes a theorem in Peano arithmetic (and all consistent extensions in a large sense of the word) that all universal machine have a soul, that the machine knows that, and that they know that their soul is not a machine, nor anything describable in third person manner. 

In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.

You are re-inventing first order logic.

In first order logic, we have the logical connectives &, V, ->, for all, it exists, and an infinity of functional and relational symbols, for each arity. F_i_j, R_i_j. The constant are given by the F_i_0.

I have always written the axiom of RA in this way:

For all x 0 ≠ s(x)

Etc.

But a strict axiomatic would be, where we use the first functional and relation symbols at our disposition:

For all x  R_0_0(F_0_0, F_0_1(x))

As I said, the names of the object is any symbol we want, so everything is described in a purely relation way.

This can be done at a more bract level, and we get to category theory, but with mechanism, this put light only on the first person plural sharable, and get beyond complexity for the non computable part, like the Dominical categories, where the object are the universal machineries, and the morphism are the Truing morphism respecting partial computability. 

Today’s mathematics is axiomatic and relational, and that is true for computer science, and with mechanism, that is true for the basis of the mind, which facilitates the work of the computer programmers, which can give long name to programs!

(Below I saw you know all this!)

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships,

That is mainly why I have made a thread (well 10 threads) on the combinators. All recursion equation have solutions. The first recursion theorem is quais built in there. Then with the phi_i, we can use the second recursion theorem easily to get both that extensional recursion (in part) or an even more interesting intensional recursion, the one I have used in my paper “Amoeba, Planaria, and Dreaming Machine”, and which is implicit in both G and G* (the machine theology).

but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.

In first order logic, there is no intrinsic properties at all.

Technically, I could explain why an extremely rich Löbian machine, like ZF, can reintroduce a sort of intrinsicness in their … quantified theology qG*, due to its non countable domain of inquiry. The argument of Quine and Barcus against modal logic applies to the extremely rich Löbian machine. That is why I am not a set theoretical realist, unlike Gödel.

I prefer the latter.

Me too. And it is already the way of the logicians today. There is no problem with the infinite regress, because they are soluble in the partial computable environnement, or give name to infinities in the extensional mathematical realm.

(Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.) 

The ontology of Mechanism is few intrinsic that any universal machineries can be used.

Two simple axioms are enough. Of course, all the interesting things is what happens in the (unbounded and untheorisable in the limit) phenomenology.

Arithmetic defines a consciousness flux, initiated by each universal machine/number, and the first person singular and plural appears at the limit, by the invariance of the first person for the delays in the computation.

What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea.

Yes that is a good point. A qualia is first person intrinsic from the first person view, but already extrinsic in any view which can ascribe a mind to another. 

Intrinsicness, when assumed or added in a theory leads to essentialism, and is bad modal logic. Now, nuance can been made, because word as concrete and intrinsic are not so well easily definable, and in which theory?

Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments.

Their are first person experience above all. Organism and environment refer to all all computational histories and the infinite sum of them, like to get the limit above.

With Mechanism, you cannot avoid the arithmetical "Boltzmann brains”, nor the universal dovetailing aka the sigma_1 arithmetical truth.

I don’t want to be rude, Pierz, but when you use word like “organism” and “environment” it is unclear if you commit or not an ontological commitment in some physical reality.

With Mechanism, we can prove that phenomelonoically sthings are like that:

NUMBER => CONSCIOUSNESS => PHYSICAL REALITIES => HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made.

OK, then :)

We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated. “Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person.

We can try and test theories,  … before being burned or buried alive of course.

Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.

All communicable “truth” are hypothetical. Beyond “my" consciousness "here and now", we have only theories, with meta-degrees of plausibility. The earth is round is much more plausible than the Earth is flat. The theory of gas kinetics is much more plausible than the atoms of cold and heat of Lavoisier, and, I would say, Mechanism is much more plausible than Materialism, which is actually the “Vitalism" of the Aristotelian theologians (the materialist).

Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.

Nor can any machine. It is a theorem in their theology. It would be like feeling that []p is the same as []p & p. Only mad machine can reports such experience. 

That is how mechanism explains consciousness and qualia; they are the immediately knowable things, even indubitable for the Löbian entities, yet non capturable by any representation, or in any third person terms, even non definable, except by referring to the arithmetical truth at the meta-level, assuming mechanism, which are indirect way.

One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related.

A model is given by the category theory, where you have only pints and arrows, but replaced the point by a loop or a set of loops, which is a bit ad hoc. For mechanism, all you need is anything in which you can define (mathematically) what is a computer or a universal Turing machine. See the thread on combinators to see how to derive universal machines from just two simple axioms:

Kxy = x

Sxyz = xz(yz)

Is K intrinsic? Certainly not. Does K admits other interpretation than being something named K and doing what it does? Yes, those are provided by the model (in the logician sense) of those axioms, or of

It exist k such that kxy = x

It exists s such that sxyz = xz(yz)

That is called combinatory algebra, and amazingly perhaps, N with the relation* defined by x * y = phi_i(y) is such a combinatory algebra. 

Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.

Perfect!

So, why assume anything intrinsic? The problem of the physicalists (not the physicists) is that they introduce a primary matter which becomes their intrinsic fundamental terms. But that is exactly the mistake Aristotle did, by non understanding Plato. That is basically how Plotinus corrected this mistake, and getting a neopythagorean theology isomorphic to the one of the universal machine.

The problem is that we are plausibly wrong in theology, and it is taboo to just reason in this field. Bandits and liars of course prefer obscurantism than light, which would show them.

Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch:  “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”

They put their ontology before reflexion. A concrete universe is a number dream seen by the dreamer.

But there is no concrete universe, only concrete theories, which eventually are determined by infinitely concrete natural numbers, which can make the looking very complex, needing abstraction to make usable sense.

Why to introduce the idea of a primary physical universe in the first place? 

It is an obvious impediment for metaphysics (as mechanism proves) but also for physics, independently of any metaphysics. 

We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation.  Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything  around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be?

Like the guy after the annihilation and duplication I Helsinki, and find itself in Washington. Why Washington? And the guy in Moscow can ask “why Moscow?”, but of course, as a mindful computationalist, he expected that.

OK.

Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.

You got the main thing, yes.

Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious. The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties. 

Grateful for any comments/critiques.

Very good :)

Now, if you are willing to bet, like Descartes, Darwin, … that biology is explainable mechanically, and even digitally, like the existence of DNA suggests, that is, if you are willing to say “yes” to a doctor, then, your metaphor above came true. It is a theorem of already Peano Arithmetic that computations and all computations exist in a tiny segment of the arithmetical reality. They semantically realised by what the logiciens called the models of arithmetic. It is realised in a tiny segment of the standard model, that is, the least model of RA or PA. Model is used in the logician sense: a mathematical structure, with a notion of satisfaction of arithmetical formula. By incompleteness, no machine at al, if consistent or sound, can even define its model, which plays, for it, the notion of internal god, then external with mechanism.

For a computation to exists you need many conditions, explaining the how and the why, and the counterfactuals, of a “concrete” computations. It does not matter if you represent a memory by a physical object, or a number, and the richness of the additive+multiplicative relations entails the existence I-of all concrete computation is that tiny segment of the arithmetical reality.

Number do no more think than machine or brains. Only person thinks, and a person is a complex abstract type, of a machine/number interpreted by some universal number. The theory predict that below our substation level, we are confronted to a infinity of universal numbers in “competition” (so to speak), and above that levels we are confronted to finitely many universal numbers (called family, friend, colleagues, but also cells, and many subset of the physical reality). 

Apology for criticising the paragraphs that you eventually criticised well yourself after!

Bruno

[Bruno Marchal]

On 18 Jun 2019, at 12:56, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

Hi Pierz,

On Tue, Jun 18, 2019, at 04:15, Pierz wrote:

I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about  a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world.

Right. I think this points to a fundamental fact that is overlooked in the dominant scientific paradigm of our age: that we are embedded in reality. We are participants, looking at it from the inside. The contemporary paradigm gives the utmost importance to the "third-person view" of reality, which is nothing more than a model, if not a fantasy.

The edifice collapses once you try to explain consciousness, because this third person view model forces us to explain consciousness as an emergent property of matter, and that doesn't work. An overlooked simple possibility is that separating the notions of "consciousness" and "reality" is nonsensical. There is no evidence of any "reality" outside of conscious experience, nor can there be.

I am not saying that there is no value in the third-person view, on the contrary, it leads to myriad interesting things, namely the computer I am using to type this email. But we have to be able to see models for what they are.

Consider a camera lens. I want to take a photo of something, which is to say, I want to compress a 3D object into some 2D representation. Different lenses provide different mappings, but there is no way to avoid the fact that, no matter what lens you choose, something is lost. At the same time, there is no "correct lens". They just produce different mapping, that may be more or less useful depending on the situation.

There are no cells, hearts, stars, atoms, people, societies, markets, ants, music or any other such category outside of human language. These are words that point to human mental models. These models please us, and we keep playing the game. Sometimes we find even better models, but we are doing nothing but coming up with new, perhaps better lenses. Ultimately, I think this is an infinite game.

Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of). 

I have the utmost respect and interest in Physics, but I think that contemporary physicists suffer from the problem of having convinced themselves that their field, and their filed alone, can produce "the correct lens". Most scientific fields have a lot to learn from Physics when it comes to rigor, but at the same time physicists underestimate how much easier it is to achieve rigor when you are dealing with very low levels of complexity (as compared to Biology, Psychology, Sociology and so on).

I think it would be good if Physics found its way back to a more humble and wise position, being proud of the great lenses it creates, but understanding that we also need other lenses in our toolkit.

Another thing I think is that the epistemic boundaries of current scientific fields have reached a point of diminishing returns, and we really should take seriously the project of crossing these boundaries without sacrificing rigor -- the elusive dream of interdisciplinarity without bullshit.

To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.

I agree.

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.

I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential.

Exactly. And this is handled by Diagonalisation, of many different kinds. The proof by Solovay of the arithmetical completeness of G and G* involves a formidable use of the second recursion theorem, which is a syntactical, constructive, form of diagonalisation, and who makes a machines thinking on its own limiting extensions. That is the key tool of theoretical computer science. Rogers said that Recursion theory (now named “computability theory”) could have been called “diagonalisation theory”.  All books by Smullyan describes this, and explicitly so in his volume “Diagonalisation and self-reference”. G and G*, that is Solovay theorem, is a sort of peak in that field. 

The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter. I think this is the only way out of the fact that we are observing an object from the inside, so self-referentiality is unavoidable.

Indeed. And the theory is there, and it is not mine, nor Gödel’s one, it is the theory of all consistent chatting universal machine, and that is provable in Peano arithmetic.

This is also why I claim that computer science might be more fundamental than Physics, because computer science is the field with the tools to tackle self-referentiality / recursion. But again, I am being silly. Perhaps it is just another lens.

Assuming Digital Mechanism, there is no choice.

I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.) 

What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments.

My only problem with this idea is how quickly it goes over "relationships between organisms and their environments", as if there is some clear distinction or boundary between the two categories. Right now I am looking at this text, in my computer screen, and I am me looking at my computer screen. This is true of all objects we know. When we say apple, we mean "a human being's experience of an apple", even if we are not consciously aware of that. But we say "apple" for short.

They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated.

Exactly.

“Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.

I think so too.

Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.

One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.

Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch:  “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”

We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation.  Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything  around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.

Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious.

I do not think that this is what Bruno claims.

Only metaphorically. Of course.

What people seems to ignore is that the computations, once you fix any system you like to *describe them* provably exist arithmetically, and that is provable in very weak theories. 

Some people seems able to distinguish the difference between the truth of 1 + 1 = 2, and the syntaxical sentence describing such truth, but when it comes to computation, they confuse the description of a computation, with the computation itself, and so fails to understand what it means to say that once you agree that it is true that 1+1=2, it will be as much true that the computation are implemented in the arithmetical reality, than the statement that the Fermat theorem is true in the arithmetical reality, very plausibly, trusting Andrew Wiles and its colleague. The notion of computation is purely arithmetical. And although they are tuns of evidence for physical implementation of computation, none are an evidences for thinking that the material one are primary, quite the contrary when we look at physics.

Only person think, but if a physical computation, in virtue of being a computation, can support a thinking person, then the (sigma_1) arithmetical reality, which supports all computations, will support that thinking person in finitely many histories, and the physical laws are the laws of predictions from there.

In fact, most of what you write seems compatible with what Bruno says, but he will correct me if I am wrong.

You are right. He got the point, you too, it seems? 

You just need to study a bit more of mathematical logic :)

I suspect you are not yet completely happy with the way the universal machine explains why she is conscious, and why she will not insist if you disbelieve this, because she knows that it is non definable, nor rationally justifiable,/provable.

With mechanism, we assume what everybody already assume, elementary arithmetic, and it is up to the materialist to define matter and to explain how that matter can select some computations, and interfere with the natural consciousness flux that all universal machine determine (in the arithmetical reality, or in the computer science theoretical reality (it is the same)).

Bruno

Telmo.

The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties. 

Grateful for any comments/critiques.

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 18 Jun 2019, at 14:37, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Self-reference is not the same as recursion. I invite you to read my paper "The Self-Referential Aspect of Consciousness", or for the full picture my book "I Am": https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan

As I said already, you are right. What you describe is the “first person self-reference”. This one is indeed not directly amenable to recursion, neither through the first recursion theorem, still less with the second recursion theorem.

But the first person reference is offered freely by arithmetic by identifying the soul and the knower in arithmetic. The consistency is given that this self-reference does not give an name to the subject, except “I”, which is not definable except by local self-pointing relatively to others FAPP. 

It is the subject of the experience, the inner god, the soul, the one got by []p & p, and []p & <>t & p. They are provably not definable in the language of that machine, but she can, like us, bet on mechanism, bet on its consistency (with precautions) and say “yes” to the doctor, knowing that she does not know what she is doing.

The beauty is that G* proves that []p is equivalent with the two variants above, but G does not prove it, and the machine is condemned to conflicting logics and mathematics about itself, enforcing a deepening of the self-observation.

You seem to want to communicate a (plausibly partially correct) insight, instead of looking for some theory explaining that’s insight, and the rest.

Bruno

On Tuesday, 18 June 2019 13:58:49 UTC+3, telmo wrote:

 self-referentiality / recursion.

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[Brent Meeker]

On 6/18/2019 3:56 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
> An overlooked simple possibility is that separating the notions of
> "consciousness" and "reality" is nonsensical. There is no evidence of
> any "reality" outside of conscious experience, nor can there be.

Weren't you ever unconscious and awoke to discover that reality had
proceeded without you?  That's evidence.

Brent

[Philip Thrift]

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 1:00:22 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 18 Jun 2019, at 14:37, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Self-reference is not the same as recursion. I invite you to read my paper "The Self-Referential Aspect of Consciousness", or for the full picture my book "I Am": https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan

As I said already, you are right. What you describe is the “first person self-reference”. This one is indeed not directly amenable to recursion, neither through the first recursion theorem, still less with the second recursion theorem.

But the first person reference is offered freely by arithmetic by identifying the soul and the knower in arithmetic. The consistency is given that this self-reference does not give an name to the subject, except “I”, which is not definable except by local self-pointing relatively to others FAPP. 

It is the subject of the experience, the inner god, the soul, the one got by []p & p, and []p & <>t & p. They are provably not definable in the language of that machine, but she can, like us, bet on mechanism, bet on its consistency (with precautions) and say “yes” to the doctor, knowing that she does not know what she is doing.

The beauty is that G* proves that []p is equivalent with the two variants above, but G does not prove it, and the machine is condemned to conflicting logics and mathematics about itself, enforcing a deepening of the self-observation.

You seem to want to communicate a (plausibly partially correct) insight, instead of looking for some theory explaining that’s insight, and the rest.

Bruno

 

        It is the subject of the experience ... got by []p & p, and []p & <>t & p. 

Here, as I've written about before, you have the semantics of the language on the left (the experience) and the modal language on the right.

The modal language (an expression and all its sequents) may be the (or an) extrinsic description of the experience, but the latter is he real thing.

@philipthrift

[PGC]

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 4:15:43 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:

I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about  a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. 

Lol then this list would be about the wrongest place in the world, right? 

I mean Jesus, behold all the attempts to assimilate the discourse of your post immediately! You apparently appear as fresh meat to all the members. 

Especially in demonstrating how well your post and thoughts would do under a better regime... ;-) What fantastic academic armor you would wear, how colors would appear to you, how Yoda would formulate syntax (btw it's "Red, I am!" you morons), how arithmetic would make love to you, how Bruno would know whether Telmo is wrong, and on top of that Deleuze too! Never mind that Deleuze and the infinitely undecided Christian consciousness soul fundamentalists on this list are as far apart as Plato is from logging on to the web in his dialogues... "You would most certainly do well on our team is the consensus here", lol.

