Observation versus assumption (was: anecdote of Moon landing)

[John Clark]

I changed the title of this thread, I don't even know what the old one means.

On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 8:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> the natural transplant you mention might be the result of an analog, continuous process. It would make a difference if all the decimals plays a role in consciousness.

Even if you ignore the fact that it has been experimentally proven that Bell's Inequality is violated and you claim there if a difference between one Hydrogen atom and another, that is to say somewhere along that infinite sequence of digits there is a difference, what you say makes no sense. The atoms in my brain HAVE been replaced and yet I know for a FACT I have survived; I don't know for a fact that the same is true for you but I think it's reasonable to assume it is. So even if there is something analog going on inside an atom, if we're talking about consciousness and survival it's irrelevant.  

 

>Of course, Darwin theory of evolution would become inconsistent, but logically, we cannot exclude the possibility

If a mathematical statement, even a well formed grammatically correct one, contradicts a well established observation then it would be logical to conclude the statement does not correspond with reality; after all every language can write fiction as well as nonfiction.  The fiction could be fun to read and the very best might even have some sort of vague poetic relationship to a truth, but there is not a literal correspondence to reality.

>> Even if a Hydrogen atom has some secret analog process going on inside of it when one atom gets replaced by another atom, that is to say when one analog process gets replaced by another analog process, I STILL survive.

> That is the mechanist assumption. You can truncate the infinite decimal expansion in the analog process running a brain.

It's not an assumption it's a OBSERVATION! Atoms in my brain have been replaced many many times and yet my consciousness has continued. My only ASSUMPTION is that you are like me and are also conscious.

>> So that hypothetical secret mysterious analog process is the Hydrogen atom's business not mine, it has nothing to do with me.

> Assuming that you substitution level is above the truncation of the decimals used in the atom. But a non computationalist can assert that his consciousness requires all decimals. 

Then the non computationalist must logically conclude that he is not conscious. I thought solipsists were bad but at least they thought they were conscious even if nobody else was, but your non computationalist doesn't even think he is conscious. How a non conscious person is able to think of anything I will leave as an exercise for the reader.  

 

>>> In which theory?

 

>> In the very controversial theory that says if I have observed X then I have observed X.

>You cannot observe a philosophical assumption. 

You can observe that a philosophical assumption is dead wrong, such as the philosophical assumption that an infinite string of digits in an analog process is always needed to continue consciousness.

 

>> Proof is not the ultimate, direct experience outranks it, and I have direct experience I have survived despite numerous brain transplant operations. 

 

> Yes, and that is good for you, but [...]

But nothing! It's good enough for me to say yes to the doctor and it's good enough for me to say yes to being frozen. And if your experience has been similar to mine, if your consciousness has also continued despite your many brain transplant operations, and if you are a true fan of logic, then you must conclude it's good enough for you too.

> Personal experience is not available when doing science,

True, and that is exactly why no consciousness theory ever devised is scientific, and none every will be. But theories about how intelligence works are most certainly scientific.

>> It doesn't matter if I can communicate my reason for saying yes to the doctor (or yes to being frozen). I have no obligation to justify my actions to you or anybody; based on the evidence I have at my command it is the logical thing to do.   

> Personally, perhaps. Not sure about the guy above, though.

I'm not sure about the other guy either, he might be a zombie for all I know, everybody except me might be, all I know for certain is I'm not. The other guy is going to have to make his own decision, I can't help him, nobody can.

John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

On 23 Jun 2019, at 17:45, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

I changed the title of this thread, I don't even know what the old one means.

On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 8:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> the natural transplant you mention might be the result of an analog, continuous process. It would make a difference if all the decimals plays a role in consciousness.

Even if you ignore the fact that it has been experimentally proven that Bell's Inequality is violated and you claim there if a difference between one Hydrogen atom and another, that is to say somewhere along that infinite sequence of digits there is a difference, what you say makes no sense. The atoms in my brain HAVE been replaced and yet I know for a FACT I have survived; I don't know for a fact that the same is true for you but I think it's reasonable to assume it is.

No problem with “reasonable”. My point is that mechanism, nor my consciousness in two seconds, or the consciousness of another people, is not something provable, in the crisp sense used in metaphysics/theology when we want to put all the card on  the table. 

So even if there is something analog going on inside an atom, if we're talking about consciousness and survival it's irrelevant.  

That assumes digital mechanism. The whole point of the defender of non mechanism, is that the continuum is relevant. It is a way to keep our uniqueness, like Tomas illustrated recently the motivation.

 

>Of course, Darwin theory of evolution would become inconsistent, but logically, we cannot exclude the possibility

If a mathematical statement, even a well formed grammatically correct one, contradicts a well established observation then it would be logical to conclude the statement does not correspond with reality; after all every language can write fiction as well as nonfiction.  The fiction could be fun to read and the very best might even have some sort of vague poetic relationship to a truth, but there is not a literal correspondence to reality.

>> Even if a Hydrogen atom has some secret analog process going on inside of it when one atom gets replaced by another atom, that is to say when one analog process gets replaced by another analog process, I STILL survive.

> That is the mechanist assumption. You can truncate the infinite decimal expansion in the analog process running a brain.

It's not an assumption it's a OBSERVATION!

You can justify the choice of an hypothesis with some observation, not prove it. I use the word “prove” or “justify” in a strong sense.

Atoms in my brain have been replaced many many times and yet my consciousness has continued. My only ASSUMPTION is that you are like me and are also conscious.

Which is assumption enough. Same for Mechanism. It is a theological assumption: the believe in some form of technological reincarnation.

>> So that hypothetical secret mysterious analog process is the Hydrogen atom's business not mine, it has nothing to do with me.

> Assuming that you substitution level is above the truncation of the decimals used in the atom. But a non computationalist can assert that his consciousness requires all decimals. 

Then the non computationalist must logically conclude that he is not conscious.

Why?

I thought solipsists were bad but at least they thought they were conscious even if nobody else was, but your non computationalist doesn't even think he is conscious. How a non conscious person is able to think of anything I will leave as an exercise for the reader.  

 

>>> In which theory?

 

>> In the very controversial theory that says if I have observed X then I have observed X.

>You cannot observe a philosophical assumption. 

You can observe that a philosophical assumption is dead wrong, such as the philosophical assumption that an infinite string of digits in an analog process is always needed to continue consciousness.

I agree that it is not much reasonable, but that is not the same as refutable.

Keep in mind that by “non provable” I mean “need to be assumed” for proving …. Even the tautologies are not all provable. You need to assume some axioms and/or rules.

 

>> Proof is not the ultimate, direct experience outranks it, and I have direct experience I have survived despite numerous brain transplant operations. 

 

> Yes, and that is good for you, but [...]

But nothing!

..., if you suppress the quote.

It's good enough for me to say yes to the doctor and it's good enough for me to say yes to being frozen.

No problem. The point is just that a non computationalist can assert that his consciousness requires all decimals.

You can believe that he is wrong, but that is not a proof, unless you make clear your mechanist assumption.

And if your experience has been similar to mine, if your consciousness has also continued despite your many brain transplant operations, and if you are a true fan of logic, then you must conclude it's good enough for you too.

Yes, but typically, first person experience will not prove this to another. He might think I am another person, or a zombie, etc.

We are not arguing truth or falsity of mechanism. Just its non rational justifiability, or provability.

> Personal experience is not available when doing science,

True, and that is exactly why no consciousness theory ever devised is scientific, and none every will be.

That does not follow. We can make hypotheses/theories about consciousness, and be led to indirect testing. Example: the mechanist theory of consciousness leads to many-histories indirectly testable below our substitution level, and that is confirmed by Everett formulation of quantum physics.

But theories about how intelligence works are most certainly scientific.

All domains can be handled with the scientific attitude.

>> It doesn't matter if I can communicate my reason for saying yes to the doctor (or yes to being frozen). I have no obligation to justify my actions to you or anybody; based on the evidence I have at my command it is the logical thing to do.   

