Re: Why Does Anything Exist?

[spudb...@aol.com]

Well for this knuckle dragging savage, I compulsively am driven towards how can our species make use of science and philosophy to make life better? We may chose to view your fellow compuationalist philosopher, Juergen Schmidhuber, viewing God (you know He doesn't like to be called that!) As being The Great Programmer. Yet, we primates are behaviorally motivated by rewards, so we would have to gain a material reason to act in common?

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On Wednesday, March 10, 2021 Bruno Marchal <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 10 Mar 2021, at 14:08, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 9, 2021, 5:45 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I kind of side with Canadian philosopher John Leslie, as well as British astronomer, James Jeans on this question. Both Leslie and Jeans see the cosmos as a Great Thought. I formalize their conjectures as a Great Program. One may ask, running on what?

I agree that thought is in a sense, more fundamental (existing prior to) the observed. Of course the next question is what explains the origin of this thought? This is the answer I now tell myself (I welcome revisions/improvements):

If one accepts the independent existence of mathematical truths, like "2 + 2 = 4" then, due to Turing universal equations, one must also accept truths like "The 1,829,735th step of program #789 contains a bit string "01011101".

We can keep going, and extend this to say, programs that describe computable physical worlds, and relate the bit strings representing those generated states to facts about these computable realities

It therefore becomes a mathematically provable fact that "there exists a universal equation that includes an encoding of this very e-mail, written by a computational version of a person just like me, who exists as part of a computed physical reality which looks just like our observable universe."

So if 2+2=4, then thoughts exist.

Indeed :)

Bruno

Jason

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On Tuesday, March 9, 2021 Jason Resch <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 12:37 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 3/9/2021 12:22 AM, Jason Resch wrote:

On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 12:57 AM Kim Jones <kimj...@ozemail.com.au> wrote:

What was there before there was nothing?

I don't believe reality was ever a state of absolute nothingness. Rather, there are things that exist necessarily: logical laws, truth, properties of numbers, etc. Some of these truths and number relations concern and define all computational histories, and the appearance of a physical reality is a result of these computations creating consciousness observers. See: https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#A_Story_of_Creation

But you're casually confounding different sense of "exist".  Logical laws, number, etc are derivative on language.  They don't "exist" physically.  The logicians meaning of exist is just to satisfy a predicate.  Any sensible discussion of "exist"needs to start with recognizing it has several different meanings.

Hi Brent,

You are right there are various senses of the word "exists".

I dedicate a section specifically to this issue, and define three types, or modes of existence: https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/#Three_Modes_of_Existence

Jason

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[Jason Resch]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 8:00 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Well for this knuckle dragging savage, I compulsively am driven towards how can our species make use of science and philosophy to make life better? We may chose to view your fellow compuationalist philosopher, Juergen Schmidhuber, viewing God (you know He doesn't like to be called that!) As being The Great Programmer. Yet, we primates are behaviorally motivated by rewards, so we would have to gain a material reason to act in common?

I believe that a universal ethics, can follow from theories of personal identity.

To me, the most sensible of which suggest universalism / open individualism: the idea that there is only one mind and we are all it.

This converts self interest into a common interest for the good of all sentient beings.

Jason

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 11 Mar 2021, at 03:00, spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Well for this knuckle dragging savage, I compulsively am driven towards how can our species make use of science and philosophy to make life better?

99,9% of the human problem comes mainly from dishonesty, and people who does not do their job. Then the rest is preferably selected through the democratic process.

Of course,  a democracy has to separate religion/theology from politics and state, and it can only help to bring back theology at the faculty of science, and try to “cure” the consequences of the lies, which last since 1492 years, and have been the cause of many other lies in the applied human science, like the idea that it makes sense to make a medication illegal due to its danger. Here “science” has shown that the more a medication has a high potential of danger, the more that danger is amplified by the illegality. For cannabis, le danger itself was a lie, and as you can see, just one hundred of years of lies is very hard to “cure”, so for 1492 years, we will have to be patient. As we have regressed since I am born, I am not over-optimistic on this, and I would already be pleased if we could avoid a next millenium of obscurantism.

Science per se is neutral on ethic, except that 1) it is an ethic by itself, by its exemplary modesty, when it is done honestly, and 2) a minimal science of ethics can be extracted from the study of the machine theology. For example, with Mechanism, it becomes a quasi-theorem that Hell is paved with the good intentions, and this favours above all the democracies, in politics, but actually in any 3d-brain processing, where the left/right brain might be the specialisation of the []p/([]p & p) duality. []p is the part specialised in 3p notions, and thus language, and []p & p handle the unnameable first person subject. In politics, the same occurs, although they can permute the task, and usually the right realise the program of the left, and vice versa. But here too, we have regressed, and some people endangered democracies by having extreme discourse, and I guess the many lies.

Then, anything which can help people to come back to reason, including plants, will help, but again, only through serious education and research, etc. 

The theology of the machine should help, as it imposes some level of modesty, a bit like some plant, but I am not sure the human are spiritually mature enough. Most people in this domain prefer the comfortable lies to searching a truth which they might dislike. To recognise oneself in the universal (Löbian) machine can help, but like love, it is not something enforceable.

So, the algorithm to save democracy and science would be 1) abolish the prohibition laws (or equivalently, reinstate the free-market, 2) for the long run, bring back *all* sciences back to the academy of science, not just the natural sciences.