How about going full bore on avoiding fundamental discussions? As in resisting the urge to prove to ourselves... anything! Asking instead perhaps where you want the thing to go? What you want your discourse to perform? What... IT... does? Leaving the whole parental "should" and "respectability" formations, the originality vanities, historical pornography, Christian reputations, saints and names, pretense towards some real fundamental or truth thing... leaving all that crap behind and asking how can discourse perform or leave room for things at the destination? 

Goes without saying that if you're resourceful enough to free yourself of the prison section of your own discourse fortress, bribing yourself as the guard on the bridge, not paying mind to heights and alligators living in the moat: then you got some black ops work ahead of you. The kind of work where, if it is done pro, teams have each others' backs and words instead of whining around and bickering endlessly like everybody else... who run from themselves by lowering the bar of expectations enough to definitely not make a mistake, not take risks, to not finish things and see them through, and instead be forever amazed by their usual wishful thinking with infinitely precise and accurate explanations that fill books and waste precious time, because they need recruits for what they can't themselves believe: the road beyond the personal discourse fortress is not safe. It is wondrous, filled with infinite opportunity that satiates everything in abundance. But it's not for cowards or those that fear seeing blood, which is why the shy folks stay home and defend the thing forever. PGC   

[Cosmin Visan]

"First person self-reference" is a pleonasm. Self-reference IS first person. Anything else, "3rd person bla-bla", is just words-play.

[Philip Thrift]

My brain/body (Me) has the experience I am. That experience occurs nowhere else.

@philipthrift

[Cosmin Visan]

"Brain"/"Body" are just ideas in consciousness. The experience of "I" is eternal and it is how self-reference feels itself.

[Pierz]

Howdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacy (step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant  - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more. On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress. I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies. It has led to the dominance of an impoverished reductionist account of the world that forecloses the possibility of a plurality of other rich epistemologies. I don't harbour too many illusions of changing the world, but those are the reasons I'm firing my arrow into the maelstrom.

[Philip Thrift]

I don't know about "eternal". I can't remember any experience I had before age 3, and I don't think I had any at all before I was gestating in my mother's womb.

@philipthrift

[Pierz]

On Wednesday, June 19, 2019 at 12:44:35 AM UTC+10, Terren Suydam wrote:

Hi Pierz,

Your writings remind me very much of the work of Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher who similarly shifted ontology from identity to relation, and explored many interesting consequences of making that shift. My exposure to him came from the excellent Philosophize This podcast, which dedicated 5 episodes to Deleuze. If you're interested, check out the first episode here.

Thanks. I know of Deleuze of course - I believe he killed himself by jumping out his Paris apartment window to escape the sufferings of emphysema. He's one of the post-modern guys much beloved of the academics along with Derrida and Foucault et al. But I am admittedly not familiar with his ideas. I've been trying to find philosophers who might have gone down this path before but not turned up all that much, so I will definitely check him out.

Terren

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[spudb...@aol.com]

I don't know jack about "eternal," but in physics (memory?) here is an example of 'immortal' which is darn close to eternal :-)

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190614094634.htm

I like stuff like this, so I posted it. Is it at all of use? Meh!

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[Pierz]

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 8:58:49 PM UTC+10, telmo wrote:

Hi Pierz,

On Tue, Jun 18, 2019, at 04:15, Pierz wrote:

I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about  a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world.

Right. I think this points to a fundamental fact that is overlooked in the dominant scientific paradigm of our age: that we are embedded in reality. We are participants, looking at it from the inside. The contemporary paradigm gives the utmost importance to the "third-person view" of reality, which is nothing more than a model, if not a fantasy.

The edifice collapses once you try to explain consciousness, because this third person view model forces us to explain consciousness as an emergent property of matter, and that doesn't work. An overlooked simple possibility is that separating the notions of "consciousness" and "reality" is nonsensical. There is no evidence of any "reality" outside of conscious experience, nor can there be.

But then you risk reification of consciousness itself - something I have fallen into myself, but now am less sure about. Is consciousness a "thing" in which experiences occur? Do we need such an "ether" for experiences to propagate through? I totally agree with you that a purely third person account of mind fails (any kind of "property dualism" solution is nasty and ad hoc). But do we need to find some new fundamental substrate? Perhaps there is one, but "the Tao that you can name is not the Tao". Even the Buddhists don't really believe in consciousness - the manifestations of it are part of the veil of Maya and nirvana is a state of non-being. Consciousness is an abstraction of our experiences, as matter is. What certainly exists is the phenomenological field we share, a network of relationships of which qualia and what we call matter are a part.

I am not saying that there is no value in the third-person view, on the contrary, it leads to myriad interesting things, namely the computer I am using to type this email. But we have to be able to see models for what they are.

Consider a camera lens. I want to take a photo of something, which is to say, I want to compress a 3D object into some 2D representation. Different lenses provide different mappings, but there is no way to avoid the fact that, no matter what lens you choose, something is lost. At the same time, there is no "correct lens". They just produce different mapping, that may be more or less useful depending on the situation.

There are no cells, hearts, stars, atoms, people, societies, markets, ants, music or any other such category outside of human language. These are words that point to human mental models. These models please us, and we keep playing the game. Sometimes we find even better models, but we are doing nothing but coming up with new, perhaps better lenses. Ultimately, I think this is an infinite game.

Yep. David Deutsch says the same in The Beginning of Infinity.

 

Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of). 

I have the utmost respect and interest in Physics, but I think that contemporary physicists suffer from the problem of having convinced themselves that their field, and their filed alone, can produce "the correct lens". Most scientific fields have a lot to learn from Physics when it comes to rigor, but at the same time physicists underestimate how much easier it is to achieve rigor when you are dealing with very low levels of complexity (as compared to Biology, Psychology, Sociology and so on).

Yes exactly. It really needs to be pointed out that we can only barely calculate the states of the simplest atoms, using all the supercomputers available to us! Yet the successful analysis of these isolated, microscopic physical systems is supposed to convince us that we understand all of physical reality "in principle"? This laughable idea that we live in a computer simulation of some advanced civilization - when we can't even simulate a single fucking oxygen atom?! We sure are clever apes, but it's even more impressive how impressed we are with ourselves.  

I think it would be good if Physics found its way back to a more humble and wise position, being proud of the great lenses it creates, but understanding that we also need other lenses in our toolkit.

 

Another thing I think is that the epistemic boundaries of current scientific fields have reached a point of diminishing returns, and we really should take seriously the project of crossing these boundaries without sacrificing rigor -- the elusive dream of interdisciplinarity without bullshit.

 

You have to sacrifice some rigour. Psychology is an example of a field where rigour has been applied, and the effect has been the sterilisation of imagination. Psychology as a discipline has a giant chip on is shoulder about its status as a "soft" science. So they inject more and more rigour in the form of statistical analysis, and what have we been left with? Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is fine and good, helpful in many cases, but it's a terribly limited approach to human beings, and it reduces therapists to technicians and patients to something like faulty machines. People are far richer than that, but the problem is that statistical methods are very blunt instruments that require a high degree of standardisation of technique and the levelling out of as much other variation as possible, with the result that all the richness of what actually occurs in therapy is lost, and you end up with lowest-common-denominator therapy as the only sanctioned therapeutic modality. We certainly do need quantitative analyses to keep us honest in psychology as in other areas, but rigour is not the only consideration, and quantitative methods come with their own costs. In some areas, what we need is not necessarily more rigour, but more tolerance of uncertainty, more imagination, more experimentation, combined with corrective critical analysis which may or may not include a quantitative component.

To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.

I agree.

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.

I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.

 

Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere.

I think this is the only way out of the fact that we are observing an object from the inside, so self-referentiality is unavoidable. This is also why I claim that computer science might be more fundamental than Physics, because computer science is the field with the tools to tackle self-referentiality / recursion. But again, I am being silly. Perhaps it is just another lens.

I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.) 

What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments.

My only problem with this idea is how quickly it goes over "relationships between organisms and their environments", as if there is some clear distinction or boundary between the two categories. Right now I am looking at this text, in my computer screen, and I am me looking at my computer screen. This is true of all objects we know. When we say apple, we mean "a human being's experience of an apple", even if we are not consciously aware of that. But we say "apple" for short.

 

And I am saying "organisms and their environments" for short. It is hard to talk at all without such shortcuts. I do not believe that organisms are fundamentally separate from their environments.

They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated.

Exactly.

“Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.

I think so too.

Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.

One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.

Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch:  “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”

We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation.  Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything  around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.

Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious.

I do not think that this is what Bruno claims. In fact, most of what you write seems compatible with what Bruno says, but he will correct me if I am wrong.

 

Yes, I know Bruno doesn't believe 7965 can reason, but he thinks mathematics implements reasoning. I like Bruno's ideas, but his is a mathematical ontology that starts with arithmetic, whereas mine is a relational ontology that starts with the phenomenological field. Maybe they are compatible views, maybe they aren't. I remain unconvinced about qualia arising in arithmetical structures, but these are deep questions. I may be wrong.

Telmo.

The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties. 

Grateful for any comments/critiques.

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[Pierz]

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 7:12:33 PM UTC+10, Cosmin Visan wrote:

Red is red.

No I don't think it is. I do understand your point of view. Indeed subjectively red does seem to be red, some kind of irreducible. Yet it is far from unambiguously clear that this is really the case. Imagine if you could only see in shades of red. How long would it take before red became black-and-white? Imagine if all you could ever be conscious of were redness. Without contrast, is such a state of consciousness possible? Just pure intrinsic redness, existing in and of itself, outside of any relationship with other colours, other qualia? If you only have one colour receptor in your visual system, you have only one differentiator of elements in your visual field - brightness. If you have two colour receptors, like a dog, what colours do you see? Red and yellow? Blue and yellow? The specific wavelengths of course do not matter here - it's no guarantee that just because a dog has a receptor for what we call "blue" light, that it perceives what we call blue when it sees that colour. Indeed I doubt it, because blue is a differentiator of a trichromatic system, and specifically our, human trichromatic system. I believe that the colour red has its particular qualities by virtue of evolutionary associations with red. What is red in nature? Blood, fire. Red stimulates us to pay attention. Green soothes us because of its deep evolutionary association with safe, sheltered environments. I am not reducing qualia to "nothing but" here, let alone "nothing at all", like Dennett,  but I am saying that they are part of a field of relationships and exist only by virtue of those relationships. Take the relationships away and "red" dissolves - and I believe you could prove that by wearing red-lensed glasses for a week. 

[Brent Meeker]

Exactly.  And compare some other colors.  My father was red/green color blind (which is fairly common) so ripe strawberrys looked the same color as the leaves to him.  Is orange orange?  English didn't even have a word for orange until the fruit was imported from China.  Chaucer writes of a sunset color between red and yellow.  And some people have four different color receptors, instead of just three.  But even though there are many gradations and associations, does that mean there are only relations?  There is no red?

Brent

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/19/2019 5:41 PM, Pierz wrote:

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.

I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.

 

Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere.

But if you stop worrying about what exists (where "exists" is theory dependent anyway) and think or relationships not a things but as explanations, then you can have a virtuous circle of explanation, i.e. one that encompasses everything.  To explain/understand something you start from something you already understand and work your way around.  Empirically, that's pretty much how we learn things...you always have to start from things you understand.

Brent

[Pierz]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 2:24:36 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote:

On 6/19/2019 6:07 PM, Pierz wrote:

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 7:12:33 PM UTC+10, Cosmin Visan wrote:

Red is red.

No I don't think it is. I do understand your point of view. Indeed subjectively red does seem to be red, some kind of irreducible. Yet it is far from unambiguously clear that this is really the case. Imagine if you could only see in shades of red. How long would it take before red became black-and-white? Imagine if all you could ever be conscious of were redness. Without contrast, is such a state of consciousness possible? Just pure intrinsic redness, existing in and of itself, outside of any relationship with other colours, other qualia? If you only have one colour receptor in your visual system, you have only one differentiator of elements in your visual field - brightness. If you have two colour receptors, like a dog, what colours do you see? Red and yellow? Blue and yellow? The specific wavelengths of course do not matter here - it's no guarantee that just because a dog has a receptor for what we call "blue" light, that it perceives what we call blue when it sees that colour. Indeed I doubt it, because blue is a differentiator of a trichromatic system, and specifically our, human trichromatic system. I believe that the colour red has its particular qualities by virtue of evolutionary associations with red. What is red in nature? Blood, fire. Red stimulates us to pay attention. Green soothes us because of its deep evolutionary association with safe, sheltered environments. I am not reducing qualia to "nothing but" here, let alone "nothing at all", like Dennett,  but I am saying that they are part of a field of relationships and exist only by virtue of those relationships. Take the relationships away and "red" dissolves - and I believe you could prove that by wearing red-lensed glasses for a week.

Exactly.  And compare some other colors.  My father was red/green color blind (which is fairly common) so ripe strawberrys looked the same color as the leaves to him.  Is orange orange?  English didn't even have a word for orange until the fruit was imported from China. 

 

Ha! Now that's one I didn't know. I was aware that blue only makes an appearance in language (everywhere) quite recently. There's no blue in ancient Greek (it's the "wine-dark" sea in Homer, not the blue sea). But these are linguistic matters - no-one I expect is denying that people saw blue before they had a word for it.

Chaucer writes of a sunset color between red and yellow.  And some people have four different color receptors, instead of just three.  But even though there are many gradations and associations, does that mean there are only relations?  There is no red?

 

I did not say there is no red - though Dennett does. I am saying red is defined by its relations. We feel something, which when interpreted in the visual channel, is experienced as colour. The case of people with four colour receptors in interesting, because it appears the experience of that extra colour is quite weak. I think that is because there are no (or very few) relationships between that colour (whatever it is) and our evolutionary history, so people can see a difference, but it's not a very interesting one. It's a pure visual differentiator, without the experiential richness of the other colours. So the expectation that seeing a new colour would be a fascinating, extraordinary experience is belied by that. Our emotional and visual spectra already fully saturate one another so to speak, so there's not much to be gained by turning on another one. On the other hand, there's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJQYBWUqdIE. In those cases, people really are seeing the richness of a new colour for the first time, because they are colours their brains are already programmed to see and respond to emotionally.

Brent

[Cosmin Visan]

These are interesting things that you say, and indeed I'm postponing for a while the wearing of the colored glasses for a week, primarily because I would look weird at work with colored glasses all the time. But sooner or later I will do the experiment, because it is also my belief that the selected color will vanish.

Also, you ask what colors the dog will see. I believe it will be yellow and blue. The reasons I'm giving in my paper "Is Qualia Meaning or Understanding?" with reference to the Haidinger's Brush phenomenon, which is yellow and blue: https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan If you read it, I'm very curious what you think. I'm also talking about red, green and most of the stuff that you mentioned.

Though in the end there is a problem with this relational ontology. Indeed red might disappear if you wear those glasses, because there would be no relation to other colors. But what do you do when you talk about the full experience of being conscious ? That experience, in itself, cannot be compared to anything else, because by definition it is the full experience. How is it maintained ? I'm also curious what the answer is.

[Philip Thrift]

However, it is perfectly possible that one day the results will even allow for applications, for example the construction of durable data memories for future quantum computers

could have implications for transhumanism. :)

But immortal quasiparticles brings to mind Epicurus's psychical atoms which are dispersed when the physical atoms are when one dies, meaning one's "I am" is deconstituted and becomes part of who knows how many "I am"s to follow.

(Also related to the "combination problem" pf panpsychism.)

@philipthrift

On Wednesday, June 19, 2019 at 6:54:43 PM UTC-5, spudb...@aol.com wrote:

I don't know jack about "eternal," but in physics (memory?) here is an example of 'immortal' which is darn close to eternal :-)

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190614094634.htm

I like stuff like this, so I posted it. Is it at all of use? Meh!

-----Original Message-----
From: Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com>

[Philip Thrift]

On Wednesday, June 19, 2019 at 7:41:43 PM UTC-5, Pierz wrote:

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 8:58:49 PM UTC+10, telmo wrote:

I have the utmost respect and interest in Physics, but I think that contemporary physicists suffer from the problem of having convinced themselves that their field, and their filed alone, can produce "the correct lens". Most scientific fields have a lot to learn from Physics when it comes to rigor, but at the same time physicists underestimate how much easier it is to achieve rigor when you are dealing with very low levels of complexity (as compared to Biology, Psychology, Sociology and so on).

Yes exactly. It really needs to be pointed out that we can only barely calculate the states of the simplest atoms, using all the supercomputers available to us! Yet the successful analysis of these isolated, microscopic physical systems is supposed to convince us that we understand all of physical reality "in principle"? This laughable idea that we live in a computer simulation of some advanced civilization - when we can't even simulate a single fucking oxygen atom?! We sure are clever apes, but it's even more impressive how impressed we are with ourselves.  

Wow. Both of these are wonderfully stated!