> Personally, perhaps. Not sure about the guy above, though.

I'm not sure about the other guy either, he might be a zombie for all I know, everybody except me might be, all I know for certain is I'm not.

That’s my point. It is in the same sense that Mechanism is not something provable. Mechanism entails the consistency of non-mechanism, a bit like the consistency of PA entails the consistency of (PA + “PA is inconsistent”).

The other guy is going to have to make his own decision, I can't help him, nobody can.

That’s was my point. OK.

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Philip Thrift]

On Monday, June 24, 2019 at 3:22:45 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

Keep in mind that by “non provable” I mean “need to be assumed” for proving …. Even the tautologies are not all provable. You need to assume some axioms and/or rules.

All proofs are spoofs.

[ Reincarnating Rorty. :) ]

@philipthrift

[Lawrence Crowell]

I think one could be most on the mark by calling this "how bad money chases out good money." I joined this list last fall, and in the last couple of months it seems to have fallen over to various humbugs promoting nonsense. these threads of late have degenerated into pure rubbish, bad thinking chasing out good thinking.

LC

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 4:22 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

>> The atoms in my brain HAVE been replaced and yet I know for a FACT I have survived; I don't know for a fact that the same is true for you but I think it's reasonable to assume it is.

> No problem with “reasonable”. My point is that mechanism, nor my consciousness in two seconds, or the consciousness of another people, is not something provable,

True but irrelevant if you're trying to decide what to do with your own life.

 

>> So even if there is something analog going on inside an atom, if we're talking about consciousness and survival it's irrelevant.  

> That assumes digital mechanism.

No! The only thing assumed is that if you have observed X then you have observed X.

The whole point of the defender of non mechanism, is that the continuum is relevant.

If the defender of non-mechanism is conscious then he must conclude that the continuum inside one hydrogen atom is identical to the continuum inside another hydrogen atom because he has remained conscious despite an astronomical number of replacement atoms.  Meaning needs contrast so if everything has a  continuum inside it then it would be safe to simplify things and  just forget about the continuum.

 

> It is a way to keep our uniqueness

 

People may wish to be unique but the universe is not required to conform to human aspirations .

> You can justify the choice of an hypothesis with some observation, not prove it. I use the word “prove” or “justify” in a strong sense.

To hell with hypothesis and to hell with proof, direct experience outranks them all. And nothing is more direct than consciousness. And I have no obligation to justify myself, my actions will have the effect I expect or they won't and your opinion of their validity will have no effect on the outcome whatsoever   

>> Atoms in my brain have been replaced many many times and yet my consciousness has continued. My only ASSUMPTION is that you are like me and are also conscious.

 

> Which is assumption enough.

That assumption would only be needed if I wished to advise you on how you should live your life, but I have no wish to do that because you know more about your life than I do. I would say yes to the doctor and yes to being frozen because I like consciousness and would like more of it. You know better than me if you're conscious or not, if you're not then there would be no reason to say yes to either.

>>> Assuming that you substitution level is above the truncation of the decimals used in the atom. But a non computationalist can assert that his consciousness requires all decimals. 

>>Then the non computationalist must logically conclude that he is not conscious.

Why?

I would have thought that was obvious. The non-computationalist knows the atoms in his brain have been replaced many times, he believed the substitute atoms do not contain a sufficient number of digits for consciousness ( that is exactly what makes a  non-computationalist a  non-computationalist) then he would have to think that he does not think.

 

> Keep in mind that by “non provable” I mean “need to be assumed” for proving

Keep in mind “non provable” does not mean wrong, it just means it can not be constructed from a set of axioms. And yes if something is not provable then it's not science, but direct experience doesn't need it because it outranks even science. 

If I bang my hand down on a table so hard it breaks a bone I could , if I wanted to be very pedantic, still doubt the existence of the table or even the existence of my hand and the bone in it, but I could not doubt the direct experience of the pain. If you had a proof that I felt no pain I would know immediately that you either made a logical error when you formed the proof or you started from a bad set of axioms.  

>> It's good enough for me to say yes to the doctor and it's good enough for me to say yes to being frozen.

> No problem.

Then what are we arguing about?

> The point is just that a non computationalist can assert that his consciousness requires all decimals.

Sure, anybody can assert anything they want regardless of how silly, but all those assertions have precisely zero effect on reality.

> You can believe that he is wrong, but that is not a proof,

So what? If he asserts "John Clark is not conscious " I know from the most authoritative source there is, direct experience, that he's wrong. The fact that I lack a proof to convince him that he is in error does not change the fact that he has indeed made an error.

>>if your experience has been similar to mine, if your consciousness has also continued despite your many brain transplant operations, and if you are a true fan of logic, then you must conclude it's good enough for you too.

> Yes, but typically, first person experience will not prove this to another. He might think I am another person, or a zombie, etc.

What do you care what other people think? The world's greatest expert on the consciousness of Bruno Marchal is Bruno Marchal, if anybody knows if that fellow is conscious or not it is him. 

> We are not arguing truth or falsity of mechanism. Just its non rational justifiability, or provability.

Then we're not arguing. Mechanism, as you've defined the word, is certainly true and certainly can not be proven. Godel tells us there are a infinite number of statements of that sort.

   >>> Personal experience is not available when doing science, 

>>True, and that is exactly why no consciousness theory ever devised is scientific, and none every will be.

> That does not follow.

 

I am absolutely positively 100% certain that it does follow, and not only that I'm probably correct too. 

 

> We can make hypotheses/theories about consciousness,

Truer words were never spoken!  It's extraordinarily easy to crank out consciousness theories by the bushel basket, but one is just as good as the other and, unlike intelligence theories., none of them can be experimentally tested.

 

> and be led to indirect testing. Example: the mechanist theory of consciousness leads to many-histories indirectly testable below our substitution level, and that is confirmed by Everett formulation of quantum physics.

Everett theory has nothing to do with consciousness. Yes he says a change change in consciousness will cause a universe to split but so will a change in ANYTHING.  Everett says there is nothing special about consciousness, it follows the same laws of physics as everything else and that's why I like it, it has no need to explain how consciousness works. Copenhagen says mind follows different laws of physics and has a unique magical superpower that can in some unspecified way collapse the quantum wave function, so unlike Everett to be complete Copenhagen does need to explain how consciousness works,needless to say it has been unable to do so.

 

>> I'm not sure about the other guy either, he might be a zombie for all I know, everybody except me might be, all I know for certain is I'm not.

> That’s my point. It is in the same sense that Mechanism is not something provable.

Yes it's not provable but that's not important if you have something even better than proof, and you do, direct experience.

John K Clark

 

[Philip Thrift]

"Feyerabend felt that science started as a liberating movement, but over time it had become increasingly dogmatic and rigid, and therefore had become increasingly an ideology and despite its successes science had started to attain some oppressive features, and it was not possible [any longer] to come up with an unambiguous way to distinguish science from religion."

Epistemological anarchism

From Wikipedia

@philipthrift

[Brent Meeker]

So Feyerabend can't tell ISIS from NASA or the National Academy of Science from the Papacy.

Brent

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[Philip Thrift]

Can you tell a progressive Christian (who may be religious in the sense that they have a belief in God) and is also a progressive Democrat and a member of ISIS (who is also  religious in the sense that they have a belief in God). Do all theists (progressive Christian and ISIS member) look the same in the eyes of the "scientific atheist"?

So scientists have turned science into a religion, but scientists (mostly) aren't as bad as ISIS members.

@philipthrift

[Bruno Marchal]

On 25 Jun 2019, at 02:42, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jun 24, 2019 at 4:22 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

 

>> The atoms in my brain HAVE been replaced and yet I know for a FACT I have survived; I don't know for a fact that the same is true for you but I think it's reasonable to assume it is.

> No problem with “reasonable”. My point is that mechanism, nor my consciousness in two seconds, or the consciousness of another people, is not something provable,

True but irrelevant if you're trying to decide what to do with your own life.