We may chose to view your fellow compuationalist philosopher, Juergen Schmidhuber, viewing God (you know He doesn't like to be called that!) As being The Great Programmer.

The expression “Great programmer” is a bit like the expression  “Gaia”: an anthropomorphisation of something which might just be thing, in a context where it is more complicated and part of the subject inquiry. 

You need to understand that the definition of program, or digital machine requires (very) elementary arithmetic, which is recursively equivalent to the universal dovetailer, which is rather not seen as a person. All universal numbers in arithmetic are “great programmer”, and you can start from any of them. I use the natural numbers because everyone with the primary school diploma already believe in them, or understand them.

Yet, we primates are behaviorally motivated by rewards, so we would have to gain a material reason to act in common?

A material reward looks more like a punishment to me, despite, until now, it is not entirely clear if the theology of the machine is as much negative on “matter” than Neoplatonism (where Matter and Evil are basically identify, as matter is quasi entirely defined negatively as the thing that God cannot control, a bit like the fact that the first person indeterminacy makes God unable to predict your fist person  future in a self-multiplying experience, and matter arise from that “divine lack of control”. Matter is given by a “bastard (probability) calculus” for that reason (in Plato, a bit like in QM), and the Church-Turing thesis makes this into a derivation of physics from number theology.

The human primate is a social animal, but the rewards it needs is just the satisfaction of its natural and spiritual needs, and for this a working democracy is enough. But of course, a democracy is a living organism, and it can be sick, and we have to find ways to better protect it, to fix the leak between the separated power. In the US, a simple fix would consists in making mandatory for a candidate to presidential election to show his taxes, just to give one example. We must (re)educate people about why lying is very bad for the whole society including all individuals, and lying at the top of the power should be enough to enforce resigning for any one in any society. The problem is that when liar get power, they are very difficult to dislodge, and a democracy can slide into a tyranny.

Bruno

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[Telmo Menezes]

Am Do, 11. Mär 2021, um 04:43, schrieb Jason Resch:

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 8:00 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Well for this knuckle dragging savage, I compulsively am driven towards how can our species make use of science and philosophy to make life better? We may chose to view your fellow compuationalist philosopher, Juergen Schmidhuber, viewing God (you know He doesn't like to be called that!) As being The Great Programmer. Yet, we primates are behaviorally motivated by rewards, so we would have to gain a material reason to act in common?

I believe that a universal ethics, can follow from theories of personal identity.

To me, the most sensible of which suggest universalism / open individualism: the idea that there is only one mind and we are all it.

This converts self interest into a common interest for the good of all sentient beings.

Very nicely put Jason.

This is also what I believe.

Telmo

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 11 Mar 2021, at 05:43, Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021, 8:00 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Well for this knuckle dragging savage, I compulsively am driven towards how can our species make use of science and philosophy to make life better? We may chose to view your fellow compuationalist philosopher, Juergen Schmidhuber, viewing God (you know He doesn't like to be called that!) As being The Great Programmer. Yet, we primates are behaviorally motivated by rewards, so we would have to gain a material reason to act in common?

I believe that a universal ethics, can follow from theories of personal identity.

To me, the most sensible of which suggest universalism / open individualism: the idea that there is only one mind and we are all it.

OK. But that might belong to “G* minus G”, making such an idea true, but expressing it might delay it (!). It is also hard to say to someone suffering a particular problem (disease, pain).

Some medication can help, but hereto, the truth is double-edged.

This converts self interest into a common interest for the good of all sentient beings.

I agree. Sometimes I think it could be good that our work are not signed. Papers would be judged and perhaps published without the name of the authors, like … in the Middle-Âge.

But that would be too much, and could make us into sort of “ants”, and as I say above, it works only through people who understand by themselves the open-individualism. To enforce it through discourse might lead to the contrary, like form of super-individualism and other manifestation of the “little ego”, which can sometimes become very big for some people.

Bruno

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[spudb...@aol.com]

Now what we had were Republics, Bruno, not democracies. The Italians had these republics, for some, in the late middle ages in which the power of the nobles was contained a bit. For the US being a republic today, was not true for a long time. Not when politicians in the US absolutely require lots of cash to win any election, and the big corporations here are happy, indeed, to supply them. As the Orange Man said in 2015, in response to a reporters question. "No, no, they'll take the money and they'll do whatever ya want!" So this is the American system, an oligarchy, a plutocracy. On the honesty of scientists as a class, I see this as dubious, because the ability to pull back and not be ideological is sorely missing from most. Also, group loyalty and identity with these people, if only for career purposes, lends itself to what I view as conformity, at best. 

On the subject of God, I have been told by a wise women, to view God as the Universe. I am using this as a working theory for myself alone, only because it is appealing for some reason, and kind of lend itself to my Boltzmann Brain fascination. As American philosopher Jack Handey once wrote, "They say that a little bit of God is inside everyone's heart. Well, if that is true, I hope he likes enchiladas, because tonight that's what He's getting." 

Food for thought!

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[Brent Meeker]

On 3/12/2021 12:53 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> So, the algorithm to save democracy and science would be 1) abolish
> the prohibition laws (or equivalently, reinstate the free-market,

If you lived in Texas, you'd have a $16,000 electric bill.  :-)

Brent