@philipthrift

 

[Bruno Marchal]

I might agree. Perhaps Telmo was talking about a physical reality, as judged independent of consciousness, which does not exist … physically, but still arithmetically.

The physical reality is independent of us, with “us” = the terrestrial mammals (say).

But the physical reality is not independent of us, with “us” = the universal numbers.

Dinosaurs have existed in our human past. But things like past and future are “invention” of numbers (to be short). We cannot prove this (in the strong sense of proof), but in that sense, we cannot prove anything about Reality nor even that there is a reality. To prove the existence of a reality is akin to prove our own consistency. We cannot prove that, despite we cannot really donut that we are (locally) consistent.

Some faith is unavoidable, if we want to do fundamental research, and avoid pure instrumentalism, which leads to manipulations, lies, and the law of the jungle ...

Bruno



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> Brent

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Jun 2019, at 22:50, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

"First person self-reference" is a pleonasm. Self-reference IS first person. Anything else, "3rd person bla-bla", is just words-play.

When a program output its code, or use it during a computation: it is third person self-reference.

When a human say I have two legs, it is FAPP, third person reference, although with mechanism, at some point this too is “really” only a first person plural self-reference.

Pure first person self-reference is a subtler notion, and it took me sometime to see that Theaetetus' attempt to define it works well in arithmetic thanks to incompleteness. Incompleteness refutes Socrates critic of Theaetetus. 

First person self-reference happens when a human say I feel pain in my leg, even if he has no leg. It refers to our own private subjective experience.

It is not word play: it is arithmetic, and those nuances apply provably to us (when assuming Mechanism).

Bruno

On Tuesday, 18 June 2019 21:00:22 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:

As I said already, you are right. What you describe is the “first person self-reference”.

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Jun 2019, at 00:13, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, June 19, 2019 at 11:05:53 PM UTC+10, PGC wrote:

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 4:15:43 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:

I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about  a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. 

Lol then this list would be about the wrongest place in the world, right? 

I mean Jesus, behold all the attempts to assimilate the discourse of your post immediately! You apparently appear as fresh meat to all the members. 

Especially in demonstrating how well your post and thoughts would do under a better regime... ;-) What fantastic academic armor you would wear, how colors would appear to you, how Yoda would formulate syntax (btw it's "Red, I am!" you morons), how arithmetic would make love to you, how Bruno would know whether Telmo is wrong, and on top of that Deleuze too! Never mind that Deleuze and the infinitely undecided Christian consciousness soul fundamentalists on this list are as far apart as Plato is from logging on to the web in his dialogues... "You would most certainly do well on our team is the consensus here", lol.

How about going full bore on avoiding fundamental discussions? As in resisting the urge to prove to ourselves... anything! Asking instead perhaps where you want the thing to go? What you want your discourse to perform? What... IT... does? Leaving the whole parental "should" and "respectability" formations, the originality vanities, historical pornography, Christian reputations, saints and names, pretense towards some real fundamental or truth thing... leaving all that crap behind and asking how can discourse perform or leave room for things at the destination? 

Goes without saying that if you're resourceful enough to free yourself of the prison section of your own discourse fortress, bribing yourself as the guard on the bridge, not paying mind to heights and alligators living in the moat: then you got some black ops work ahead of you. The kind of work where, if it is done pro, teams have each others' backs and words instead of whining around and bickering endlessly like everybody else... who run from themselves by lowering the bar of expectations enough to definitely not make a mistake, not take risks, to not finish things and see them through, and instead be forever amazed by their usual wishful thinking with infinitely precise and accurate explanations that fill books and waste precious time, because they need recruits for what they can't themselves believe: the road beyond the personal discourse fortress is not safe. It is wondrous, filled with infinite opportunity that satiates everything in abundance. But it's not for cowards or those that fear seeing blood, which is why the shy folks stay home and defend the thing forever. PGC   

Howdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacy

First person indeterminacy. Like in Everett, the probability (and the collapse) are first person experience. There is no third person self-reference. I just correct your typo.

(step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant  - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more.

You did show complete understanding of this in your publication of the UDA. I understand you don’t follow the thread on it, but you might thing helping those who does not understand, or perhaps fake to not understand, etc. 

On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress.

Nor do I. Nobody can know if I personally believe or not in Mechanism. Defending ideas is a waste of time, I think.

I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies. It has led to the dominance of an impoverished reductionist account of the world that forecloses the possibility of a plurality of other rich epistemologies. I don't harbour too many illusions of changing the world, but those are the reasons I'm firing my arrow into the maelstrom.

I do want a change in the world, like making theology back into science. We see the obscurantism and the suffering which happens when we let this filed in the hand of those who exploit it for their special interest. I want to share the universal machine lesson in modesty. I want a better world for the kids.

Bruno 

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[Cosmin Visan]

But there are no legs in the first place. "Legs" are from the very start just ideas in consciousness.

Also, self-reference doesn't "happen". Self-reference eternally is. All the consciousness in the world are self-reference. Self-reference is no-thing (in the sense that it is not a thing, it is unformalizable) and every-thing (all the consciousness in the world) both at the same time. I'm not sure if you grasp this subtlety.

[Cosmin Visan]

Only because you don't remember, it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Is like dreaming. Most of the time when we wake up we don't remember anything. But if we are woken up during the night, we clearly remember dreaming. Also, a guy once told me something very interesting. He said that when he had kids, he started to remember things from when he was 1 year old, things that never before in his life remembered, things that he didn't even know that he lived. So if you don't have kids, try having some, and see what happens.

[Jennifer OBryon]

I think to be conscious first requires you to be conscious of your own unique disposition. I s struggle with the idea of a machine becoming conscious without first having unique personal traits. Without having something personal to share, there would be no reason to become part of the conscious world. However, providing a person who already has a unique disposition with artificial neural networks to assist in sensory perception and expression is completely in the realm of possibilities. I think our disposition are initially inherited genetically and are altered through our life events and decisions and reactions to the life events. Enabling a machine to become conscious may be akin to cloning a human dna ‘memory starter kit’ . . .?

[Cosmin Visan]

"Machine" is just an idea in consciousness. Consciousness is the nature of reality. You don't create it. It always is. Is like saying: "Machines will one day be able to produce electrons, only if we write the proper algorithm for electrons". lol

[Pierz]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 9:16:58 PM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jun 2019, at 00:13, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, June 19, 2019 at 11:05:53 PM UTC+10, PGC wrote:

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 4:15:43 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:

I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about  a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. 

Lol then this list would be about the wrongest place in the world, right? 

I mean Jesus, behold all the attempts to assimilate the discourse of your post immediately! You apparently appear as fresh meat to all the members. 

Especially in demonstrating how well your post and thoughts would do under a better regime... ;-) What fantastic academic armor you would wear, how colors would appear to you, how Yoda would formulate syntax (btw it's "Red, I am!" you morons), how arithmetic would make love to you, how Bruno would know whether Telmo is wrong, and on top of that Deleuze too! Never mind that Deleuze and the infinitely undecided Christian consciousness soul fundamentalists on this list are as far apart as Plato is from logging on to the web in his dialogues... "You would most certainly do well on our team is the consensus here", lol.

How about going full bore on avoiding fundamental discussions? As in resisting the urge to prove to ourselves... anything! Asking instead perhaps where you want the thing to go? What you want your discourse to perform? What... IT... does? Leaving the whole parental "should" and "respectability" formations, the originality vanities, historical pornography, Christian reputations, saints and names, pretense towards some real fundamental or truth thing... leaving all that crap behind and asking how can discourse perform or leave room for things at the destination? 

Goes without saying that if you're resourceful enough to free yourself of the prison section of your own discourse fortress, bribing yourself as the guard on the bridge, not paying mind to heights and alligators living in the moat: then you got some black ops work ahead of you. The kind of work where, if it is done pro, teams have each others' backs and words instead of whining around and bickering endlessly like everybody else... who run from themselves by lowering the bar of expectations enough to definitely not make a mistake, not take risks, to not finish things and see them through, and instead be forever amazed by their usual wishful thinking with infinitely precise and accurate explanations that fill books and waste precious time, because they need recruits for what they can't themselves believe: the road beyond the personal discourse fortress is not safe. It is wondrous, filled with infinite opportunity that satiates everything in abundance. But it's not for cowards or those that fear seeing blood, which is why the shy folks stay home and defend the thing forever. PGC   

Howdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacy

First person indeterminacy. Like in Everett, the probability (and the collapse) are first person experience. There is no third person self-reference. I just correct your typo.

Apologies, yes of course I meant that, 

(step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant  - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more.

You did show complete understanding of this in your publication of the UDA. I understand you don’t follow the thread on it, but you might thing helping those who does not understand, or perhaps fake to not understand, etc. 

To me the idea of first person indeterminacy is pretty simple and obvious, and is the basis for MWI - so I don't know why JC doesn't get it, or if he pretends not to as you say. What I understand even less is why you bother to continue the debate with him over it when he's clearly entrenched in his position and will never budge. Life's too short to spend it banging your head against a brick wall.

On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress.

Nor do I. Nobody can know if I personally believe or not in Mechanism. Defending ideas is a waste of time, I think.

Isn't that what you were doing in your endless wrangle with JC though?

I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies. It has led to the dominance of an impoverished reductionist account of the world that forecloses the possibility of a plurality of other rich epistemologies. I don't harbour too many illusions of changing the world, but those are the reasons I'm firing my arrow into the maelstrom.

I do want a change in the world, like making theology back into science. We see the obscurantism and the suffering which happens when we let this filed in the hand of those who exploit it for their special interest. I want to share the universal machine lesson in modesty. I want a better world for the kids.

Bruno 

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[PGC]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 12:13:34 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:

Howdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacy (step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant  - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more. On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress. I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies.

There is no requirement for a discursive vehicle that explains everything. Conspiracy discourses accomplish that all the time but lead nowhere. On this list the burden of proof should always lay on those that propose to explain everything.

But a discourse that specifies a pluralism that ditches the usual one vs many issues, idealism, belief, religions etc. is a candidate for breaking the gridlock of always framing what's going on politically at the level of nation states, with all the potential for ugly nativist/purist nonsense. Instead I see sexier discourses run more along the lines of specifying that pluralism, say in cultural, scientific, and biodiversity senses, is an international security and survival matter with the potential to override the traditional war zones of philosophy of science, aesthetics, even belief.

Bruno can defend his 30 year old thesis here forever but its defense costs diversity, like the guy at the party who must always tear the conversation to his pet topic and cannot relate to folks on their own terms without dominating their discourse á la behold the supreme unified truth of the G*/G split and your deviation from the truth that there is no truth, over which I, the only last remaining sincere scientist preside. He could tattoo his diamonds on his face, take a photo, and just post the photo when he looses his cool with Brent, Russell, Telmo, Bruce, Phil etc. when their posts waver from the divine truth of the mechanical übersoul and save everybody time.

Explanations, reality, truth etc. can be overrated because you don't need to believe in a certain ontology, truth, personal religions, views etc. if we can agree on some higher level e.g. that things are sexy regardless of discursive origins and games: like aiming for biodiversity in oceans at a global level, with global budgets and research. More protection, efficient management, increasing biodiversity means more fish in the sea, more fish on peoples' plates, money in fishermen pockets, resilience of these resources to changing climates: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/22/6230, more potential for cleaner tourism, better dives for Russell, all of which should charge more research. The notion that we somehow have to align on what the physical or real world is to be able to proceed is innocent but devoid of pragmatic ability. Yawn on the sophomoric innocent debates running for thousands of years: the time is now.

More relations, more food, better survival, sustainability, more access to more resources, more sophisticated approaches to ethics and problems of evil and law seem sexier than betting everything on a single ontological horse and policing its dance moves. The road to infinite sexiness of interest. Not merely to modestly maintain some multiplicity/diversity, but to expand these because dominant narratives and discourses are control structures that require too much costly stupidity and unhappiness to maintain. Desert barreness instead of colorful jungles with higher resilience and increasing checks and balances. The virtuous circle of sexiness: I don't know who or what the world or its subjects are but I don't care fundamentally because I'm having better sex, purer poison, and meaning embodied and shared in more resilient environments. PGC

[Pierz]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 7:06:25 PM UTC+10, Cosmin Visan wrote:

These are interesting things that you say, and indeed I'm postponing for a while the wearing of the colored glasses for a week, primarily because I would look weird at work with colored glasses all the time. But sooner or later I will do the experiment, because it is also my belief that the selected color will vanish.

Awesome! I don't have the commitment myself, but I'll sure be interested to hear how that turns out :) 

Also, you ask what colors the dog will see. I believe it will be yellow and blue. The reasons I'm giving in my paper "Is Qualia Meaning or Understanding?" with reference to the Haidinger's Brush phenomenon, which is yellow and blue: https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan If you read it, I'm very curious what you think. I'm also talking about red, green and most of the stuff that you mentioned.

Though in the end there is a problem with this relational ontology. Indeed red might disappear if you wear those glasses, because there would be no relation to other colors. But what do you do when you talk about the full experience of being conscious ? That experience, in itself, cannot be compared to anything else, because by definition it is the full experience. How is it maintained ? I'm also curious what the answer is.

You overlook a lot of complexity when you make sweeping statements about "the full experience of being conscious." Do you mean a person's full experience in a given moment? Because surely that experience is an aggregation of qualia, with both internal relations (say between red and blue colour elements in the visual field), and relations with prior experiences. For example the feeling I have when I look at my dog right now is a highly complex aggregate of relationships with prior memories of her, other dogs, with innumerable experiences too complex and various to mention which are compressed into a kind of qualitative summary which is the feeling I have looking at her. My experience of the current moment in its totality is an inter-related collection of such relationships between the current and prior moments and experiences. Does this network of relationships in consciousness end at some primary irreducible atom of consciousness with the intrinsic property of being conscious? I say no. I say that that that web of relations ultimately merges into the infinite web of relations that is the cosmos, a web that has no fundamental properties that can be named or expressed in finite form. 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Jun 2019, at 02:41, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 8:58:49 PM UTC+10, telmo wrote:

Hi Pierz,

On Tue, Jun 18, 2019, at 04:15, Pierz wrote:

I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about  a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world.

Right. I think this points to a fundamental fact that is overlooked in the dominant scientific paradigm of our age: that we are embedded in reality. We are participants, looking at it from the inside. The contemporary paradigm gives the utmost importance to the "third-person view" of reality, which is nothing more than a model, if not a fantasy.

The edifice collapses once you try to explain consciousness, because this third person view model forces us to explain consciousness as an emergent property of matter, and that doesn't work. An overlooked simple possibility is that separating the notions of "consciousness" and "reality" is nonsensical. There is no evidence of any "reality" outside of conscious experience, nor can there be.

But then you risk reification of consciousness itself

I agree that is the problem for those who want consciousness being fundamental. It is also a way to avoid searching a theory/explanation of it. It is not better than the reification of matter into primary matter. It is good as a simplifying assumption, but excessively bad as an hypothesis in metaphysics.

- something I have fallen into myself, but now am less sure about. Is consciousness a "thing" in which experiences occur? Do we need such an "ether" for experiences to propagate through? I totally agree with you that a purely third person account of mind fails (any kind of "property dualism" solution is nasty and ad hoc).

I disagree. With mechanism, there is no dualism, but a through explanation why there has to be first person account by machines, and why it is not definable, not provable, yet indubitable and immediately know, and then that consciousness theory explains the “illusion of matter” in a completely precise way, and thus testable. Mathematical logic provides the tools to do this, but very few philosophers or physicists know it.

But do we need to find some new fundamental substrate?

With mechanism, there is no substrate at all. Numbers or programs are not substrate. They are purely definable in the axiomatic relational way, and the apparent substrates are explained in term of the first person (plural) experience of the person supported by the number relation in arithmetic. 

Perhaps there is one, but "the Tao that you can name is not the Tao”.

Which is very similar to Gödel’s second incompleteness: <>t -> ~[]<>t. 

No machine at all can give a name or description of a reality enough rich to encompass itself. That explains why consciousness is necessary puzzling.

Even the Buddhists don't really believe in consciousness - the manifestations of it are part of the veil of Maya and nirvana is a state of non-being.

I am not sure of this. I think they say that for the awake-consciousness, which is always undecidable. Maybe you can give a reference here, so I can confirm.

Consciousness is an abstraction of our experiences, as matter is. What certainly exists is the phenomenological field we share, a network of relationships of which qualia and what we call matter are a part.

Yes. And that follows from the relation between numbers, or combinators, etc. Any universal machinery will do. Physics is independent of the choice of the (immaterial) ontology.

I am not saying that there is no value in the third-person view, on the contrary, it leads to myriad interesting things, namely the computer I am using to type this email. But we have to be able to see models for what they are.