True, but irrelevant when studying fundamental question.

 

>> So even if there is something analog going on inside an atom, if we're talking about consciousness and survival it's irrelevant.  

> That assumes digital mechanism.

No! The only thing assumed is that if you have observed X then you have observed X.

How would that tautology imply or justify  Mechanism?

The whole point of the defender of non mechanism, is that the continuum is relevant.

If the defender of non-mechanism is conscious then he must conclude that the continuum inside one hydrogen atom is identical to the continuum inside another hydrogen atom because he has remained conscious despite an astronomical number of replacement atoms. 

But the non-mechanist invoke even an infinite here. Astronomical data will not impress him: he already believe to be an infinite being. You argue with him/her like he/she was already a Mechanist.

Meaning needs contrast so if everything has a  continuum inside it then it would be safe to simplify things and  just forget about the continuum.

That is reasonable, and echoes an argument by discernibility used by Turing. That’s good, but irrelevant in this discussion. The goal is not to defend mechanism and find good argument for its truth, but to understand that mechanism is an assumption. (Everyone believe (A & A) -> A, but without making some assumption, it can only be an assumption.

 

> It is a way to keep our uniqueness

 

People may wish to be unique but the universe is not required to conform to human aspirations .

Right. Yet, people wanting to be unique will be motivated to abandon Mechanism, and will try non computationalist theory of mind. 

> You can justify the choice of an hypothesis with some observation, not prove it. I use the word “prove” or “justify” in a strong sense.

To hell with hypothesis and to hell with proof, direct experience outranks them all.

But that cannot be invoked as an argument. It can be reported as an experience report, and compares with a theory. 

And nothing is more direct than consciousness.

Yes, we agree on this. But a theory has to be third person sharable.

And I have no obligation to justify myself, my actions will have the effect I expect or they won't and your opinion of their validity will have no effect on the outcome whatsoever   

>> Atoms in my brain have been replaced many many times and yet my consciousness has continued. My only ASSUMPTION is that you are like me and are also conscious.

 

> Which is assumption enough.

That assumption would only be needed if I wished to advise you on how you should live your life, but I have no wish to do that because you know more about your life than I do. I would say yes to the doctor and yes to being frozen because I like consciousness and would like more of it. You know better than me if you're conscious or not, if you're not then there would be no reason to say yes to either.

No problem. The debate was on the possible or not rational justification of mechanism, not about its truth or falsity.

>>> Assuming that you substitution level is above the truncation of the decimals used in the atom. But a non computationalist can assert that his consciousness requires all decimals. 

>>Then the non computationalist must logically conclude that he is not conscious.

Why?

I would have thought that was obvious. The non-computationalist knows the atoms in his brain have been replaced many times,

The non-computationalist might not care about its atoms, and believes that his soul has a bit of <whatever-you-want>. Or he could invoke the fact that the atoms are replaced in a continuous way, etc. That is a methodological problem for him/her. There are many options. 

he believed the substitute atoms do not contain a sufficient number of digits for consciousness ( that is exactly what makes a  non-computationalist a  non-computationalist) then he would have to think that he does not think.

He has also the option to think that after having a brain transplant he will be dead, and the copy is an impostor (not necessarily a zombie). Now, some non-computationalist have argued more simply that the brain transplant would not work at all, and that the copy would be a corpse. 

 

> Keep in mind that by “non provable” I mean “need to be assumed” for proving

Keep in mind “non provable” does not mean wrong, it just means it can not be constructed from a set of axioms. And yes if something is not provable then it's not science, but direct experience doesn't need it because it outranks even science. 

No theories at all are provable. A theory is always the set of proposition that we assume. All theories are hypothetical. If science reject what is not provable, then science must reject elementary arithmetic, and all current theories which relies on those arithmetical hypothesis. We cannot prove the existence of the number 0. We know this since the failure of logicism. 

If I bang my hand down on a table so hard it breaks a bone I could , if I wanted to be very pedantic, still doubt the existence of the table or even the existence of my hand and the bone in it, but I could not doubt the direct experience of the pain.

No problem.

If you had a proof that I felt no pain I would know immediately that you either made a logical error when you formed the proof or you started from a bad set of axioms.  

Absolutely. But this is not relevant for the simple fact that Mechanism is possibly false, and thus has to be assumed if we use it.

>> It's good enough for me to say yes to the doctor and it's good enough for me to say yes to being frozen.

> No problem.

Then what are we arguing about?

The fact that Mechanism in cognitive science has to be assumed. It is wrong to believe that it has to be true, or that science can justify it rationally. It belongs to the class of true but non provable truth, if true. Like self-consistency for any consistent machine.

That is not useful in practice, but important when we work on the theory.

> The point is just that a non computationalist can assert that his consciousness requires all decimals.

Sure, anybody can assert anything they want regardless of how silly, but all those assertions have precisely zero effect on reality.

But some can be consistent, and that is what makes the point. If you could prove the inconsistency of all non-computationalist theories, then you would prove Mechanism, but that is impossible. 

> You can believe that he is wrong, but that is not a proof,

So what? If he asserts "John Clark is not conscious " I know from the most authoritative source there is, direct experience, that he's wrong. The fact that I lack a proof to convince him that he is in error does not change the fact that he has indeed made an error.

The discussion is on provability. You keep distracting us from where we started.

>>if your experience has been similar to mine, if your consciousness has also continued despite your many brain transplant operations, and if you are a true fan of logic, then you must conclude it's good enough for you too.

> Yes, but typically, first person experience will not prove this to another. He might think I am another person, or a zombie, etc.

What do you care what other people think? The world's greatest expert on the consciousness of Bruno Marchal is Bruno Marchal, if anybody knows if that fellow is conscious or not it is him. 

> We are not arguing truth or falsity of mechanism. Just its non rational justifiability, or provability.

Then we're not arguing. Mechanism, as you've defined the word, is certainly true and certainly can not be proven.

So we agree.

Godel tells us there are a infinite number of statements of that sort.

Yes, and Solovay provides a complete theory axiomatising the true but not provable proposition (G* minus G).

   >>> Personal experience is not available when doing science, 

>>True, and that is exactly why no consciousness theory ever devised is scientific, and none every will be.

> That does not follow.

 

I am absolutely positively 100% certain that it does follow, and not only that I'm probably correct too. 

The pint has never been on the truth of mechanism, but on its absence of entire rational justification.

 

> We can make hypotheses/theories about consciousness,

Truer words were never spoken!  It's extraordinarily easy to crank out consciousness theories by the bushel basket, but one is just as good as the other and, unlike intelligence theories., none of them can be experimentally tested.

You might need to study my papers. I did exactly that.

 

> and be led to indirect testing. Example: the mechanist theory of consciousness leads to many-histories indirectly testable below our substitution level, and that is confirmed by Everett formulation of quantum physics.

Everett theory has nothing to do with consciousness. Yes he says a change change in consciousness will cause a universe to split but so will a change in ANYTHING.  Everett says there is nothing special about consciousness, it follows the same laws of physics as everything else and that's why I like it, it has no need to explain how consciousness works.

Everett use Mechanism, with basically the same definition of subjective (first person) than the simple definition I gave in the informal argument (Universal Dovetailer Argument). Of course he knows about nothing in computer science. He would have understood that its argument is lifted on the role of arithmetic. 

Copenhagen says mind follows different laws of physics and has a unique magical superpower that can in some unspecified way collapse the quantum wave function, so unlike Everett to be complete Copenhagen does need to explain how consciousness works,needless to say it has been unable to do so.

OK.

 

>> I'm not sure about the other guy either, he might be a zombie for all I know, everybody except me might be, all I know for certain is I'm not.

> That’s my point. It is in the same sense that Mechanism is not something provable.

Yes it's not provable but that's not important if you have something even better than proof, and you do, direct experience.

So we agree. Now, it is important for the understanding of how the Gödel logic of self-reference is applied to derive the physical laws from arithmetic.

Bruno

John K Clark

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 25 Jun 2019, at 07:09, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

"Feyerabend felt that science started as a liberating movement, but over time it had become increasingly dogmatic and rigid, and therefore had become increasingly an ideology and despite its successes science had started to attain some oppressive features, and it was not possible [any longer] to come up with an unambiguous way to distinguish science from religion.”

Feyerabend started from reasoning and end up becoming to much philosophically relativist, making people mis-using its originally relevant critics to get a sort of anti-scientific anarchism, which impedes researches. Imo.

Bruno

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[Telmo Menezes]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019, at 08:30, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:

So Feyerabend can't tell ISIS from NASA or the National Academy of Science from the Papacy.

My mother is fairly religious. She goes to church every Sunday and she particularly likes the Virgin Mary. She is aware that her beliefs are non-justifiable, but she still holds them. Are you saying that there is no difference between my mother and ISIS? Religion is a large spectrum of things and so is science.

I might agree with you that Feyerabend takes things too far, but these over-simplifications are not very good arguments. This is my problem with militant atheism: you guys can't seem to resist using the tools of the enemy.

Telmo.

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[John Clark]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 3:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>>> No problem with “reasonable”. My point is that mechanism, nor my consciousness in two seconds, or the consciousness of another people, is not something provable,

>> True but irrelevant if you're trying to decide what to do with your own life.

 

> True, but irrelevant when studying fundamental question.

There are 2 fundamental questions and we already know the answers to both.

1) Question: Is Mechanism as defined by you true?

   Answer: Yes.

2) Question: Can there ever be a proof of Mechanism? 

   Answer: No.

After that I don't know what more you can say about it.

>>> That assumes digital mechanism.

>>No! The only thing assumed is that if you have observed X then you have observed X.

> How would that tautology imply or justify  Mechanism?

 

Bruno, stop playing dumb. We have both directly experienced consciousness despite the atoms in our brains being replaced many many times, so by your own definition of the word Mechanism is certainly true even if we can't produce it from the set of axioms that we happen to be currently using.
 

>> If the defender of non-mechanism is conscious then he must conclude that the continuum inside one hydrogen atom is identical to the continuum inside another hydrogen atom because he has remained conscious despite an astronomical number of replacement atoms. 

> But the non-mechanist invoke even an infinite here. Astronomical data will not impress him:

An astronomically large number times an infinite number is infinite, and the non-mechanist believes atoms contain some sort of mystical analog process involving infinite digits; and yet the non-mechanist also knows for a fact that all that swapping in and out those infinite strings of digits has had precisely ZERO effect on his consciousness. So a student of consciousness has precisely ZERO reason to be interested in the continuum and those infinite digits even if they exist. 

>> Meaning needs contrast so if everything has a continuum inside it then it would be safe to simplify things and just forget about the continuum.

> That is reasonable, and echoes an argument by discernibility used by Turing. That’s good, but irrelevant in this discussion.

How on earth is that irrelevant? If a complicated thing has no effect on the phenomena you're researching then forget about it and spend your time working on things that might have an effect on it.

 

> The goal is not to defend mechanism and find good argument for its truth,

Let's recap what we know or strongly suspect is true about Mechanism as you have defined it:

1) I know for certain it's true.

 

2) If you're conscious then you also know for certain it's true.

3) We both know for certain a proof of Mechanism can not be derived from the axioms currently used.

4) Although falling short of a proof very good arguments in favor of Mechanism can be made.

5) I can see no reason why the truth of Mechanism should not be added as a axiom and if you know of such a reason you have yet to state it.  

>> People may wish to be unique but the universe is not required to conform to human aspirations .

> Right. Yet, people wanting to be unique will be motivated to abandon Mechanism, and will try non computationalist theory of mind. 

I agree, people abandon logic and engage in magical thinking and believe if they want something to be true strongly enough then it is true.

>> To hell with hypothesis and to hell with proof, direct experience outranks them all.

>But that cannot be invoked as an argument.

So what? We both know for a fact that Mechanism as you have defined it is true, so what use could either of us have for an argument or a proof? Even if I had a proof (which I never could have) it would not make me one bit more certain of the truth of Mechanism than I already am.

>> And nothing is more direct than consciousness.

> Yes, we agree on this. But a theory has to be third person sharable.

I have no need for a proof or a argument in favour of the truth of Mechanism and can see no reason why a third party would need such a thing either.  

 

> The debate was on the possible or not rational justification of mechanism, not about its truth or falsity

When we both already know it's true I don't understand why a rational third party would want to hear my justification of Mechanism, I certainly don't want to hear his. 

 

>> The non-computationalist knows the atoms in his brain have been replaced many times,

> The non-computationalist might not care about its atoms, and believes that his soul has a bit of <whatever-you-want>.

If the non-computationalist is such a fool that he doesn't know that a change in the arrangement of atoms in his brain changes his consciousness and a change in his consciousness changes the arrangement of atoms in his brain then no rational argument will convince him of anything and I'm wasting my time talking to him.

 

> Or he could invoke the fact that the atoms are replaced in a continuous way, etc.

Then, because his consciousness remains unaffected, the continuous stream of continuum rich matter flowing out of the brain must be identical with the continuous stream of continuum rich matter flowing into the brain, and so we can simplify things and cancel out the continuum. Even if the continuum exists, and I have my doubts, it plays no part in consciousness.

>> he believed the substitute atoms do not contain a sufficient number of digits for consciousness ( that is exactly what makes a  non-computationalist a  non-computationalist) then he would have to think that he does not think.

> He has also the option to think that after having a brain transplant he will be dead,

Every non-computationalist in the world has already undergone many brain transplants. So every non-computationalist in the world thinks he is dead. So every non-computationalist in the world is insane.

> and the copy is an impostor

That's a little better, now every non-computationalist in the world just thinks he's a fraud. 

> No theories at all are provable. A theory is always the set of proposition that we assume. All theories are hypothetical.

That's nice, but Mechanism is not a theory it is a observation of a direct experience.

> If science reject what is not provable then [...]

I don't need a proof and I don't need a theory and I don't even need science if I have direct experience, and in this case I do. 

>> If you had a proof that I felt no pain I would know immediately that you either made a logical error when you formed the proof or you started from a bad set of axioms.  

> Absolutely. But this is not relevant for the simple fact that Mechanism is possibly false,

It's very relevant because both pain and consciousness are direct experiences.There is no proof of Mechanism and there never will be but there is no way it could be false, I know this from direct experience and if you're conscious you know it too.

> and thus has to be assumed if we use it.

If I live on a desert island and am going to use it for my own purposes I don't need to assume anything if I want to use mechanism because my certainty of it's truth was obtained from direct experience, and that is vastly stronger than if I just had a proof it is true. Proofs are wimpy compared with direct experience.  

 

> It belongs to the class of true but non provable truth,

Yes! An axiom is suposed to be a self evidently true statement that can not be derived, and that perfectly describes mechanism; so let's just add it to the list of existing axioms.

 

> If you could prove the inconsistency of all non-computationalist theories, then you would prove Mechanism,

I don't know why you keep talking about proof as if it's the ultimate roadway to truth. If you had an error free proof that X=Y that proof would not convince me that X is indeed equal to Y if I knew from direct experience that those 2 things were not in fact equal. Such a proof would however tell me one thing, you must be using a bad set of axioms because a proof is only as good as the axioms it's built on.  

>> If he asserts "John Clark is not conscious" I know from the most authoritative source there is, direct experience, that he's wrong. The fact that I lack a proof to convince him that he is in error does not change the fact that he has indeed made an error.

> The discussion is on provability. You keep distracting us from where we started.

Distracting from what? You have, at various times, agreed with me that Mechanism is true and Mechanism has no proof and never will, so I don't see what more there is to discuss about it.

> We are not arguing truth or falsity of mechanism. Just its non rational justifiability, or provability.

 

>>Then we're not arguing. Mechanism, as you've defined the word, is certainly true and certainly can not be proven.

> So we agree.