Consider a camera lens. I want to take a photo of something, which is to say, I want to compress a 3D object into some 2D representation. Different lenses provide different mappings, but there is no way to avoid the fact that, no matter what lens you choose, something is lost. At the same time, there is no "correct lens". They just produce different mapping, that may be more or less useful depending on the situation.

There are no cells, hearts, stars, atoms, people, societies, markets, ants, music or any other such category outside of human language. These are words that point to human mental models. These models please us, and we keep playing the game. Sometimes we find even better models, but we are doing nothing but coming up with new, perhaps better lenses. Ultimately, I think this is an infinite game.

Yep. David Deutsch says the same in The Beginning of Infinity.

If the game is Turing emulable, that would be like the universal dovetailer (aka sigma-1 arithmetic), but the physics which emerges is provably NON Turing emulable. The first person indeterminacy domain is highly NOT computable, and note that consciousness itself is also far beyond the computable, as it is basically only definable by reference to truth (the top of all degrees of unsolvability).

 

Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of). 

I have the utmost respect and interest in Physics, but I think that contemporary physicists suffer from the problem of having convinced themselves that their field, and their filed alone, can produce "the correct lens". Most scientific fields have a lot to learn from Physics when it comes to rigor, but at the same time physicists underestimate how much easier it is to achieve rigor when you are dealing with very low levels of complexity (as compared to Biology, Psychology, Sociology and so on).

Yes exactly. It really needs to be pointed out that we can only barely calculate the states of the simplest atoms, using all the supercomputers available to us!

All material things, including a minute portion of the vacuum, needs the entire sigma_1 truth as an oracle to be emulated. No computer at all will ever been able to simulate this.

The mystery is in the explanability of the physical reality. At first sight, mechanism entails an explosion of continuations. It is the very subtle consequence of incompleteness which saves the physical realm, in the Mechanist setting.

Yet the successful analysis of these isolated, microscopic physical systems is supposed to convince us that we understand all of physical reality "in principle"? This laughable idea that we live in a computer simulation of some advanced civilization - when we can't even simulate a single fucking oxygen atom?! We sure are clever apes, but it's even more impressive how impressed we are with ourselves.  

Yes, that is how I have proven that we can test if we are in an emulation of not. And thanks to the quantum, we have evidence that we are not in simulation. We are in the infinitely one which are run in the tiny segment of the arithmetical reality, which is a segment of all models of arithmetic.

I think it would be good if Physics found its way back to a more humble and wise position, being proud of the great lenses it creates, but understanding that we also need other lenses in our toolkit.

 

Another thing I think is that the epistemic boundaries of current scientific fields have reached a point of diminishing returns, and we really should take seriously the project of crossing these boundaries without sacrificing rigor -- the elusive dream of interdisciplinarity without bullshit.

 

You have to sacrifice some rigour. Psychology is an example of a field where rigour has been applied, and the effect has been the sterilisation of imagination.

I agree, but that was fake rigour, based on reductionist metaphysics. That happens because rigorous in theology is still forbidden in many circles.

It is easy to reintroduce rigour in the human science, by adding interrogation marks. The problem are the fake certainties that people are trained to believe, when theology is in the hand of authoritarian societies.

Psychology as a discipline has a giant chip on is shoulder about its status as a "soft" science. So they inject more and more rigour in the form of statistical analysis, and what have we been left with? Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is fine and good, helpful in many cases, but it's a terribly limited approach to human beings, and it reduces therapists to technicians and patients to something like faulty machines.

The universal machine already know better. That is not rigour. Only appearance of face rigour.

People are far richer than that, but the problem is that statistical methods are very blunt instruments that require a high degree of standardisation of technique and the levelling out of as much other variation as possible, with the result that all the richness of what actually occurs in therapy is lost, and you end up with lowest-common-denominator therapy as the only sanctioned therapeutic modality. We certainly do need quantitative analyses to keep us honest in psychology as in other areas, but rigour is not the only consideration, and quantitative methods come with their own costs. In some areas, what we need is not necessarily more rigour, but more tolerance of uncertainty, more imagination, more experimentation, combined with corrective critical analysis which may or may not include a quantitative component.

Or better hypothesis. Mechanism explains why we need both the qualitative, well analysed through the communicable and incommunicable self-referential statements, and the quantitative.

To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.

I agree.

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.

I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.

 

Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere.

It is not an exaggeration to say that theoretical computer scienc, if not the whole mathematical logic field, is based on how Gödel and Kleene have solved the “infinite regress problem” of all circular definition. 

Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach” is excellent. He is the only physicist that I know who is not wrong on Gödel and its relation with Mechanism.

I think this is the only way out of the fact that we are observing an object from the inside, so self-referentiality is unavoidable. This is also why I claim that computer science might be more fundamental than Physics, because computer science is the field with the tools to tackle self-referentiality / recursion. But again, I am being silly. Perhaps it is just another lens.

I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.) 

What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments.

My only problem with this idea is how quickly it goes over "relationships between organisms and their environments", as if there is some clear distinction or boundary between the two categories. Right now I am looking at this text, in my computer screen, and I am me looking at my computer screen. This is true of all objects we know. When we say apple, we mean "a human being's experience of an apple", even if we are not consciously aware of that. But we say "apple" for short.

 

And I am saying "organisms and their environments" for short. It is hard to talk at all without such shortcuts. I do not believe that organisms are fundamentally separate from their environments.

They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated.

Exactly.

“Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.

I think so too.

Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.

One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.

Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch:  “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”

We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation.  Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything  around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.

Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious.

I do not think that this is what Bruno claims. In fact, most of what you write seems compatible with what Bruno says, but he will correct me if I am wrong.

 

Yes, I know Bruno doesn't believe 7965 can reason, but he thinks mathematics implements reasoning.

It follows from “yes doctor”.

This seems to be not known: but the existence of all computations in the arithmetical reality (the models, standard or not, of any known theory of arithmetic) is a fact. Even provable in Peano arithmetic.

I like Bruno's ideas,

I have no ideas. I have just shows the theory obtained by any universal computationalist machine introspectiog itself. Every statement I make is either a theorem in Peano arithmetic, or in very limited extensions of arithmetic, like in Torkel Franzen’s book “Inexhaustibility”. 

but his is a mathematical ontology that starts with arithmetic, whereas mine is a relational ontology that starts with the phenomenological field.

But then, Telmo, you put the mystery in the ontology, and this in a way which makes you condemning all machines into zombie. I just listen to the machine, and explain what they already tell us.

I don’t think that PA is a zombie, especially by its silence on the fundamental question, and then the use of G*, with the interrogation marks.

Maybe they are compatible views, maybe they aren't. I remain unconvinced about qualia arising in arithmetical structures, but these are deep questions. I may be wrong.

I am still not sure if what many miss here is not just some knowledge of mathematical logic.

I would be please if people tell me if they do understand that incompleteness makes all nuance of provability obligatory, and why the non definable one would not explain the qualia, including why that is necessarily felt as mysterious (which is eventually related to the fact that the first person *is* not a machine from its own point of view. Indeed it is anon definable abstract type distributed on the whole arithmetical reality: that is not a machine!

(I have commented both Pierz and Telmo, here, sorry for that).

Bruno

Telmo.

The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties. 

Grateful for any comments/critiques.

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[Bruno Marchal]

Absolutely, but that is the reason to not start from a circular explanation, but from a simple non circular like one, which, if Turing universal, will account for all circular processes. Then, this attribute mind to machines, and kill all reductionist conception that we can have on machines, and thus on humans too!

Bruno

Brent

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[Pierz]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 9:44:57 PM UTC+10, PGC wrote:

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 12:13:34 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:

Howdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacy (step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant  - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more. On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress. I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies.

There is no requirement for a discursive vehicle that explains everything. Conspiracy discourses accomplish that all the time but lead nowhere. On this list the burden of proof should always lay on those that propose to explain everything.

 

I would never claim that the proposal I have put forward here "explains everything". It's not meant as a candidate for a theory of everything. It's meant as an antidote to reifications and reductions of all kinds.

But a discourse that specifies a pluralism that ditches the usual one vs many issues, idealism, belief, religions etc. is a candidate for breaking the gridlock of always framing what's going on politically at the level of nation states, with all the potential for ugly nativist/purist nonsense. Instead I see sexier discourses run more along the lines of specifying that pluralism, say in cultural, scientific, and biodiversity senses, is an international security and survival matter with the potential to override the traditional war zones of philosophy of science, aesthetics, even belief.

Bruno can defend his 30 year old thesis here forever but its defense costs diversity, like the guy at the party who must always tear the conversation to his pet topic and cannot relate to folks on their own terms without dominating their discourse á la behold the supreme unified truth of the G*/G split and your deviation from the truth that there is no truth, over which I, the only last remaining sincere scientist preside. He could tattoo his diamonds on his face, take a photo, and just post the photo when he looses his cool with Brent, Russell, Telmo, Bruce, Phil etc. when their posts waver from the divine truth of the mechanical übersoul and save everybody time.

Explanations, reality, truth etc. can be overrated because you don't need to believe in a certain ontology, truth, personal religions, views etc.

Yes of course. Ontologies are less important than saving the world's fish, educating our children well, getting rid of nuclear weapons etc etc, and those goals do not depend much on whether anyone believes in intrinsic properties or not. But we all gravitate to our particular fascinations, intellectual bones we just can't help gnawing at. I teach classes about how to have better relationships. I write fiction. I write code. And I ponder the deep questions of the relationship between mind, matter and mathematics - without, I think, becoming that guy at the party. In fact I almost never even mention these ideas because most people consider it weird.

 

if we can agree on some higher level e.g. that things are sexy regardless of discursive origins and games: like aiming for biodiversity in oceans at a global level, with global budgets and research. More protection, efficient management, increasing biodiversity means more fish in the sea, more fish on peoples' plates, money in fishermen pockets, resilience of these resources to changing climates: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/22/6230, more potential for cleaner tourism, better dives for Russell, all of which should charge more research. The notion that we somehow have to align on what the physical or real world is to be able to proceed is innocent but devoid of pragmatic ability. Yawn on the sophomoric innocent debates running for thousands of years: the time is now.

More relations, more food, better survival, sustainability, more access to more resources, more sophisticated approaches to ethics and problems of evil and law seem sexier than betting everything on a single ontological horse and policing its dance moves.

Sure - except we have, as a society, bet everything on a single ontological horse, and we do police its dance moves. There's one giant ontological horse in town, in case you haven't noticed, and its name is Materialism. And so I say, yes, let a thousand flowers bloom! But in order to do that, we need to kill that damn horse. Then we might begin to properly honour the true depth of meaning in this world, the subterranean connections of karma, and the stories that shape the whole thing. I like to think a relational ontology would give a lot more horses a lot more space to dance.

[PGC]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 2:02:37 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jun 2019, at 06:36, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 6/19/2019 5:41 PM, Pierz wrote:

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.

I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.

 

Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere.

But if you stop worrying about what exists (where "exists" is theory dependent anyway) and think or relationships not a things but as explanations, then you can have a virtuous circle of explanation, i.e. one that encompasses everything.  To explain/understand something you start from something you already understand and work your way around.  Empirically, that's pretty much how we learn things...you always have to start from things you understand.

Absolutely, but that is the reason to not start from a circular explanation, but from a simple non circular like one, which, if Turing universal, will account for all circular processes. Then, this attribute mind to machines, and kill all reductionist conception that we can have on machines, and thus on humans too!

You pretend that this immunizes people from evil or that such approaches were inherently more truthful, more correct for purely aesthetic ("simple") reasons. It's ambitious: you don't offer what may appeal to other folks and their sensibilities, you clothe it as "the real reason to not start circular". You confuse logic, personal truths/opinions, and taste a lot for somebody who claims to have nailed qualia and sensation. This resembles the confusion of fanatics. PGC  

[Telmo Menezes]

Bruno, it wasn't me who wrote the above.

I don’t think that PA is a zombie, especially by its silence on the fundamental question, and then the use of G*, with the interrogation marks.

Maybe they are compatible views, maybe they aren't. I remain unconvinced about qualia arising in arithmetical structures, but these are deep questions. I may be wrong.

I am still not sure if what many miss here is not just some knowledge of mathematical logic.

I do miss some knowledge of mathematical logic, but again this wasn't me. I will reply to the other things soon. I apologize for being inconsistent in my participation in discussions. Life gets in the way...

Telmo.

I would be please if people tell me if they do understand that incompleteness makes all nuance of provability obligatory, and why the non definable one would not explain the qualia, including why that is necessarily felt as mysterious (which is eventually related to the fact that the first person *is* not a machine from its own point of view. Indeed it is anon definable abstract type distributed on the whole arithmetical reality: that is not a machine!

(I have commented both Pierz and Telmo, here, sorry for that).

Bruno

Telmo.

The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties. 

Grateful for any comments/critiques.

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[Philip Thrift]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 7:35:27 AM UTC-5, Pierz wrote:

More relations, more food, better survival, sustainability, more access to more resources, more sophisticated approaches to ethics and problems of evil and law seem sexier than betting everything on a single ontological horse and policing its dance moves.

Sure - except we have, as a society, bet everything on a single ontological horse, and we do police its dance moves. There's one giant ontological horse in town, in case you haven't noticed, and its name is Materialism. And so I say, yes, let a thousand flowers bloom! But in order to do that, we need to kill that damn horse. Then we might begin to properly honour the true depth of meaning in this world, the subterranean connections of karma, and the stories that shape the whole thing. I like to think a relational ontology would give a lot more horses a lot more space to dance.

What about just an ontology that includes real experiences (or qualia), that are nonphysical in the sense of being outside of physics (as practiced today)?

@philipthrift

[PGC]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 2:35:27 PM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 9:44:57 PM UTC+10, PGC wrote:

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 12:13:34 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:

Howdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacy (step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant  - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more. On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress. I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies.

There is no requirement for a discursive vehicle that explains everything. Conspiracy discourses accomplish that all the time but lead nowhere. On this list the burden of proof should always lay on those that propose to explain everything.

 

I would never claim that the proposal I have put forward here "explains everything". It's not meant as a candidate for a theory of everything. It's meant as an antidote to reifications and reductions of all kinds.

But a discourse that specifies a pluralism that ditches the usual one vs many issues, idealism, belief, religions etc. is a candidate for breaking the gridlock of always framing what's going on politically at the level of nation states, with all the potential for ugly nativist/purist nonsense. Instead I see sexier discourses run more along the lines of specifying that pluralism, say in cultural, scientific, and biodiversity senses, is an international security and survival matter with the potential to override the traditional war zones of philosophy of science, aesthetics, even belief.

Bruno can defend his 30 year old thesis here forever but its defense costs diversity, like the guy at the party who must always tear the conversation to his pet topic and cannot relate to folks on their own terms without dominating their discourse á la behold the supreme unified truth of the G*/G split and your deviation from the truth that there is no truth, over which I, the only last remaining sincere scientist preside. He could tattoo his diamonds on his face, take a photo, and just post the photo when he looses his cool with Brent, Russell, Telmo, Bruce, Phil etc. when their posts waver from the divine truth of the mechanical übersoul and save everybody time.

Explanations, reality, truth etc. can be overrated because you don't need to believe in a certain ontology, truth, personal religions, views etc.

Yes of course. Ontologies are less important than saving the world's fish, educating our children well, getting rid of nuclear weapons etc etc, and those goals do not depend much on whether anyone believes in intrinsic properties or not. But we all gravitate to our particular fascinations, intellectual bones we just can't help gnawing at. I teach classes about how to have better relationships. I write fiction. I write code. And I ponder the deep questions of the relationship between mind, matter and mathematics - without, I think, becoming that guy at the party. In fact I almost never even mention these ideas because most people consider it weird.

 

if we can agree on some higher level e.g. that things are sexy regardless of discursive origins and games: like aiming for biodiversity in oceans at a global level, with global budgets and research. More protection, efficient management, increasing biodiversity means more fish in the sea, more fish on peoples' plates, money in fishermen pockets, resilience of these resources to changing climates: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/22/6230, more potential for cleaner tourism, better dives for Russell, all of which should charge more research. The notion that we somehow have to align on what the physical or real world is to be able to proceed is innocent but devoid of pragmatic ability. Yawn on the sophomoric innocent debates running for thousands of years: the time is now.

More relations, more food, better survival, sustainability, more access to more resources, more sophisticated approaches to ethics and problems of evil and law seem sexier than betting everything on a single ontological horse and policing its dance moves.

Sure - except we have, as a society, bet everything on a single ontological horse, and we do police its dance moves. There's one giant ontological horse in town, in case you haven't noticed, and its name is Materialism. And so I say, yes, let a thousand flowers bloom! But in order to do that, we need to kill that damn horse.

Lol, that's another "Just say No" thing though. If stuff/materialism is what people want, then that's a commitment worth nailing: You want to keep having stuff? How about better stuff? More sustainable stuff that is more fun, produced in work environments that are more ethical? More brains optimizing our relationship to stuff, make it less damaging so you can have more good stuff?