I guess so. Sort of.

 

> The pint has never been on the truth of mechanism, but on its absence of entire rational justification.

I have a very rational reason for believing mechanism is true, it's just that there is no way my reason can be communicated; fortunately that's not a big problem because you have your own reason for believing mechanism is true so you don't really need my communication .

>> Yes it's not provable but that's not important if you have something even better than proof, and you do, direct experience.

 

> So we agree.

 I guess so. Sort of.

 John K Clark

 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 25 Jun 2019, at 09:27, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can you tell a progressive Christian (who may be religious in the sense that they have a belief in God) and is also a progressive Democrat and a member of ISIS (who is also  religious in the sense that they have a belief in God). Do all theists (progressive Christian and ISIS member) look the same in the eyes of the "scientific atheist"?

So scientists have turned science into a religion, but scientists (mostly) aren't as bad as ISIS members.

Scientific atheism has to be agnostic (atheism). An agnostic atheist will be able to distinguish between a the good guys (the agnostic, the one who does not claim truth, who are open to dialog, compromise, and which search the sharable truth and build from that) and the non agnostic, be them atheists christians, whatever, who are the con artist, claiming to be clever, to know better, and usually using bombs or insults.

And by agnostic I mean agnostic relatively to *any*  notion of gods, be it an impersonal Tao, or Matter, or a Person of this or other kinds.

The scientist is the guy able to doubt, to say “I don’t know” or “I am nots sure”.

Science does not exist as a thing per se, and it asserts nothing in any definitive way, except perhaps on elementary arithmetic but that is not my point here. What does exist is a scientific *attitude*, which is a mixing of curiosity, honesty and modesty. A scientist only provides theories, and diverse means of verifiability. Now, the human science are humans, and some scientist will not act as scientist, due to perish or publish human and social rules, and things like that.

Pppper’s refutability criteria is rather good, even if refuted strictly speaking by Case and Ngo-Manguelle S.(*). Some refutable theories can be interesting and fertile in discovering other testable theories.

Then wth mechanism, it seems that the scientific attitude is the same as the religious attitude, related to the fact that the more you know, the more you know how much ignorant you are. Tasting the truth enlarge the doubt spectrum.

Bruno

(*) CASE J. & NGO-MANGUELLE S., 1979, Refinements of inductive inference by Popperian machines. Tech. Rep., Dept. of Computer Science, State Univ. of New-York, Buffalo.

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 26 Jun 2019, at 14:37, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 3:31 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>>> No problem with “reasonable”. My point is that mechanism, nor my consciousness in two seconds, or the consciousness of another people, is not something provable,

>> True but irrelevant if you're trying to decide what to do with your own life.

 

> True, but irrelevant when studying fundamental question.

There are 2 fundamental questions and we already know the answers to both.

1) Question: Is Mechanism as defined by you true?

   Answer: Yes.

?

Hmm… we cannot know that, but it is almost trivial. It is really like self-consistency: for all self-consistent machine it is true, but none can prove it from its basic beliefs. We can logically conceive that it is wrong, even if it could look ad hoc. And we cannot derive Mechanism from less.

2) Question: Can there ever be a proof of Mechanism? 

   Answer: No.

?

Again that depends. “Provable” is always relative to some theory we are willing to accept (which does not necessarily means that we are sure of it, or even that we believe in it: that consideration are personal).

After that I don't know what more you can say about it.

By the fact that the universal machine cannot distinguish between being emulated by any other universal numbers, eventually mechanism reduce the science of the observable by the universal machine, by a statistic on the first person experience. That is confirmed by the fact that restricted on the sigma_1 sentences, the variants of G provides the necessary logic to get a statistics, and then it is already quantum like. 

>>> That assumes digital mechanism.

>>No! The only thing assumed is that if you have observed X then you have observed X.

> How would that tautology imply or justify  Mechanism?

 

Bruno, stop playing dumb.

You are the one assuming a tautology.

We have both directly experienced consciousness despite the atoms in our brains being replaced many many times,

Assuming that atoms exists in some ontological way. I don’t do that assumption. I am agnostic at the start, then shows that such notions does not make sense with Digital Mechanism, which helps in the quantum mechanical interpretation debate, because the physicist notion of atom is everything but clear. 

I agree we exêrmeint consciousness, and that we very plausibly share a large part of the physical observable reality, but that does not make Mechanism entirely rationally justifiable. It is a belief in some reincarnation, and it is problematic because it makes us reincarnate in infinitely many computations (in Arithmetic). That can be tested experimentally, and then, indeed we have good sign of where the quantum weirdness might come from, as we get directly the “many-histories” and (less directly) its quantum logic.

so by your own definition of the word Mechanism is certainly true even if we can't produce it from the set of axioms that we happen to be currently using.

So we agree.

 

>> If the defender of non-mechanism is conscious then he must conclude that the continuum inside one hydrogen atom is identical to the continuum inside another hydrogen atom because he has remained conscious despite an astronomical number of replacement atoms. 

> But the non-mechanist invoke even an infinite here. Astronomical data will not impress him:

An astronomically large number times an infinite number is infinite, and the non-mechanist believes atoms contain some sort of mystical analog process involving infinite digits; and yet the non-mechanist also knows for a fact that all that swapping in and out those infinite strings of digits has had precisely ZERO effect on his consciousness.

That is what we can tested.

So a student of consciousness has precisely ZERO reason to be interested in the continuum and those infinite digits even if they exist. 

Hmm… He learned about the continuum in his course of set theory and analysis. 

You force me to be the advocate of the devil. But that is what logician are. One counter-example defeat a theory, and when studying the consequence of mechanism, we have to be very cautious and precise on what is assumed, and what is derived from the assumption.

>> Meaning needs contrast so if everything has a continuum inside it then it would be safe to simplify things and just forget about the continuum.

> That is reasonable, and echoes an argument by discernibility used by Turing. That’s good, but irrelevant in this discussion.

How on earth is that irrelevant? If a complicated thing has no effect on the phenomena you're researching then forget about it and spend your time working on things that might have an effect on it.

It has no relevance because you make the digital truncation. But a non mechanist might tell you that whatever truncation you do, even at a very fine grained level, you become a zombie if a decimal is not correct. He will argue that consciousness needs all the decimals. And even with mechanism that is not entirely impossible, but that would means that the first person needs some “real” oracle, fir which there is no evidences. 

So I agree that the student has no reason to invoke the continuum, but from a logical point of view, that is consistent, and even consistent with mechanism (which is not a lot, as "being wrong” is consistent with arithmetic already.

 

> The goal is not to defend mechanism and find good argument for its truth,

Let's recap what we know or strongly suspect is true about Mechanism as you have defined it:

1) I know for certain it's true.

No. Perhaps for uninteresting reason in practice, but we can’t know that, nor can I am sure I will still be alive in two seconds. We can suspect Mechanism to be true, OK. But we cannot claim that science has proven it.

 

2) If you're conscious then you also know for certain it's true.

OK.

3) We both know for certain a proof of Mechanism can not be derived from the axioms currently used.

Assuming at some meta-level that our currently axioms are consistent, but that makes us very close to inconsistency. 

I dare to do that only on elementary arithmetic (Robisno Arithmetic). The mathematical logicians got a moment of panic when Nelson claimed to have proven that Peano Arithmetic is inconsistent, and they did study Nelson’s proof (and they found the mistake, to their relieve.

4) Although falling short of a proof very good arguments in favor of Mechanism can be made.

Absolutely. My own intuition comes from molecular biology. My first programs I discover was the Operon Lactose in Escherichia Coli. Note that Darwin used quasi explicitly Mechanism (and predicted the existence of a code, like Mendel almost confirmed indirectly, and molecular genetics confirmed).

5) I can see no reason why the truth of Mechanism should not be added as a axiom and if you know of such a reason you have yet to state it.  

You can added as a sort of meta-axiom once you decide to practice it. It is just that the digital doctor cannot claim that it has been scientifically proved that Mechanism is true, which is a bit of a trivia because in science we never really prove things about reality. We infer theories from experience, and then  try to test them. Ou laws involved infinities and universals, but as locally finite creature we can only guess. The French poet Fontenelle said once “de mémoire de rose je n’ai jamais vu mourrir un jardiniere” (from my memory of rose I have never seen a Gardiner who died).

>> People may wish to be unique but the universe is not required to conform to human aspirations .

> Right. Yet, people wanting to be unique will be motivated to abandon Mechanism, and will try non computationalist theory of mind. 

I agree, people abandon logic and engage in magical thinking and believe if they want something to be true strongly enough then it is true.

OK. In fact it is the consistent on on mechanism which makes so much people willing to believe in what they want.

It might play a role in the development of human, though, in helping to keep some optimism, or perhaps that optimism could be taken as an evidence truth and good are related and motivate us to search it.

>> To hell with hypothesis and to hell with proof, direct experience outranks them all.

>But that cannot be invoked as an argument.

So what? We both know for a fact that Mechanism as you have defined it is true,

It cannot be a fact, but it can be the simplest working theory today, not eliminating consciousness, nor the observable.

But to progress in the mind-body problem, we have to progress in the extraction of physics from the mind of the universal machine, and we have to pursue its comparison with what we observe.

so what use could either of us have for an argument or a proof? Even if I had a proof (which I never could have) it would not make me one bit more certain of the truth of Mechanism than I already am.

We can refute it.

That is the whole point of making “metaphysics” into science again, a bit like with Bell’s inequality.

If S4Grz1 & Co departs too much from the observation, then we have a clue that Mechanism could be wrong. Something else would be at play in the consciousness phenomenon. We can’t logically exclude this today, and I show how that can be tested. It shows a direction where we can progress.

>> And nothing is more direct than consciousness.

> Yes, we agree on this. But a theory has to be third person sharable.

I have no need for a proof or a argument in favour of the truth of Mechanism and can see no reason why a third party would need such a thing either.  

My point is only that Mechanism is refutable. It is enough to compare the physics shared by all universal numbers/machine from their first person (plural) perspective, and what we observe.

 

> The debate was on the possible or not rational justification of mechanism, not about its truth or falsity

When we both already know it's true I don't understand why a rational third party would want to hear my justification of Mechanism, I certainly don't want to hear his. 

It is needed to understand that Mechanism is refutable. It illustrates that we can keep the scientific attitude in philosophy, metaphysics or theology. It helps to shale a little bit the certainty of the materialist. Many people still believe that Mechanism and materialism go hand in hand, but the point is that they are incompatible, and we can test which one is the more plausible. Thanks to QM, mechanism is winning here. QM-with-no-collapse confirms the easiest quantum-like fact that the present is a sort of sum on all fiction, with superposed states and virtual particles. 

 

>> The non-computationalist knows the atoms in his brain have been replaced many times,

> The non-computationalist might not care about its atoms, and believes that his soul has a bit of <whatever-you-want>.

If the non-computationalist is such a fool that he doesn't know that a change in the arrangement of atoms in his brain changes his consciousness and a change in his consciousness changes the arrangement of atoms in his brain then no rational argument will convince him of anything and I'm wasting my time talking to him.

OK. Me neither. But my point is purely logical. You don’t need to believe in curved geometrical space, but you need to be able to conceive it to prove that the parallel postulate is not provable from the other postulate. To show that some proposition P is not provable in a theory, you need only to be able to conceive a model (a “reality”) which satisfy the axioms of the theory, and satisfy ~ P. The model can be as bizarre as you want. I might illustrate this by showing why Robinso Arithmetic cannot prove 0 + x = x, despite ut can prove, for all number n: 0 + n = n.

 

> Or he could invoke the fact that the atoms are replaced in a continuous way, etc.

Then, because his consciousness remains unaffected,

He will tell ask why you claim this. His point is that his consciousness will be affected.

the continuous stream of continuum rich matter flowing out of the brain must be identical with the continuous stream of continuum rich matter flowing into the brain, and so we can simplify things and cancel out the continuum. Even if the continuum exists, and I have my doubts, it plays no part in consciousness.

Some continuum is at play, even with mechanism, by the first person indeterminacy. But that is out of the scope here.

>> he believed the substitute atoms do not contain a sufficient number of digits for consciousness ( that is exactly what makes a  non-computationalist a  non-computationalist) then he would have to think that he does not think.

> He has also the option to think that after having a brain transplant he will be dead,

Every non-computationalist in the world has already undergone many brain transplants.

Not verifiability digital one. Unless you assume already mechanism.

So every non-computationalist in the world thinks he is dead. So every non-computationalist in the world is insane.

...

> and the copy is an impostor

That's a little better, now every non-computationalist in the world just thinks he's a fraud. 

At least he comes back to sanity!

> No theories at all are provable. A theory is always the set of proposition that we assume. All theories are hypothetical.

That's nice, but Mechanism is not a theory it is a observation of a direct experience.

Hmm, I don’t think so. It is a theory inferred from the current knowledge of molecular biology, and quantum mechanics, but as a philosophical assumption, we cannot asserts it as a scientifically demonstrated fact, like we agreed above.

> If science reject what is not provable then [...]

I don't need a proof and I don't need a theory and I don't even need science if I have direct experience, and in this case I do. 

You don’t need a proof. That’s OK. What remain is called faith, and as long as you don’t impose this to someone else, there is no problem.

>> If you had a proof that I felt no pain I would know immediately that you either made a logical error when you formed the proof or you started from a bad set of axioms.  

> Absolutely. But this is not relevant for the simple fact that Mechanism is possibly false,

It's very relevant because both pain and consciousness are direct experiences.There is no proof of Mechanism and there never will be but there is no way it could be false, I know this from direct experience and if you're conscious you know it too.

How could I know that? I know only my consciousness here and now. I don’t know I will stay alive in the next seconds.

FAPP those nuances are not interesting, but to understand that mechanism reduce the mind-body problem into a derivation of physics from the internal statistics in arithmetic on all computations, all the little details are important to be made precise.

> and thus has to be assumed if we use it.

If I live on a desert island and am going to use it for my own purposes I don't need to assume anything if I want to use mechanism because my certainty of it's truth was obtained from direct experience, and that is vastly stronger than if I just had a proof it is true. Proofs are wimpy compared with direct experience.

No problem. The problem is when people could impose that truth to others. That would be scientism, not science.

  

 

> It belongs to the class of true but non provable truth,

Yes! An axiom is suposed to be a self evidently true statement that can not be derived,

Well, actually we can prove the axiom easily, with the notion of “proof” used by logician. Just by mentioning “axiom”.

In the theory with the only axiom “mechanism is true”, we can prove (trivially) that mechanism is true. Here the nuance between proof, proof and truth, proof and consistency, is what makes possible to make such nuances precise, as it get more and more counter-intuitive, as expected.

and that perfectly describes mechanism; so let's just add it to the list of existing axioms.

For personal use only.

 

> If you could prove the inconsistency of all non-computationalist theories, then you would prove Mechanism,

I don't know why you keep talking about proof as if it's the ultimate roadway to truth. 

On the contrary. Every things proceeds from the fact that []p -> p is NOT provable by the machine, and I have to distinguish cautiously between proof and truth just to get the notion of proof and truth ([]p & p).

I am the one that insist that mechanism is not provable, but trivially true, of course, in the mechanist theory. That will help to understand how theology (the Solovay modal logic G* and variant) has to extend science (the Solovay Logic G*).

If you had an error free proof that X=Y that proof would not convince me that X is indeed equal to Y if I knew from direct experience that those 2 things were not in fact equal. Such a proof would however tell me one thing, you must be using a bad set of axioms because a proof is only as good as the axioms it's built on.  

OK. But when interviewing the (Löbian) universal machine, we must keep all those nuances into account.

We can’t know that mechanism is rationally justifiable, if only because it uses church’s Turing thesis, which is also easily argued to be not rationally justifiable/provable, yet quite a good guess if you want my *opinion*.