With regards to materialism and dependencies of many kinds: I have little faith in ascetic and modesty based "just say no to xyz" approaches because they're not fun enough to sustain. Kinda like diets: if it's a deprivation trip you're running then people are correct in refuting that. It's patronizing to be told one should regret existing because one worships certain things and not others. Regardless of backgrounds. 

It's up educators indeed to show "you can enjoy your poison/materialism in a healthier way with a few tweaks" and bank on the fact that people get bored. Even junkies get bored of "that life" after fifteen years. What solidifies dependencies is the rest of the world patronizing them going "you greedy materialist junkies shouldn't have your stuff while we have ours!". That's a fuel for our addiction to materialism: people's frustrations. So a multiplicity discourse worth its salt has to wage war on poverty/frustration/suffering/hate and convince industry that profit maximization includes new measures that pursue these ends in the long run because failure to do so has and will continue to have negative national security/political stability implications that will hurt their bottom line. 

A pluralism of this kind would frame people as wealth generator-ends in themselves, instead of wasteful consumers in service of the traditional corporate profit maximization. I'm tired of the victimization trappings and the holier than thou bullshit in discourses. PGC

[Cosmin Visan]

You can clearly say that there are structures inside qualia, but the final quale is always singular. The highest quale that you experience is the present moment as such. And present moment as such, as a quale on its own, doesn't have another quale to compare with. So it shouldn't be possible to exist. The problem is related to the so-called "meta-cognition". Some people, including for example Bernardo Kustrap, say that you need to have meta-cognition in order to have any qualia at all. And they say that since animal don't have meta-cognition, they also don't have any qualia. But the problem is that if you take this theory for granted, then you also need meta-meta-cognition in order for meta-cognition to exist. And so on to infinity. So there must be something absolute, beyond relations.

[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Jun 2019, at 13:19, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

But there are no legs in the first place. "Legs" are from the very start just ideas in consciousness.

You are right. Eventually, legs and atoms are first person plural. As I said. But locally and pedagogically, it is not good to insist on this at the start.

Now, self-reference, be it 1p, 3p, 1p-plural does not requires the existence of anything, except the numbers or programs.

Also, self-reference doesn't "happen". Self-reference eternally is.

No problem with that either. But an explanation must start from where everybody agrees, and those willing to accept Digital Mechanism, if only for the sake of the reasoning, have no problem with addition and multiplication on numbers.

All the consciousness in the world are self-reference.

No problem. But many things that you say can be proved to be necessary the case. It is not an assumption, it becomes theorems, when we bet on Computationalism (aka Digital Mechanism).

Self-reference is no-thing (in the sense that it is not a thing,

Of course.

it is unformalizable)

Absolutely OK, despite it is amazingly meta-definable (by rich Löbian machine *on* less rich Löbian machines).

That is why at some point it is crucial to understand that Mechanism is a theology, which is the science of what is, from our personal perspective, necessarily extending properly science. 

and every-thing (all the consciousness in the world) both at the same time.

Now that does not make sense to me, but this is because your ontology is unclear for me. Your text is not quite helpful, and I might ask you to formalise your ontology and perhaps the phenomenology too, to make precise sense on this. It is unclear how you would test experimentally such statements.

Bruno 

I'm not sure if you grasp this subtlety.

On Thursday, 20 June 2019 14:08:55 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:

First person self-reference happens when a human say I feel pain in my leg, even if he has no leg. It refers to our own private subjective experience.

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[Bruno Marchal]

I do miss some knowledge of mathematical logic, but again this wasn't me. I will reply to the other things soon. I apologize for being inconsistent in my participation in discussions. Life gets in the way…

No problem, Telmo. Apology for the mis-attribution! 

Bruno

Telmo.

I would be please if people tell me if they do understand that incompleteness makes all nuance of provability obligatory, and why the non definable one would not explain the qualia, including why that is necessarily felt as mysterious (which is eventually related to the fact that the first person *is* not a machine from its own point of view. Indeed it is anon definable abstract type distributed on the whole arithmetical reality: that is not a machine!

(I have commented both Pierz and Telmo, here, sorry for that).

Bruno

Telmo.

The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties. 

Grateful for any comments/critiques.

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Jun 2019, at 13:37, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 9:16:58 PM UTC+10, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jun 2019, at 00:13, Pierz <pie...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, June 19, 2019 at 11:05:53 PM UTC+10, PGC wrote:

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 4:15:43 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:

I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about  a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. 

Lol then this list would be about the wrongest place in the world, right? 

I mean Jesus, behold all the attempts to assimilate the discourse of your post immediately! You apparently appear as fresh meat to all the members. 

Especially in demonstrating how well your post and thoughts would do under a better regime... ;-) What fantastic academic armor you would wear, how colors would appear to you, how Yoda would formulate syntax (btw it's "Red, I am!" you morons), how arithmetic would make love to you, how Bruno would know whether Telmo is wrong, and on top of that Deleuze too! Never mind that Deleuze and the infinitely undecided Christian consciousness soul fundamentalists on this list are as far apart as Plato is from logging on to the web in his dialogues... "You would most certainly do well on our team is the consensus here", lol.

How about going full bore on avoiding fundamental discussions? As in resisting the urge to prove to ourselves... anything! Asking instead perhaps where you want the thing to go? What you want your discourse to perform? What... IT... does? Leaving the whole parental "should" and "respectability" formations, the originality vanities, historical pornography, Christian reputations, saints and names, pretense towards some real fundamental or truth thing... leaving all that crap behind and asking how can discourse perform or leave room for things at the destination? 

Goes without saying that if you're resourceful enough to free yourself of the prison section of your own discourse fortress, bribing yourself as the guard on the bridge, not paying mind to heights and alligators living in the moat: then you got some black ops work ahead of you. The kind of work where, if it is done pro, teams have each others' backs and words instead of whining around and bickering endlessly like everybody else... who run from themselves by lowering the bar of expectations enough to definitely not make a mistake, not take risks, to not finish things and see them through, and instead be forever amazed by their usual wishful thinking with infinitely precise and accurate explanations that fill books and waste precious time, because they need recruits for what they can't themselves believe: the road beyond the personal discourse fortress is not safe. It is wondrous, filled with infinite opportunity that satiates everything in abundance. But it's not for cowards or those that fear seeing blood, which is why the shy folks stay home and defend the thing forever. PGC   

Howdy cowboy. I know what you're saying. Everyone here has their drum to bang - and bang it they will! I once described the fight between John Clark and Bruno over the third person indeterminacy

First person indeterminacy. Like in Everett, the probability (and the collapse) are first person experience. There is no third person self-reference. I just correct your typo.

Apologies, yes of course I meant that, 

OK, no problem.

(step 3 or whatever it is) as being like one of those Siberian coal fires that has been burning since the start of the 20th century. I think for now it is dormant  - but I'm hesitant even to mention it, since that may be all it needs to burst into flame again... It all becomes rather sterile and exhausting even to watch. Hence why I'm not here so much any more.

You did show complete understanding of this in your publication of the UDA. I understand you don’t follow the thread on it, but you might thing helping those who does not understand, or perhaps fake to not understand, etc. 

To me the idea of first person indeterminacy is pretty simple and obvious,

To most people, I think.

and is the basis for MWI - so I don't know why JC doesn't get it, or if he pretends not to as you say.

In his recent post, he applied the same in Everett, which is new. But then he has to say that with Everett there is no reason to take the lift or to jump out of the windows, because he get 100% certainty on all outcomes, and that is contradicted by all experience in physics.

What I understand even less is why you bother to continue the debate with him over it when he's clearly entrenched in his position and will never budge.

Clark, at least, do this in public, where my philosopher opponents do it exclusively behind my back, so it is a way to answer to this, and indeed illustrates that such opposition is mainly the usual irrational attachement to the materialist dogma. I try to measure the degree of irrationality, and I illustrate its existence by the same token.

Life's too short to spend it banging your head against a brick wall.

There are many brick wall. But sometimes you can understand how they work, and why they do that, which can help for the future. 

But you can skip the posts of course.

On the other hand, we're all people who are in love with trying to understand the deep nature of things, and whatever human foibles get in the way, surely it's not the worst possible way to go to through the world. Anyway, to your main point, there is, I think, a point, beyond the intellectual game. I have no interest in defending any fortress.

Nor do I. Nobody can know if I personally believe or not in Mechanism. Defending ideas is a waste of time, I think.

Isn't that what you were doing in your endless wrangle with JC though?

On the contrary, I show that mechanism require some faith, I insist all the time it is my working assumption. I explain why it has to be an hypothesis, and that those will say science has shown mechanism to be true are necessarily con-artist. Then I show also that the mechanist assumption is refutable, and indeed, if the material modes were not quantum-like, I would judge Mechanism implausible.

Clark is the one who say that mechanism is not an assumption. He insisted on this in his recent post again.

I like mechanism, but only because it leads to a precise theory, refutable, and it illustrates that with *some* hypothesis, we can reason, peacefully, and get testable consequences, and so do what is usually called science. Better to search the key under the lamp, at least we might discover that they are not there!

Bruno

I believe that the western bias towards thinking in terms of things with intrinsic properties has had many unfortunate consequences. It means we tend to see people as individuals with intrinsic characters rather than parts of a system, which causes us to blame them, often enough, for their suffering. It has blinded us to critical environmental interdependencies. It has led to the dominance of an impoverished reductionist account of the world that forecloses the possibility of a plurality of other rich epistemologies. I don't harbour too many illusions of changing the world, but those are the reasons I'm firing my arrow into the maelstrom.

I do want a change in the world, like making theology back into science. We see the obscurantism and the suffering which happens when we let this filed in the hand of those who exploit it for their special interest. I want to share the universal machine lesson in modesty. I want a better world for the kids.

Bruno 

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Jun 2019, at 14:36, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 2:02:37 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jun 2019, at 06:36, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 6/19/2019 5:41 PM, Pierz wrote:

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.

I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.

 

Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere.

But if you stop worrying about what exists (where "exists" is theory dependent anyway) and think or relationships not a things but as explanations, then you can have a virtuous circle of explanation, i.e. one that encompasses everything.  To explain/understand something you start from something you already understand and work your way around.  Empirically, that's pretty much how we learn things...you always have to start from things you understand.

Absolutely, but that is the reason to not start from a circular explanation, but from a simple non circular like one, which, if Turing universal, will account for all circular processes. Then, this attribute mind to machines, and kill all reductionist conception that we can have on machines, and thus on humans too!

You pretend that this immunizes people from evil

I claim that it destroys the reductionist conception of machine, like the one hold by 19th century materialist, or more recently by Searle, and other “anti-mechanists”.

or that such approaches were inherently more truthful, more correct for purely aesthetic ("simple") reasons.

On the contrary. I claim it to be more simple, but anyone can try a non mechanist theory, and for all what I *know* they might be correct. Yet, the evidences obtained today favours Mechanism.

In science, we never know what we hit the truth.

It's ambitious: you don't offer what may appeal to other folks and their sensibilities, you clothe it as "the real reason to not start circular”.

I just suggest that Brent’s virtuous circle theory is coherent with a non circular ontology, like RA, and that it has to be possible, if mechanism is true.

I put my hypotheses on the table, and I propose to share a reasoning. Ask any question if you feel something is not valid. 

Bruno

You confuse logic, personal truths/opinions, and taste a lot for somebody who claims to have nailed qualia and sensation. This resembles the confusion of fanatics. PGC  

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[PGC]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 4:56:12 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jun 2019, at 14:36, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 2:02:37 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jun 2019, at 06:36, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 6/19/2019 5:41 PM, Pierz wrote:

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones.

I am not sure that a relational ontology must suffer from infinite regress, it can instead be self-referential. The ontology of "strange loops", as proposed by Hofstadter.

 

Gotta read Hofstadter some day. I have thought of the possibility of circular set of relationships, but then the circular system itself would be a brute fact. Infinite regress is not necessarily something "suffered", unless what we are hoping for is some intrinsic property, some solid ground somewhere.

But if you stop worrying about what exists (where "exists" is theory dependent anyway) and think or relationships not a things but as explanations, then you can have a virtuous circle of explanation, i.e. one that encompasses everything.  To explain/understand something you start from something you already understand and work your way around.  Empirically, that's pretty much how we learn things...you always have to start from things you understand.

Absolutely, but that is the reason to not start from a circular explanation, but from a simple non circular like one, which, if Turing universal, will account for all circular processes. Then, this attribute mind to machines, and kill all reductionist conception that we can have on machines, and thus on humans too!

You pretend that this immunizes people from evil

I claim that it destroys the reductionist conception of machine, like the one hold by 19th century materialist, or more recently by Searle, and other “anti-mechanists”.

So it destroys the bad/evil kind of reductionism. 

 

or that such approaches were inherently more truthful, more correct for purely aesthetic ("simple") reasons.

On the contrary. I claim it to be more simple, but anyone can try a non mechanist theory, and for all what I *know* they might be correct. Yet, the evidences obtained today favours Mechanism.

In your mind, with your personal conceptions of truth, falsifiability, and a taste for anthropomorphizing formal systems by yourself. As if there's this huge front of mechanics and physicalists weighing the evidence, with your posts as the credible, representative voice and authority. You're the emperor without clothes, the general with armies in the future. 

 

In science, we never know what we hit the truth.

Please, spare me the science preacher rhetorical bag. 

 

It's ambitious: you don't offer what may appeal to other folks and their sensibilities, you clothe it as "the real reason to not start circular”.

I just suggest that Brent’s virtuous circle theory is coherent with a non circular ontology, like RA, and that it has to be possible, if mechanism is true.

I put my hypotheses on the table, and I propose to share a reasoning. Ask any question if you feel something is not valid. 

What good is sharing reasoning when you move the goalpost with every post? You'll post whatever fits. One post ago you're "absolutely the reason to not start circular", which becomes "only share a reasoning if mechanism is true". For somebody so deeply concerned lecturing folks on proper scientific reasoning, its unsurprising that this is what it is. PGC

[PGC]

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 3:58:17 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Now that does not make sense to me, but this is because your ontology is unclear for me. Your text is not quite helpful, and I might ask you to formalise your ontology and perhaps the phenomenology too, to make precise sense on this. It is unclear how you would test experimentally such statements.

You "might" ask him. I would advise against such a move as he may reverse the question and ask you something equivalent. E.g. he may ask: Can you show me Bell's theorem in the combinator thread or using any equivalent universal machinery? Just to make precise sense of things? To see in action how to test such statements, ontologies, phenomenologies experimentally, in a formal setting of your choice, beyond retrodiction on others' work? PGC

[Philip Thrift]

Life's too short to spend it banging your head against a brick wall.

Dr. Johnson? 

“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.'”

(Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, quoted from Wikipedia.)

@philipthrift 

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/20/2019 3:42 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> On 18 Jun 2019, at 20:41, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 6/18/2019 3:56 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>> An overlooked simple possibility is that separating the notions of "consciousness" and "reality" is nonsensical. There is no evidence of any "reality" outside of conscious experience, nor can there be.
>> Weren't you ever unconscious and awoke to discover that reality had proceeded without you? That's evidence.
> I might agree. Perhaps Telmo was talking about a physical reality, as judged independent of consciousness, which does not exist … physically, but still arithmetically.
>
> The physical reality is independent of us, with “us” = the terrestrial mammals (say).
>
> But the physical reality is not independent of us, with “us” = the universal numbers.
>
> Dinosaurs have existed in our human past. But things like past and future are “invention” of numbers (to be short). We cannot prove this (in the strong sense of proof), but in that sense, we cannot prove anything about Reality nor even that there is a reality. To prove the existence of a reality is akin to prove our own consistency. We cannot prove that, despite we cannot really donut that we are (locally) consistent.
>
> Some faith is unavoidable, if we want to do fundamental research, and avoid pure instrumentalism, which leads to manipulations, lies, and the law of the jungle ...

You seem to have a black-and-white view of knowledge: It's either faith
or proof.  The first is unreliable, the second is inapplicable.  What
everyone else relies on is evidence.  It doesn't provide certainty, but
it reduces uncertainty.

And how does instrumentalism, the idea that theories are good or bad
according to how well they predict things, lead to "manipulaltion and
lies".   Are you rejecting empiricism as a measure of knowledge?

Brent

Brent

[Cosmin Visan]

Self-reference not being a formal entity, it can maintain at its unformal level propositions like "1=2". Therefore, it can look-back-at-itself in all kinds of way without creating contradictions, so it is able to bring multiple consciousnesses into existence, all consciousnesses having as their first (formal) emergent level the level of the Self: "I am".

[Cosmin Visan]

It is something like this. Self-reference keeps looking-back-at-itself and creates all kinds of FORMS of manifestation. Note that, since self-reference is unformalizable, this picture doesn't actually represent self-reference. No FORM can capture the true nature of self-reference. But it can at least give an idea of the ways in which self-reference looks-back-at-itself. If you want, all the "I am"s that you see in the picture are self-reference itself. Self-reference is all the "I am"s at the same time. It can do this because it is an unformal entity.

[Lawrence Crowell]

In some ways quantum entanglement has this feature. Also so called quantum Cheshire cat experiments have demonstrated how the charge of an electron can "go there" while the spin "goes somewhere else." Quantum numbers are all that exist, and they can form entangled states and appear in a local manner in decoherence or observation.

LC

On Monday, June 17, 2019 at 9:15:43 PM UTC-5, Pierz wrote:

I've been thinking and writing a lot recently about  a conception of reality which avoids the debates about what is fundamental in reality. It seems to me that with regards to materialism, we find it very difficult to escape the evolutionarily evolved, inbuilt notion of "things" and "stuff" that our brains need in order to manipulate the world. Yet QM and importantly the expected dissolution of time and space as fundamental entities in physics have made any such simple mechanistic notion of matter obsolete - what is left of matter except mathematics and some strange thing we can only call "instantiation" - the fact that things have specific values rather than (seeming to be) pure abstractions? What does a sophisticated materialist today place his or her faith in exactly? Something along the lines of the idea that the world is fundamentally describable by mathematics, impersonal and reducible to the operation of its simplest components. With regards to the last part - reductionism - that also seems to be hitting a limit in the sense that, while we have some supposed candidates for fundamental entities (whether quantum fields, branes or whatever), there is always a problem with anything considered "fundamental" - namely the old turtle stack problem. If the world is really made of any fundamental entity, then fundamentally it is made of magic - since the properties of that fundamental thing must simply be given rather than depending on some other set of relations. While physicists on the one hand continually search for such an entity, on the other they immediately reject any candidate as soon as it is found, since the question naturally arises, why this way and not that? What do these properties depend on? Furthermore, the fine tuning problem, unless it can be solved by proof that the world *has* to be the way it is – a forlorn hope it seems to me – suggests that the idea that we can explain all of reality in terms of the analysis of parts (emergent relationships) is likely to collapse – we will need to invoke a cosmological context in order to explain the behaviour of the parts. It's no wonder so many physicists hate that idea, since it runs against the deep reductionist grain. And after all, analysis of emergent relationships (the parts of a thing) is always so much easier than analysis of contextual relationships (what a thing is part of). 

To get to the point then, I am considering the idea of a purely relational ontology, one in which all that exists are relationships. There are no entities with intrinsic properties, but only a web of relational properties. Entities with intrinsic properties are necessary components of any finite, bounded theory, and in fact such entities form the boundaries of the theory, the "approximations" it necessarily invokes in order to draw a line somewhere in the potentially unbounded phenomenological field. In economic theory for instance, we have “rational, self-interested” agents invoked as fundamental entities with rationality and self-interest deemed intrinsic, even though clearly such properties are, in reality, relational properties that depend on evolutionary and psychological factors, that, when analysed, reveal the inaccuracies and approximations of that theory. I am claiming that all properties imagined as intrinsic are approximations of this sort - ultimately to be revealed as derived from relations either external or internal to that entity.

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones. I prefer the latter. (Note that I am using a definition of relational properties that includes emergent properties as relational, though the traditional philosophical use of those terms probably would not. The reason is that I am interested in what is ontologically intrinsic, not semantically intrinsic.) 

What would such a conception imply in the philosophy of mind? Traditionally, the “qualiophiles” have defined qualia as intrinsic properties, yet (while I am no fan of eliminativism) I think Dennett has made a strong case against this idea. Qualia appear to me to be properties of relationships between organisms and their environments. They are not fundamental, but then neither is the “stuff” of which organisms and environments are made. We simply cannot ask about fundamental properties, but must confine ourselves to the networks of relationships we find ourselves embedded in, and from which we, as observer-participants, cannot be extricated. “Third person” accounts, including physics, are abstractions from aggregations of first person accounts, and none can rise so high above the field of observation as to entirely transcend their origins in the first person. Thus there are certainly objective truths, but not Objective Truths, that is truths that are entirely unbound to any observer and which nominate the absolute properties of real objective things.

Note that the “relationalism” I am proposing does not in any way imply *relativism*, which flattens out truth claims at the level of culture. Nor does it make consciousness “primary”, or mathematics. I cannot personally reconcile the interior views (qualia, if you like, though I think that terms places an unwarranted emphasis on “what experiences are like” rather than the mere fact of experience) with a purely mathematical ontology.

One obvious objection to this whole idea is the counter-intuitiveness of the idea of relationships without “things” being related. Yet I think the fault lies with intuition here. Western thinking is deeply intellectually addicted to the notion of “things”. David Mermin has interpreted QM in terms of “correlations only” – correlations without correlata as he puts it – an application of similar ideas to quantum theory. Part of the objection I think lies in the semantics of the word “relationship”, which automatically causes us to imagine two things on either side of the relation. It would be better to think in terms of a web, then, than individual, related entities. Or simply say that the related entities are themselves sets of relationships. Mathematics provides a good example of such a purely relational domain – a number exists solely by virtue of its relationships with other numbers. It has no intrinsic properties.

Yet what then of the problem of specific values – the instantiation aspect of materialism? To quote Hedda Mørch:  “… physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction.”

We can overcome such an objection by invoking the first person perspective. Mørch credits the specific values of entities in our environment (some specific electron having this position, that momentum and so on) to some property of “being instantiated in something intrinsic”, harking back to Kant’s Ding an Sich. Yet there is an alternative way of viewing the situation.  Let us imagine that each integer was conscious and able to survey its context in the field of all numbers. Take some number, let us say 7965. When number 7965 looks around, it sees the number 7964 right behind it, and the number 7966 right ahead. Trying to understand itself and the nature of its world, it starts doing arithmetic and finds that everything  around it can be understood purely in terms of relational properties. Yet it says to itself, how can this be? Why do the numbers around me have the specific values they do? What “breathes fire” into those arithmetical relations to instantiate the specific world I see? Yet 7965 is wrong. It is ignoring the significance of the first-person relation that places it within a specific context that defines both it and the world it sees.

Note that I am not, like Bruno, actually suggesting that numbers are conscious. The point of the thought experiment is merely to show how specific values can exist within a first person account, without us needing to invoke some unknowable thing-in-itself or substrate of intrinsic properties. 

Grateful for any comments/critiques.

[Cosmin Visan]

And when a telepathy happens, what happens is that self-reference looks-back at 2 of its forms, and thus unite them into 1 form. If on the left you have "I am" and on the right you have "I am "I am"", self-reference will look at both at the same time and creates: I am ["I am" & "I am "I am""]. Then it stops looking at both at the same time, and the telepathy ends, the 2 consciousnesses becoming again independent.

[Cosmin Visan]

Note that we know that telepathies are never 100% accurate. Some might dream of eating food, some other might dream of drinking water. But there was a telepathy, the telepathy of "ingesting something". This is because self-reference being any of its "I am"s, it doesn't necessarily have to unite groups of "I am"s only at the highest level of consciousness. It can unite all sort of sub-groups. So it only unites "ingesting something", and then on top of this, there would be other independent looking-backs that will give the final experiences of "eating food" and "drinking water".

[Bruno Marchal]

This is done in detail in my papers (and longer test).

If you are interested, I can expand this here.

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

I called that the kicking-the-table argument. It has been refuted already by Plato with the dream argument.

It begs the question, because it uses the Aristotelian criteria of reality (what we see, touch, etc.).

Bruno

@philipthrift 

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[Bruno Marchal]

> On 20 Jun 2019, at 19:41, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 6/20/2019 3:42 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> On 18 Jun 2019, at 20:41, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 6/18/2019 3:56 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>>> An overlooked simple possibility is that separating the notions of "consciousness" and "reality" is nonsensical. There is no evidence of any "reality" outside of conscious experience, nor can there be.
>>> Weren't you ever unconscious and awoke to discover that reality had proceeded without you? That's evidence.
>> I might agree. Perhaps Telmo was talking about a physical reality, as judged independent of consciousness, which does not exist … physically, but still arithmetically.
>>
>> The physical reality is independent of us, with “us” = the terrestrial mammals (say).
>>
>> But the physical reality is not independent of us, with “us” = the universal numbers.
>>
>> Dinosaurs have existed in our human past. But things like past and future are “invention” of numbers (to be short). We cannot prove this (in the strong sense of proof), but in that sense, we cannot prove anything about Reality nor even that there is a reality. To prove the existence of a reality is akin to prove our own consistency. We cannot prove that, despite we cannot really donut that we are (locally) consistent.
>>
>> Some faith is unavoidable, if we want to do fundamental research, and avoid pure instrumentalism, which leads to manipulations, lies, and the law of the jungle ...
>
> You seem to have a black-and-white view of knowledge: It's either faith or proof.

?

I make precise 8 notion of truth. One is the simple (conceptually) arithmetical truth, the other are all phenomenological modes of self-reference. That does not seem black and white to me, except for the arithmetical sentences, where we use classical logic, but then we get all the modal nuances imposed by incompleteness and its intensional variants.

> The first is unreliable, the second is inapplicable.

I don’t understand what you say that the second is inapplicable. It is not applicable for “knowledge-for-sure”, but that does not exist in science. And it works for the maker and more modest notion of Theaetetus’ knowledge.

> What everyone else relies on is evidence. It doesn't provide certainty, but it reduces uncertainty.

No problem with this. I agree.That’s the main point.

>
> And how does instrumentalism, the idea that theories are good or bad according to how well they predict things,

That is not instrumentalist. That is empiricism, which I support.

Instrumentalism is, roughly speaking “shut up and calculate”. Instrumentalism is positivism: it claims that there is no fundamental truth. Like relativism and positivism, it is self-defeating as a metaphysical position.

> lead to "manipulaltion and lies". Are you rejecting empiricism as a measure of knowledge?

Of course not.

Bruno



>
> Brent
>
> Brent

>
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[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Jun 2019, at 19:46, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Self-reference not being a formal entity, it can maintain at its unformal level propositions like "1=2”.

No problem. That is already a consequence of Gödel’s second theorem. It is the consistency of inconsistency that I have mentioned in my previous post. Unless you mean “assert” or “believe” for  “maintain”. Gödel’s theorem explain why some paraconsistent logic make sense for machines.

Therefore, it can look-back-at-itself in all kinds of way without creating contradictions, so it is able to bring multiple consciousnesses into existence, all consciousnesses having as their first (formal) emergent level the level of the Self: "I am”.

No problem with this.

Bruno 

On Thursday, 20 June 2019 16:58:17 UTC+3, Bruno Marchal wrote:

and every-thing (all the consciousness in the world) both at the same time.

Now that does not make sense to me, but this is because your ontology is unclear for me. Your text is not quite helpful, and I might ask you to formalise your ontology and perhaps the phenomenology too, to make precise sense on this. It is unclear how you would test experimentally such statements.

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[PGC]

On Friday, June 21, 2019 at 12:56:59 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Jun 2019, at 17:20, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 3:58:17 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Now that does not make sense to me, but this is because your ontology is unclear for me. Your text is not quite helpful, and I might ask you to formalise your ontology and perhaps the phenomenology too, to make precise sense on this. It is unclear how you would test experimentally such statements.

You "might" ask him. I would advise against such a move as he may reverse the question and ask you something equivalent. E.g. he may ask: Can you show me Bell's theorem in the combinator thread or using any equivalent universal machinery? Just to make precise sense of things? To see in action how to test such statements, ontologies, phenomenologies experimentally, in a formal setting of your choice, beyond retrodiction on others' work? PGC

This is done in detail in my papers (and longer test).

If you are interested, I can expand this here.

You demand formal precision from other's claims and you "read my papers" me without titles, pages, or exact references? 

Nobody has to give you permission to expand, you do so or you don't. Let's see Bell in combinators then and as many longer tests as you like. Since it's all done and obvious, it's a simple copy and paste matter. PGC

[Bruno Marchal]

As I have explained in some posts, we can start from any universal machinery, be them given by the natural numbers with addition and multiplication, or by the combinators with applications. Then we extend this with classical logical induction axioms. For example, for the numbers:

P(0) & [For all n (P(n) -> P(s(n)))] ->. For all n P(n),

Or for the combinators:

P(K) & P(S) & [For all x y ((P(x) & P(y)) -> P(xy)) -> For all x P(x).

P is for any first order formula in the language.

That leads to the Löbian machine, who provability predicate obeys to the “theology” G*.

The material modes are given by the first person modes ([]p & p, []p & <>t, []p & <>t & p). Incompleteness imposes that those modes obeys very different logics, despite G* show them extensional equivalent: it is the same part of the arithmetical reality (the sigma_1 one) seen in very different perspective.

A simple Bell’s inequality is (A & B) => (A & C) v (B & ~C).

Using the inverse Goldblatt representation of quantum logic in the modal logic B, the arithmetical rendering of that inequality is

[]<>A & []<>B => []([]<>A & []<>B) v [([]<>B & []~[]<>C)

With the box and the diamond being the modal boxes of the logic of the martial modes described above.

There are very few reason that this inequality is obeyed, and it is expected that the material modes do violate Bel’s inequality, but unfortunately, the nesting of boxes when tested on a G* theorem prover makes this not yet solved. It is intractable on today’s computer. This is not a bad sign, actually, in the sense that the quantum tautologies *should* be only tractable on a quantum computer, if the material modes would really be the one of nature, assuming quantum mechanics correct.

See for example, for more details: (or my long French text “Conscience et Mécanisme).

Marchal B. The Universal Numbers. From Biology to Physics, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2015, Vol. 119, Issue 3, 368-381.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26140993

 Eric Vandenbussche has solved some open problems when working toward that solution. 

Bruno

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[Tomas Pales]

On Tuesday, June 18, 2019 at 4:15:43 AM UTC+2, Pierz wrote:

Of course, a purely relational ontology necessarily involves an infinite regress of relationships, but it seems to me that we must choose our poison here - the magic of intrinsic properties, or the infinite regress of only relational ones. I prefer the latter.

I wouldn't say that the former is "magic" but I would say that the latter doesn't seem to make sense :) There can be relations between relations, or relations between structures/sets of relations, but there must also be non-relations in which all relations are ultimately grounded. Without non-relations, the whole edifice of relations seems to collapse because the relations are ultimately undefined. This is not a problem of an infinite chain of objects or of a circular chain of objects; the problem is that the objects (relations) are undefined.

But I would not say that non-relations are more fundamental or real than relations or vice versa. Rather I would say that one cannot exist without the other; they are on the same ontological footing, so to speak.

[PGC]

As stated previously, tractability is not clear. And while your account may suffice to you: There is no global conspiracy of physicalists that is holding platonists hostage, the jury is still out - even by your own measure, in domains of description of your personal choosing - as the notions in your thought experiments along with the testability implied by your reasoning, in particular duplicating machines and ideally working quantum computers, do not exist at present. They may exist at some point, but even if progress in those domains seems plausible, everybody with a bit of experience under the sun knows what happens when wishes get fulfilled. 

It's not simple to convince stakeholders like universities, governments, public institutions, scientists, and private companies to divert resources towards what is still on the philosophical drawing board, if it is even tractable at all. Everybody is risk averse, we all appear to die, and the notion that some ideological conspiracy is preventing a more genuine ideal fundamental mathematicalism from establishing itself is just, as Russell would say "rather baroque". Like the AGI guys, I hope they make progress towards some benevolent general artificial intelligence, but do I understand why folks wouldn't bet their futures/resources on success? I do: we're not sure about feasibility/evidence. A chess player will always hope for the infinite win continuations but the best of them are who they are because they prepare for the worst outcomes.

And as long as this ambiguity exists, we have the usual two options: abandon what appears to be not solvable or come up with feasibility and testability criteria that are accessible with technology/mathematics/physics/philosophy available today. Having clarity with ourselves, respecting ourselves even with a negative result is more scientific than infinities of pipe dreams, no matter how well argued and how seductive a unified ensemble theory, some purist arithmetical dream of body and mind feels to us. For even if our wishful thinking got everything right on some intuitive level, it would still be disingenuous to assume "we got it" before we had the quality of evidence that satisfies our peers and ourselves.

And while I may have been critical and harsh these past years, I have no issue with your person and/or your work. Your discourse assumes notions who's existential status/tractability remains unclear at this time. Therefore assuming "comp" or "mechanism" to be absolutely clear and established beyond doubt is premature. That tendency... that kind of discourse is most certainly premature, even if we applaud the passion and enthusiasm behind it, as are all the discursive attempts to ensnare folks disagreeing with such world views while posing as professors of the new most advanced fundamental science. That's almost odious (language and discourse is thankfully a bit too ambiguous), particularly when arguing to folks outside their domains of expertise, invoking arithmetic as the generous über-soul that grants certain immortality that folks are programmed since childhood to believe in. 