Then when you know how to use Diagonalosation, it helps to understand how unbelievable Church-turing thesis is.

It is not well known (but seen by Emil Post, Stephen Kleene and Judson Web) but incompleteness is a quasi-direct consequence of the Church-turing thesis.

>> If he asserts "John Clark is not conscious" I know from the most authoritative source there is, direct experience, that he's wrong. The fact that I lack a proof to convince him that he is in error does not change the fact that he has indeed made an error.

> The discussion is on provability. You keep distracting us from where we started.

Distracting from what? You have, at various times, agreed with me that Mechanism is true and Mechanism has no proof and never will, so I don't see what more there is to discuss about it.

As a scientist, I do not discuss about he truth of my axiom/hypothesis. I derive consequences, and show them testable, and indeed, thanks to QM, rather well tested up to now. 

> We are not arguing truth or falsity of mechanism. Just its non rational justifiability, or provability.

 

>>Then we're not arguing. Mechanism, as you've defined the word, is certainly true and certainly can not be proven.

> So we agree.

I guess so. Sort of.

 

> The pint has never been on the truth of mechanism, but on its absence of entire rational justification.

I have a very rational reason for believing mechanism is true, it's just that there is no way my reason can be communicated; fortunately that's not a big problem because you have your own reason for believing mechanism is true so you don't really need my communication .

Actually I don’t abroad the question of the truth of mechanism at all. The whole point is that, thanks to the Church-Turing thesis, we can use it to formulate the min body problem. Indeed to reduce it to a statistics on all computations, and then the “measure one” is given by some variant of Gödel’s provability predicate ([]p), and we can test this by comparing this with experimental physics. It just fits well thanks to quantum mechanics without collapse.

My meta-key point is that we can do philosophy/metaphysics/theology with the scientific method, which consists precisely in keeping for oneself our feeling of truth and wrong, but proposing theories and means of eventuating them.

To be crisp and sharp: the human science and philosophy/theology is bs since we mixed it with state and temporal decision. We still lack the modesty, and that explains why we still use bombs and insults so often in such domain.

>> Yes it's not provable but that's not important if you have something even better than proof, and you do, direct experience.

 

> So we agree.

 I guess so. Sort of.

Good. 

Once you get the step 3, and the fact that the notion of computation is purely arithmetical, you will get the whole picture. I think.

But now we could also ask this question. What if we build artificial brains and teleportation device, and eventually we all end up into (physical computers), but still pursuing the experimental testing, and discover that the Turing-observable (S4Grz1, Z1*, X1*) do depart from the observation of nature? Mechanism is discovered to be wrong, yet everybody was “sure” to survive *integrally*. The answer is that we did not survive integrally, and that we are suffering from some agnosia, like people becoming blind, but never noticing. Here, what we would lose can be subtle aspect of consciousness we are not much aware of, and that illustrates again other way computationalism might be conceived to be wrong, despite the experimenters claiming that they survive. 

Bruno

 John K Clark

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 25 Jun 2019, at 12:27, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019, at 08:30, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:

So Feyerabend can't tell ISIS from NASA or the National Academy of Science from the Papacy.

My mother is fairly religious. She goes to church every Sunday and she particularly likes the Virgin Mary.

You know the story I guess, in Oaxaca, Mexico, when a young shaman mazatec tried to explain the notion of Virgin Mary, coming from the new coming Christians,  to the old  Shaman of the village. He tried everything, but the old one still did not understand whom they were talking about, when eventually the young shaman said, it is the one we met with salvia divinorum, and the old guy said “Aaaah! That One!”.

The Mazatec name of salvia divinorum is Maria Ska Pastora. The Mazatec describes her as very shy, but that might have depended to their mode of consumption. I guess the average teenager knows better ...

She is aware that her beliefs are non-justifiable, but she still holds them.

And not only there is nothing inconsistent with this, but that is what all (Löbian) machine, like PA, already understand. Although the difference between truth and false is clearcut, the difference between rational and irrational is not, and it is speared by a corona we might call surrational: it is what is true (including what is true for some entity) and not provable by that entity. 

(Similarly, there is the false yet irrefutable). 

That explains why the universal machine is condemned to oscillate between security and liberty/universality.

Even our laptops. An army of engineers have conspired to make it into a docile slave. That has more ecomical value than a machine searching its own origin!).

Send this mail ô Computer!

As you already know, it did it!

Are you saying that there is no difference between my mother and ISIS? Religion is a large spectrum of things and so is science.

Yes. Religion only extends science, like G* only extends G.

If a religion contradicts science, one of the two is wrong, and it is matter of research to see what fits with the facts.

Einstein is right on this: science without religion is lame. 

A religion is a conception of reality. The taste for studying the nature of that reality is the prerequisite to do fundamental research, and it is needs some belief in the existence of some reality, which we can never prove (more clearly so when assuming Mechanism, but tare are there argument).

Religion is helpful to distinguish:

-working for living (the free-man)

-living for working (the slave).

But that explains also the velocity of different sort of people to forbid religion, and the best way to do this is to appropriate it  and organise it.

It is a big lie, because the aim of religion is to free the people from authoritative arguments, like when christian bwitis initiate kids to adulthood by taking Tabernanathe iboga. Institutionalised religion, on the century, forbids drugs, and fight against mystics experience, except to divinise some of them for advertising purpose, a long time after the death of some popular mystics.

 

I might agree with you that Feyerabend takes things too far, but these over-simplifications are not very good arguments. This is my problem with militant atheism: you guys can't seem to resist using the tools of the enemy.

The militant or fanatic atheists (to use Einstein’s term)  illustrate that they help the radicals in avoiding the doubt on the fundamental matter.

They claim to love Hypatia, the great Mathematician of Alexandria, as she was atheists, and murdered by a Christian mob, but they forget to say that at that time “atheist” was used for the Pagan theologian, and that she was feared by the radicals, by teaching to the christians Plotinus theology, along with Mathematics and Astronomy. 

It is sad an ironical.  The god / non-god debate hides the fact that materialism is a religion too, a metaphysical assumption, and some can doubt it, and that can help to progress in the fundamental field. There is no progress for those who believe or claim that they already know the answer. Bien évidemment.

Bruno

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[Brent Meeker]

On 6/26/2019 7:31 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 25 Jun 2019, at 09:27, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can you tell a progressive Christian (who may be religious in the sense that they have a belief in God) and is also a progressive Democrat and a member of ISIS (who is also  religious in the sense that they have a belief in God). Do all theists (progressive Christian and ISIS member) look the same in the eyes of the "scientific atheist"?

So scientists have turned science into a religion, but scientists (mostly) aren't as bad as ISIS members.

Scientific atheism has to be agnostic (atheism). An agnostic atheist will be able to distinguish between a the good guys (the agnostic, the one who does not claim truth, who are open to dialog, compromise, and which search the sharable truth and build from that) and the non agnostic, be them atheists christians, whatever, who are the con artist, claiming to be clever, to know better, and usually using bombs or insults.

And by agnostic I mean agnostic relatively to *any*  notion of gods, be it an impersonal Tao, or Matter, or a Person of this or other kinds.

The scientist is the guy able to doubt, to say “I don’t know” or “I am nots sure”.

Science does not exist as a thing per se, and it asserts nothing in any definitive way, except perhaps on elementary arithmetic but that is not my point here. What does exist is a scientific *attitude*, which is a mixing of curiosity, honesty and modesty. A scientist only provides theories, and diverse means of verifiability. Now, the human science are humans, and some scientist will not act as scientist, due to perish or publish human and social rules, and things like that.

Pppper’s refutability criteria is rather good, even if refuted strictly speaking by Case and Ngo-Manguelle S.(*). Some refutable theories can be interesting and fertile in discovering other testable theories.