If people want to tarnish themselves, their histories, their work, their reputations in this world with certainties, nobody in their right mind should stop them. But peer systems, and yeah I may naively kid myself that this list constitutes some loose peer discussion system, don't exist exclusively to control  and bust the chops of messiahs with the truth: they guard us from self-delusion as much as they are abused. And sometimes this is irritating and sometimes it hurts because we can't always run from what is unpleasant. Contrary to some folks however, I do not tarnish folks with "Liar, manipulator" just because I see them printing unsupported things, things I may not understand, or things that irritate me. There is enough ambiguity to say that such discourses may not always happen intentionally for various reasons, from various sides, and that they may fuel creativity, imagination, and different perspectives, being the unavoidable result of liberality in exchange and expression, if we're not as literal as fanatics pretending to themselves to be the ultimate arbiters of truth, right? 

Evidence aside, idealistic dreams are beautiful and working to make them tractable in scientific sense is important. And for that, I would always support team Plato. Just the beauty. Fuck the evidence. PGC       

[Bruno Marchal]

Maybe. This gives the impression that someday we might know that Mechanism is true, but that will never been rationally proved, only rationally inferred. Like with any other theory, we must be open to change our mind. If Z1* (a material mode) depart too much from quantum logic, that would raise a sane doubt toward computationalism. It is one of the reason to call it theology: we need some amount of fait to say “yes” to the doctor, and we cannot impose the Mechanist practice to others (with the inevitable complex question of how to decide for kids, etc.).

It's not simple to convince stakeholders like universities, governments, public institutions, scientists, and private companies to divert resources towards what is still on the philosophical drawing board, if it is even tractable at all. Everybody is risk averse, we all appear to die, and the notion that some ideological conspiracy is preventing a more genuine ideal fundamental mathematicalism from establishing itself is just, as Russell would say "rather baroque". Like the AGI guys, I hope they make progress towards some benevolent general artificial intelligence, but do I understand why folks wouldn't bet their futures/resources on success? I do: we're not sure about feasibility/evidence. A chess player will always hope for the infinite win continuations but the best of them are who they are because they prepare for the worst outcomes.

With Mechanism, all universal machine is conscious, and maximally so when not programmed. The singularity belongs to the past, unless we meant the moment where the machines will be as stupid as the human, which can still take some time.

And as long as this ambiguity exists, we have the usual two options: abandon what appears to be not solvable or come up with feasibility and testability criteria that are accessible with technology/mathematics/physics/philosophy available today.

Mechanism can be tested by using also the current theories of physics. It fits already, although he would have been judged quite implausible if we were still at Newton’s physics time. Without Quantum Mechanics, I am not sure I would have thought Mechanism plausible.

Having clarity with ourselves, respecting ourselves even with a negative result is more scientific than infinities of pipe dreams, no matter how well argued and how seductive a unified ensemble theory, some purist arithmetical dream of body and mind feels to us. For even if our wishful thinking got everything right on some intuitive level, it would still be disingenuous to assume "we got it" before we had the quality of evidence that satisfies our peers and ourselves.

My work is recognise by those who read it. My opponents are non scientist, and do philosophy in the non greek sense: they claim to know that a (primitive) material world exists. My work renew with Plato’s skepticism, and illustrate that we have not yet solve the mind-body problem. It suggest also a new theory (quantum mechanics without collapse and without wave, just partially computable arithmetical sentences. 

And while I may have been critical and harsh these past years, I have no issue with your person and/or your work. Your discourse assumes notions who's existential status/tractability remains unclear at this time.

I assume Digital Mechanism. Then I prove that physics has to be like QM has already illustrated. QM is basically incomprehensible today, and the fault is the Aristotelian belief in (boolean or not) independent substances.

Therefore assuming "comp" or "mechanism" to be absolutely clear and established beyond doubt is premature.

That will never happen. Xe cannot prove anything about “reality”, not even that there is one.

We can know consciousness, but still not prove it.

Many people believe that mechanism and materialism go hand in hand, where I show them incompatible, and then, thanks to QM, the experimental facts sides with mechanism, against materialism. But that can change tomorrow, or in billions years.

I do not defend the idea that Mechanism is true, only that it is incompatible with (Weak) Materialism, and that the empirical facts side with Mechanism, until now. 

That tendency... that kind of discourse is most certainly premature, even if we applaud the passion and enthusiasm behind it, as are all the discursive attempts to ensnare folks disagreeing with such world views while posing as professors of the new most advanced fundamental science. That's almost odious (language and discourse is thankfully a bit too ambiguous), particularly when arguing to folks outside their domains of expertise, invoking arithmetic as the generous über-soul that grants certain immortality that folks are programmed since childhood to believe in. 

Arithmetic or anything Turing equivalent, and not too much rich (no induction axiom, no axiom of infinity).

If people want to tarnish themselves, their histories, their work, their reputations in this world with certainties, nobody in their right mind should stop them. But peer systems, and yeah I may naively kid myself that this list constitutes some loose peer discussion system, don't exist exclusively to control  and bust the chops of messiahs with the truth:

When doing science, we never claim truth. We provide theories, and means to refute them. If confirmed, we can still not conclude that it is true.

they guard us from self-delusion as much as they are abused. And sometimes this is irritating and sometimes it hurts because we can't always run from what is unpleasant. Contrary to some folks however, I do not tarnish folks with "Liar, manipulator" just because I see them printing unsupported things, things I may not understand, or things that irritate me. There is enough ambiguity to say that such discourses may not always happen intentionally for various reasons, from various sides, and that they may fuel creativity, imagination, and different perspectives, being the unavoidable result of liberality in exchange and expression, if we're not as literal as fanatics pretending to themselves to be the ultimate arbiters of truth, right? 

Evidence aside, idealistic dreams are beautiful and working to make them tractable in scientific sense is important.

OK.

And for that, I would always support team Plato. Just the beauty. Fuck the evidence. PGC 

Well, we cannot be sad when the evidences sides with the beauty. What mechanism explains, is that it is up to the believer in primitive matter to show evidences, and there are none, until now. If Z1* depart from quantum logic, that would give a first evidence that we might be non Turing emulable.

Bruno 

     

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[PGC]

The burden of proof always falls to those with extraordinary claims. No other scientists lay claim to the origins of reality. The default position is that it is unclear or that we haven't advanced far enough. So that extraordinary claim calls for extraordinary - even immaculate - sort of evidence. Who knows how the problem could be posed and what powerful machines or new mathematics we could invent? That's being open to change our mind... keep working at it. 

 

It is one of the reason to call it theology: we need some amount of fait to say “yes” to the doctor, and we cannot impose the Mechanist practice to others (with the inevitable complex question of how to decide for kids, etc.).

Expressing something linguistically - all intentions aside - always "imposes". That's the nature of language and discourse. It's up to folks to use this power responsibly or fail at survival at some point.

 

Having clarity with ourselves, respecting ourselves even with a negative result is more scientific than infinities of pipe dreams, no matter how well argued and how seductive a unified ensemble theory, some purist arithmetical dream of body and mind feels to us. For even if our wishful thinking got everything right on some intuitive level, it would still be disingenuous to assume "we got it" before we had the quality of evidence that satisfies our peers and ourselves.

My work is recognise by those who read it. My opponents are non scientist, and do philosophy in the non greek sense: they claim to know that a (primitive) material world exists. My work renew with Plato’s skepticism, and illustrate that we have not yet solve the mind-body problem. It suggest also a new theory (quantum mechanics without collapse and without wave, just partially computable arithmetical sentences.

Ok but if it remains intractable then why all the quantum ambition? Is it like a Freudian quantum envy? Like my quantum and proofs are longer, more elaborate, and precise than yours? ;-) 

 

 

And while I may have been critical and harsh these past years, I have no issue with your person and/or your work. Your discourse assumes notions who's existential status/tractability remains unclear at this time.

I assume Digital Mechanism. Then I prove that physics has to be like QM has already illustrated. QM is basically incomprehensible today, and the fault is the Aristotelian belief in (boolean or not) independent substances.

I'm not sure for above reasons: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and since that isn't obtainable now believing in independent substances cannot be considered a crime or sin against science.

 

Therefore assuming "comp" or "mechanism" to be absolutely clear and established beyond doubt is premature.

That will never happen. Xe cannot prove anything about “reality”, not even that there is one.

We can know consciousness, but still not prove it.

Many people believe that mechanism and materialism go hand in hand, where I show them incompatible, and then, thanks to QM, the experimental facts sides with mechanism, against materialism. But that can change tomorrow, or in billions years.

This is where your discourse has merit: where, how, why those facts side/support mechanism and our ability or lack thereof to test the thing. The nested boxes of Bell you came up with with Eric Vandenbussche: are we sure that Telmo or Russell can't get their hands on a machine powerful enough to muscle. Why not try? Telmo's Biceps are most certainly huge by now, right? Perhaps with a powerful enough machines today and Goldblatt tattooed on his biceps, the world or the machine will see the light! lol

 

I do not defend the idea that Mechanism is true, only that it is incompatible with (Weak) Materialism, and that the empirical facts side with Mechanism, until now. 

Again: that burden of proof has to be extraordinary or the metaphysics has to be extraordinary. Before that happens, we're speculating in mathematical or philosophy of science realms.  

 

If people want to tarnish themselves, their histories, their work, their reputations in this world with certainties, nobody in their right mind should stop them. But peer systems, and yeah I may naively kid myself that this list constitutes some loose peer discussion system, don't exist exclusively to control  and bust the chops of messiahs with the truth:

When doing science, we never claim truth. We provide theories, and means to refute them. If confirmed, we can still not conclude that it is true.

Reasonable confidence, pinning down what that is, finding consensus, would already get this discussion out of the realm of speculation. And a negative result, that there is no silver bullet up to some point in time is a valuable contribution too. But I will keep my practical belief in water as a magical primitive resource that replenishes me with elan vital life force. Same for good food. And if you don't believe it's ontologically primitive, then that just means you lack evidence of how well I cook. Proof? Nobody I've cooked for has denied this fundamental metaphysical proof, including myself, which is why I have to follow Telmo on the pursuit for magical biceps, abs, etc. otherwise my expansion just progresses horizontally. And that is incompatible with platonism. PGC

 

[Bruno Marchal]

That was the subject debate by Plato and Aristotle.

Aristotle made the extraordinary claim: there is a physical universe made of primary matter, which was the false obvious fact precisely doubted by Plato. There are never been any proof of this, nor even evidence. We, 20th century human tends to take Aristotle theology for granted, but that is only an habit, I would say.

The default position is that it is unclear or that we haven't advanced far enough.

I would say that we have regressed a lot on this domain, since theology has been separated from science.

So that extraordinary claim calls for extraordinary - even immaculate - sort of evidence. Who knows how the problem could be posed and what powerful machines or new mathematics we could invent? That's being open to change our mind... keep working at it. 

The best way to be able to change our mind, is by making theory precise enough so that we can test it, and up to now, the evidences back up Mechanism. Without Descartes proposing Mechanism, there would not have been Darwin.

I make two point: the incompatibility of mechanism and (weak) materialism, which leads to the reduction of physics to arithmetic. The proof is constructive, and explains how to derive physics from arithmetic, and the propositional logic of the observable have been deduced, and the comparison with nature sides with mechanism, and refute Materialism, if we don’t consider that its failure to attach consciousness to the prediction is not already a refutation.

This is not a critics of physics, of course, but on metaphysical naturalism or physicalisme.

The problem is that since we have separated theology/metaphysics from science, many people confuse the notion of matter and primary matter. 

 

It is one of the reason to call it theology: we need some amount of fait to say “yes” to the doctor, and we cannot impose the Mechanist practice to others (with the inevitable complex question of how to decide for kids, etc.).

Expressing something linguistically - all intentions aside - always "imposes". That's the nature of language and discourse. It's up to folks to use this power responsibly or fail at survival at some point.

That is why I insist so much that Mechanism is an hypothesis (aka belief, axioms, postulate). That is why I am almost boring by repeating all the time: If mechanism is true then …

 

Having clarity with ourselves, respecting ourselves even with a negative result is more scientific than infinities of pipe dreams, no matter how well argued and how seductive a unified ensemble theory, some purist arithmetical dream of body and mind feels to us. For even if our wishful thinking got everything right on some intuitive level, it would still be disingenuous to assume "we got it" before we had the quality of evidence that satisfies our peers and ourselves.

My work is recognise by those who read it. My opponents are non scientist, and do philosophy in the non greek sense: they claim to know that a (primitive) material world exists. My work renew with Plato’s skepticism, and illustrate that we have not yet solve the mind-body problem. It suggest also a new theory (quantum mechanics without collapse and without wave, just partially computable arithmetical sentences.

Ok but if it remains intractable then why all the quantum ambition? Is it like a Freudian quantum envy? Like my quantum and proofs are longer, more elaborate, and precise than yours? ;-) 

It is because physics is reduced into a statistics on all computation (which are arithmetical objects) and that if I did not get quantum mechanics, I would have concluded that either mechanism is wrong, or we must look closer at nature and find the quantum parallel histories. (Or we are in a malevolent simulation). That could have happened if Planck constant would be much smaller, and we would not have detected the quantum logical “weirdness”. 

Then, quantum mechanics illustrate also the difficulties to interpret the fact in a Aristotelian framework. Mechanism is not the only idea that threatened Aristotelism. The conceptual difficulties in interpreting the physical facts illustrates this also. 

 

 

And while I may have been critical and harsh these past years, I have no issue with your person and/or your work. Your discourse assumes notions who's existential status/tractability remains unclear at this time.

I assume Digital Mechanism. Then I prove that physics has to be like QM has already illustrated. QM is basically incomprehensible today, and the fault is the Aristotelian belief in (boolean or not) independent substances.

I'm not sure for above reasons: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence

But extraordinary is subjective. The most extraordinary claim is that a physical universe exist primitively. There are zero reason to believe this. No one doubt that there is a physical reality, but why should it be primitive?

In science, we simply try to avoid committing oneself ontologically. No physicists do that. But physicalist do it, and they use often Mechanism implicitly, to avoid the mind-body problem. But once you grasp that 2+2=4 entails the existence of all computations, even without mechanism, that gives a reason to doubt the necessity of assuming a primitively physical universe.

and since that isn't obtainable now believing in independent substances cannot be considered a crime or sin against science.

Of course. It is only an inconsistent belief for those who are willing to say “yes” to a digitalist brain surgeon.

 

Therefore assuming "comp" or "mechanism" to be absolutely clear and established beyond doubt is premature.

That will never happen. Xe cannot prove anything about “reality”, not even that there is one.

We can know consciousness, but still not prove it.

Many people believe that mechanism and materialism go hand in hand, where I show them incompatible, and then, thanks to QM, the experimental facts sides with mechanism, against materialism. But that can change tomorrow, or in billions years.

This is where your discourse has merit: where, how, why those facts side/support mechanism and our ability or lack thereof to test the thing. The nested boxes of Bell you came up with with Eric Vandenbussche: are we sure that Telmo or Russell can't get their hands on a machine powerful enough to muscle. Why not try? Telmo's Biceps are most certainly huge by now, right? Perhaps with a powerful enough machines today and Goldblatt tattooed on his biceps, the world or the machine will see the light! lol

Eric Vandenbuscche was indeed working on how to optimise G*. But it is advanced mathematical logic, computer science, etc. Not that easy. Eric died and was unable to accomplish this work.

 

I do not defend the idea that Mechanism is true, only that it is incompatible with (Weak) Materialism, and that the empirical facts side with Mechanism, until now. 

Again: that burden of proof has to be extraordinary or the metaphysics has to be extraordinary. Before that happens, we're speculating in mathematical or philosophy of science realms.  

I don’t speculate. Most people believe in mechanism today (even some who claim the contrary. I use Mechanism in the weaker sense that most of its use.And many people are just wrong on this, as they believe that mechanism is compatible with materialism. That has been proved impossible, which makes some dogmatic materialist angry.

 

If people want to tarnish themselves, their histories, their work, their reputations in this world with certainties, nobody in their right mind should stop them. But peer systems, and yeah I may naively kid myself that this list constitutes some loose peer discussion system, don't exist exclusively to control  and bust the chops of messiahs with the truth:

When doing science, we never claim truth. We provide theories, and means to refute them. If confirmed, we can still not conclude that it is true.

Reasonable confidence, pinning down what that is, finding consensus, would already get this discussion out of the realm of speculation.

What counts are the scientist who read the works. The rest are rumours.

Consider the cannabis domain. The lies are no older than a century. The scientific consensus has been clear since the begging: no evidence at all of the danger. Then we got eventually the original paper used to make it illegal, and they were shown to be gross fraud … despite all this, cannabis is still schedule one. Just to show that lies can last. Then take into account that in theology, the lies are 1500 years old, and if we don’t do something now, we might as well prolongated the obscurantism one millenium more. Bad faith fear Reason.

And a negative result, that there is no silver bullet up to some point in time is a valuable contribution too. But I will keep my practical belief in water as a magical primitive resource that replenishes me with elan vital life force. Same for good food. And if you don't believe it's ontologically primitive, then that just means you lack evidence of how well I cook. Proof? Nobody I've cooked for has denied this fundamental metaphysical proof, including myself, which is why I have to follow Telmo on the pursuit for magical biceps, abs, etc. otherwise my expansion just progresses horizontally. And that is incompatible with platonism. PGC

Bruno

 

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[PGC]

On Monday, June 24, 2019 at 3:04:55 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 24 Jun 2019, at 13:15, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:

The burden of proof always falls to those with extraordinary claims. No other scientists lay claim to the origins of reality.

That was the subject debate by Plato and Aristotle.

Aristotle made the extraordinary claim: there is a physical universe made of primary matter, which was the false obvious fact precisely doubted by Plato. There are never been any proof of this, nor even evidence. We, 20th century human tends to take Aristotle theology for granted, but that is only an habit, I would say.

Any claim regarding the nature or origin of reality is extraordinary. Setting up straw men living in the past does not accomplish much.

 

The default position is that it is unclear or that we haven't advanced far enough.

I would say that we have regressed a lot on this domain, since theology has been separated from science.

Then move to ancient Greece and see if their doctors and medicines inspire more confidence and good faith! lol

 

So that extraordinary claim calls for extraordinary - even immaculate - sort of evidence. Who knows how the problem could be posed and what powerful machines or new mathematics we could invent? That's being open to change our mind... keep working at it. 

The best way to be able to change our mind, is by making theory precise enough so that we can test it, and up to now, the evidences back up Mechanism.

Without precision on said testability, it remains speculative philosophy though. 

 

It is one of the reason to call it theology: we need some amount of fait to say “yes” to the doctor, and we cannot impose the Mechanist practice to others (with the inevitable complex question of how to decide for kids, etc.).

Expressing something linguistically - all intentions aside - always "imposes". That's the nature of language and discourse. It's up to folks to use this power responsibly or fail at survival at some point.

That is why I insist so much that Mechanism is an hypothesis (aka belief, axioms, postulate). That is why I am almost boring by repeating all the time: If mechanism is true then …

Repeating that endlessly will not change a thing. Working on feasibility of testing it would at least in principle leave possibility. Or give us more confidence in the lack of solution.

 

 

 

And while I may have been critical and harsh these past years, I have no issue with your person and/or your work. Your discourse assumes notions who's existential status/tractability remains unclear at this time.

I assume Digital Mechanism. Then I prove that physics has to be like QM has already illustrated. QM is basically incomprehensible today, and the fault is the Aristotelian belief in (boolean or not) independent substances.

I'm not sure for above reasons: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence

But extraordinary is subjective. The most extraordinary claim is that a physical universe exist primitively. There are zero reason to believe this. No one doubt that there is a physical reality, but why should it be primitive?

Nobody is claiming that it should! You need folks to claim something they don't, to set up your discourse. But without means to test...

 

In science, we simply try to avoid committing oneself ontologically. No physicists do that. But physicalist do it, and they use often Mechanism implicitly, to avoid the mind-body problem. But once you grasp that 2+2=4 entails the existence of all computations, even without mechanism, that gives a reason to doubt the necessity of assuming a primitively physical universe.

Every court of law dealing with some appeal already doubts some primitively assumed account of facts, status of materials, agents disagreeing about platonic abstractions such as money etc. People already choose platonism on their own. Take family bonds or love as other examples. It may be incompatible propositionally, but this hard split between materialists and immaterialists is something I find myself less and less convinced by, as the discussions progress over the years. 

and since that isn't obtainable now believing in independent substances cannot be considered a crime or sin against science.

Of course. It is only an inconsistent belief for those who are willing to say “yes” to a digitalist brain surgeon.

If mechanism were itself testable.

 

 

Therefore assuming "comp" or "mechanism" to be absolutely clear and established beyond doubt is premature.

That will never happen. Xe cannot prove anything about “reality”, not even that there is one.

We can know consciousness, but still not prove it.

Many people believe that mechanism and materialism go hand in hand, where I show them incompatible, and then, thanks to QM, the experimental facts sides with mechanism, against materialism. But that can change tomorrow, or in billions years.

This is where your discourse has merit: where, how, why those facts side/support mechanism and our ability or lack thereof to test the thing. The nested boxes of Bell you came up with with Eric Vandenbussche: are we sure that Telmo or Russell can't get their hands on a machine powerful enough to muscle. Why not try? Telmo's Biceps are most certainly huge by now, right? Perhaps with a powerful enough machines today and Goldblatt tattooed on his biceps, the world or the machine will see the light! lol

Eric Vandenbuscche was indeed working on how to optimise G*. But it is advanced mathematical logic, computer science, etc. Not that easy. Eric died and was unable to accomplish this work.

That work should be made accessible to any parties interested. And if we're organized enough there should be accessible paths for beginners! Otherwise it's a fail pedagogically and any possible good work is done in vain. And if there is no route to testability that is accessible then those cards should be on the table. 

 

 

I do not defend the idea that Mechanism is true, only that it is incompatible with (Weak) Materialism, and that the empirical facts side with Mechanism, until now. 

Again: that burden of proof has to be extraordinary or the metaphysics has to be extraordinary. Before that happens, we're speculating in mathematical or philosophy of science realms.  

I don’t speculate.

Without more concrete tests, that point remains debatable. 

 

Most people believe in mechanism today (even some who claim the contrary. I use Mechanism in the weaker sense that most of its use.And many people are just wrong on this, as they believe that mechanism is compatible with materialism. That has been proved impossible, which makes some dogmatic materialist angry.

I'm interested in the non-dogmatic court and management/separation of powers with the capacity to approach abolishing crimes and abuse, because diverse possibility and distribution of power is more fun than deserts and dogmas of monotonous force with leaders/authorities holier than the rest of us. Crimes seem an excuse to fuel our toxic addiction to authority figures, prisons, paramilitary police and intelligence force etc. coupled with laziness towards the problem of evil and enforcement questions. I don't see why we principally have the need for any of those things, which is why I'm interested in less specified pluralisms and conflicts of say benevolence towards all life with empathy, care for individuals, security etc. If some ontology can address those kinds of problems, then I'm interested beyond testability. PGC 

 

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/24/2019 6:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> The burden of proof always falls to those with extraordinary claims.
>> No other scientists lay claim to the origins of reality.
>
> That was the subject debate by Plato and Aristotle.
>
> Aristotle made the extraordinary claim: there is a physical universe
> made of primary matter, which was the false obvious fact precisely
> doubted by Plato. There are never been any proof of this, nor even
> evidence. We, 20th century human tends to take Aristotle theology for
> granted, but that is only an habit, I would say.

There was nothing "extraordinary" about it.  The existence of matter and
the fact that it could be subdivided into tiny, apparently uniform
particles was common observation.  There was no evidence at all for
Plato's forms.

>
>> The default position is that it is unclear or that we haven't
>> advanced far enough.
>
>
> I would say that we have regressed a lot on this domain, since
> theology has been separated from science.

Plato's mysticism led to organized religion and theology as the servant
of totalitarian oppression.  As Vic Stenger wrote, "Science flies to the
Moon.  Religion flies into buildings."

Brent
“All human progress has been made by studying the shadows on the cave wall.”
   --- Sean Carroll

[Bruno Marchal]

On 24 Jun 2019, at 16:15, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, June 24, 2019 at 3:04:55 PM UTC+2, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 24 Jun 2019, at 13:15, PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:

The burden of proof always falls to those with extraordinary claims. No other scientists lay claim to the origins of reality.

That was the subject debate by Plato and Aristotle.

Aristotle made the extraordinary claim: there is a physical universe made of primary matter, which was the false obvious fact precisely doubted by Plato. There are never been any proof of this, nor even evidence. We, 20th century human tends to take Aristotle theology for granted, but that is only an habit, I would say.

Any claim regarding the nature or origin of reality is extraordinary. Setting up straw men living in the past does not accomplish much.

In Soccer term, all what I say is Plato 1 Aristotle zero.

I don’t claim the match was the last one.

We need to go back to the ancient, because they did an hard work, which has been hidden by the argument of authority when the christian religion begun to be radical, around +500). (The same thing happened in Islam after 1248. The “Philosophers” (those who estimates that the Text must be submitted to Reason, like Averroes) lost the battle against those who estimated that Reason must submit itself to the text, which arguably a blasphemy in the theology of the universal machine.

The god/non-God debate is like a fake debate among Aristotelians (believer in Matter) to make us forget that the origin debate was about the existence of Matter (with the big M, to mean some ontologically primitive matter).

 

The default position is that it is unclear or that we haven't advanced far enough.

I would say that we have regressed a lot on this domain, since theology has been separated from science.

Then move to ancient Greece and see if their doctors and medicines inspire more confidence and good faith! lol

Of course! They were rationalist, they did not prohibited cannabis! They were honest seeker of truth. They have been the victims of inquisition and of all form of radicalism, like today. Probably not as gifted as us for the cataract eye operation, but all in all, those people were searching truth, not trying to hide it, like the fashion today.

 

So that extraordinary claim calls for extraordinary - even immaculate - sort of evidence. Who knows how the problem could be posed and what powerful machines or new mathematics we could invent? That's being open to change our mind... keep working at it. 

The best way to be able to change our mind, is by making theory precise enough so that we can test it, and up to now, the evidences back up Mechanism.

Without precision on said testability, it remains speculative philosophy though. 

But the precision are there, and can be improved. It is not just a theory, it is an attitude toward machines, we can listen to them right now on the fundamental question. The only problem is that today, to really get the point, you need to study theoretical computer science, which is not well taught, if taught at all.

 

It is one of the reason to call it theology: we need some amount of fait to say “yes” to the doctor, and we cannot impose the Mechanist practice to others (with the inevitable complex question of how to decide for kids, etc.).

Expressing something linguistically - all intentions aside - always "imposes". That's the nature of language and discourse. It's up to folks to use this power responsibly or fail at survival at some point.

That is why I insist so much that Mechanism is an hypothesis (aka belief, axioms, postulate). That is why I am almost boring by repeating all the time: If mechanism is true then …

Repeating that endlessly will not change a thing.

It is the KEY point. My opponent want that people believe that I claim some truth, like in continental philosophy. The whole point is that I do not claim any truth. I use Church thesis to make a philosophical/theological thesis amenable to mathematics. I reduce a theological problem, in a precise theoretical frame, into a mathematical problem.

With mechanism, I illustrate that we can work in philosophy with the scientific attitude. I show Mechanism to be testable, and tested a priori as it provides a new interrelation of what is matter and why it behaves in this quantum way.

I have no problem with scientists, just with philosophers, which show their usual repugnance when scientists works in their field. It is always the same story. 

 

 

 

And while I may have been critical and harsh these past years, I have no issue with your person and/or your work. Your discourse assumes notions who's existential status/tractability remains unclear at this time.

I assume Digital Mechanism. Then I prove that physics has to be like QM has already illustrated. QM is basically incomprehensible today, and the fault is the Aristotelian belief in (boolean or not) independent substances.

I'm not sure for above reasons: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence

But extraordinary is subjective. The most extraordinary claim is that a physical universe exist primitively. There are zero reason to believe this. No one doubt that there is a physical reality, but why should it be primitive?

Nobody is claiming that it should! You need folks to claim something they don't, to set up your discourse. But without means to test...

 

In science, we simply try to avoid committing oneself ontologically. No physicists do that. But physicalist do it, and they use often Mechanism implicitly, to avoid the mind-body problem. But once you grasp that 2+2=4 entails the existence of all computations, even without mechanism, that gives a reason to doubt the necessity of assuming a primitively physical universe.

Every court of law dealing with some appeal already doubts some primitively assumed account of facts, status of materials, agents disagreeing about platonic abstractions such as money etc. People already choose platonism on their own. Take family bonds or love as other examples. It may be incompatible propositionally, but this hard split between materialists and immaterialists is something I find myself less and less convinced by, as the discussions progress over the years. 

and since that isn't obtainable now believing in independent substances cannot be considered a crime or sin against science.

Of course. It is only an inconsistent belief for those who are willing to say “yes” to a digitalist brain surgeon.

If mechanism were itself testable.

The whole point is that it is testable, and tested very well up to now, at a place were physicalists has not yet a theory (but two confilicing theories, and non try to handle the mind-body problem, with a list of exceptions though)

 

 

Therefore assuming "comp" or "mechanism" to be absolutely clear and established beyond doubt is premature.

That will never happen. Xe cannot prove anything about “reality”, not even that there is one.

We can know consciousness, but still not prove it.

Many people believe that mechanism and materialism go hand in hand, where I show them incompatible, and then, thanks to QM, the experimental facts sides with mechanism, against materialism. But that can change tomorrow, or in billions years.

This is where your discourse has merit: where, how, why those facts side/support mechanism and our ability or lack thereof to test the thing. The nested boxes of Bell you came up with with Eric Vandenbussche: are we sure that Telmo or Russell can't get their hands on a machine powerful enough to muscle. Why not try? Telmo's Biceps are most certainly huge by now, right? Perhaps with a powerful enough machines today and Goldblatt tattooed on his biceps, the world or the machine will see the light! lol

Eric Vandenbuscche was indeed working on how to optimise G*. But it is advanced mathematical logic, computer science, etc. Not that easy. Eric died and was unable to accomplish this work.

That work should be made accessible to any parties interested. And if we're organized enough there should be accessible paths for beginners! Otherwise it's a fail pedagogically and any possible good work is done in vain. And if there is no route to testability that is accessible then those cards should be on the table. 

It is testable, and tested retroactively up to now, like String theory, somehow, but string theory does not tackle the mind-body problem.

I am not sure what you are missing, ask any (specific) question.

Bruno

 

 

I do not defend the idea that Mechanism is true, only that it is incompatible with (Weak) Materialism, and that the empirical facts side with Mechanism, until now. 

Again: that burden of proof has to be extraordinary or the metaphysics has to be extraordinary. Before that happens, we're speculating in mathematical or philosophy of science realms.  

I don’t speculate.

Without more concrete tests, that point remains debatable. 

 

Most people believe in mechanism today (even some who claim the contrary. I use Mechanism in the weaker sense that most of its use.And many people are just wrong on this, as they believe that mechanism is compatible with materialism. That has been proved impossible, which makes some dogmatic materialist angry.

I'm interested in the non-dogmatic court and management/separation of powers with the capacity to approach abolishing crimes and abuse, because diverse possibility and distribution of power is more fun than deserts and dogmas of monotonous force with leaders/authorities holier than the rest of us. Crimes seem an excuse to fuel our toxic addiction to authority figures, prisons, paramilitary police and intelligence force etc. coupled with laziness towards the problem of evil and enforcement questions. I don't see why we principally have the need for any of those things, which is why I'm interested in less specified pluralisms and conflicts of say benevolence towards all life with empathy, care for individuals, security etc. If some ontology can address those kinds of problems, then I'm interested beyond testability. PGC 

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

> On 24 Jun 2019, at 20:32, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 6/24/2019 6:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> The burden of proof always falls to those with extraordinary claims. No other scientists lay claim to the origins of reality.
>>
>> That was the subject debate by Plato and Aristotle.
>>
>> Aristotle made the extraordinary claim: there is a physical universe made of primary matter, which was the false obvious fact precisely doubted by Plato. There are never been any proof of this, nor even evidence. We, 20th century human tends to take Aristotle theology for granted, but that is only an habit, I would say.
>
> There was nothing "extraordinary" about it. The existence of matter and the fact that it could be subdivided into tiny, apparently uniform particles was common observation. There was no evidence at all for Plato's forms.

Of course there were evidence for Plato’s form, notably the discovery of the Pythagorean in Number theory. The birth of mathematics. At that time, “mathematician” meant skeptical toward what we see, as opposed to the idea that we can conceive.

To infer that something exists from an observation was the point on which Plato was skeptical. Nobody doubted matter, but Aristotle is the one introducing Matter (and logic, metaphysics, …). I am not sure for the atomists like Democrites, because they were not working on the fundamental question.

>
>>
>>> The default position is that it is unclear or that we haven't advanced far enough.
>>
>>
>> I would say that we have regressed a lot on this domain, since theology has been separated from science.
>

> Plato's mysticism led to organized religion and theology as the servant of totalitarian oppression. As Vic Stenger wrote, "Science flies to the Moon. Religion flies into buildings.”


You confuse a domain of inquiry with what some humans do with it.

And by criticising that domain of inquiry, you leave it in the hands of those who massacre it.

I would say that religion is the only goal,
And that science is the only mean.

>
>
> “All human progress has been made by studying the shadows on the cave wall.”
> --- Sean Carroll

That sounds much better.

Bruno



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