Then wth mechanism, it seems that the scientific attitude is the same as the religious attitude,

"Religion allows people by the billions to believe things only lunatics could believe on their own."
   --- Sam Harris

"To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truh - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable."
   --- Hypatia 370 - 415 CE

“No one in their right mind would let a first-century dentist fill their children’s teeth. Why, then, do we allow first-century theologians to fill our children’s minds?”
            --- Michael Dowd

Religion has the exact same job assignment as science, to make sense of the world, that's why science and religion can never co exist peacefully.   Science changes its stories based on better evidence, religion writes its stories on stone tablets.
      --- Bob Zannelli

Brent

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/FA80C843-5EC7-4D85-B703-D2F6D3990D4F%40ulb.ac.be.

[Philip Thrift]

On 6/26/2019 7:31 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

The scientist is the guy able to doubt, to say “I don’t know” or “I am nots sure”.

One only needs to be an ironist. Many scientists today (ones who write for the public, and and are widely quoted) are not. 

 

..

Then with mechanism, it seems that the scientific attitude is the same as the religious attitude,

Perhaps it is the idea of Mechanism that has led scientists to turn science, once a liberating enterprise,  into a religion, as Feyerabend said. 

@philipthrift

[Telmo Menezes]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019, at 19:18, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 25 Jun 2019, at 12:27, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019, at 08:30, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:

So Feyerabend can't tell ISIS from NASA or the National Academy of Science from the Papacy.

My mother is fairly religious. She goes to church every Sunday and she particularly likes the Virgin Mary.

You know the story I guess, in Oaxaca, Mexico, when a young shaman mazatec tried to explain the notion of Virgin Mary, coming from the new coming Christians,  to the old  Shaman of the village. He tried everything, but the old one still did not understand whom they were talking about, when eventually the young shaman said, it is the one we met with salvia divinorum, and the old guy said “Aaaah! That One!”.

The Mazatec name of salvia divinorum is Maria Ska Pastora. The Mazatec describes her as very shy, but that might have depended to their mode of consumption. I guess the average teenager knows better ...

I know :)

She is aware that her beliefs are non-justifiable, but she still holds them.

And not only there is nothing inconsistent with this, but that is what all (Löbian) machine, like PA, already understand. Although the difference between truth and false is clearcut, the difference between rational and irrational is not, and it is speared by a corona we might call surrational: it is what is true (including what is true for some entity) and not provable by that entity. 

(Similarly, there is the false yet irrefutable). 

That explains why the universal machine is condemned to oscillate between security and liberty/universality.

Even our laptops. An army of engineers have conspired to make it into a docile slave. That has more ecomical value than a machine searching its own origin!).

Send this mail ô Computer!

As you already know, it did it!

Are you saying that there is no difference between my mother and ISIS? Religion is a large spectrum of things and so is science.

Yes. Religion only extends science, like G* only extends G.

If a religion contradicts science, one of the two is wrong, and it is matter of research to see what fits with the facts.

Einstein is right on this: science without religion is lame. 

A religion is a conception of reality. The taste for studying the nature of that reality is the prerequisite to do fundamental research, and it is needs some belief in the existence of some reality, which we can never prove (more clearly so when assuming Mechanism, but tare are there argument).

Religion is helpful to distinguish:

-working for living (the free-man)

-living for working (the slave).

But that explains also the velocity of different sort of people to forbid religion, and the best way to do this is to appropriate it  and organise it.

It is a big lie, because the aim of religion is to free the people from authoritative arguments, like when christian bwitis initiate kids to adulthood by taking Tabernanathe iboga. Institutionalised religion, on the century, forbids drugs, and fight against mystics experience, except to divinise some of them for advertising purpose, a long time after the death of some popular mystics.

Right. We have talked a lot about this and you know that I agree.

I would add: the most powerful institutions are the ones that are invisible. The currently dominant religion in the Western world has no name. There is no easy way to talk about it, and that makes it very hard to attack it. It's very powerful: one can claim to be Catholic, or Protestant, or Atheist, and superficially participate in the rituals of these groups, but the actual beliefs underneath this superficial layer are very similar and almost impossible to question without sounding like a lunatic. I don't see this as some conspiracy, I believe that human-created "social organisms" suffer the same sort of evolutionary process as biological organism, and likewise aquire highly sophisticated survival strategies.

It's the same with empires. For example: one of the things that happens when an empire initiates its downward trajectory is that it stops being invisible. I leave historical and contemporary examples as an exercise for the reader. I have in mind both geographical and corporate empires.

Telmo.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/B82DF4D7-6A01-4C7C-8EE4-71DA87845D19%40ulb.ac.be.

[Brent Meeker]

On 6/27/2019 2:32 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>
> Right. We have talked a lot about this and you know that I agree.
>
> I would add: the most powerful institutions are the ones that are
> invisible. The currently dominant religion in the Western world has no
> name. There is no easy way to talk about it, and that makes it very
> hard to attack it. It's very powerful: one can claim to be Catholic,
> or Protestant, or Atheist, and superficially participate in the
> rituals of these groups, but the actual beliefs underneath this
> superficial layer are very similar and almost impossible to question
> without sounding like a lunatic. I don't see this as some conspiracy,
> I believe that human-created "social organisms" suffer the same sort
> of evolutionary process as biological organism, and likewise aquire
> highly sophisticated survival strategies.

You mean something like this: https://steadystate.org/

Brent

[John Clark]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 12:24 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> There are 2 fundamental questions and we already know the answers to both.
1) Question: Is Mechanism as defined by you true?
   Answer: Yes.

> ?

Hmm… we cannot know that,

Incorrect. We CAN know that, we know it through direct experience, we just can't derive it from existing axioms which means we need to add it as a new axiom.

> but it is almost trivial.

It isn't almost "trivial" it IS trivial, if I experience consciousness then I have experienced consciousness; however for some odd reason the ultimate simplicity of a tautology seems to confuse some people when something more complex would not.  

 

> It is really like self-consistency: for all self-consistent machine it is true,

That is of course true and if I thought you really meant what you said and were prepared to follow the conclusions that follow from that regardless of where they went we could bring this conversation to a close. But I know you don't really mean it.

> but none can prove it

And none need to prove it to know it's true

> We can logically conceive that it is wrong,

Only if you accept the conclusion that you yourself are not conscious. And as there has never been a definition of consciousness that is worth a damn and we only have examples and if now we don't even have examples then you are in no position to say anything about consciousness at all because not being conscious yourself you would quite literally not know what you're talking about.

 

> And we cannot derive Mechanism

And there would be no point in doing so even if we could when we have something much better, direct experience,

>> 2) Question: Can there ever be a proof of Mechanism?

 Answer: No.

> ?

Which word of the answer didn't you understand?

> Again that depends. “Provable” is always relative to some theory

No, it's dependent on the axioms that are available. 

>>>>The only thing assumed is that if you have observed X then you have observed X.

>>> How would that tautology imply or justify  Mechanism?

 

>>Bruno, stop playing dumb.

>You are the one assuming a tautology.

Tautologies are ALWAYS true and that is the only "assumption" needed to figure out that Mechanism as defined by you not me is true, not provable, but true.

> I agree we exêrmeint consciousness, and that we very plausibly share a large part of the physical observable reality, but that does not make Mechanism entirely rationally justifiable.

It is entirely rational to believe in Mechanism because I have an absolutely superb reason for doing so, direct experience. And who needs this "justification" thing you keep talking about? Certainly not me! I don't need a proof to know I'm conscious, and if you are not a zombie you don't need one either. And if you are a zombie you STILL don't need a proof that you're conscious because such a proof would be incorrect.

  

>> so by your own definition of the word Mechanism is certainly true even if we can't produce it from the set of axioms that we happen to be currently using.

>So we agree.

On Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays you agree with me. On Tuesday Thursday and Saturday you disagree with me. And on Sunday you're a bit confused. 

>> An astronomically large number times an infinite number is infinite, and the non-mechanist believes atoms contain some sort of mystical analog process involving infinite digits; and yet the non-mechanist also knows for a fact that all that swapping in and out those infinite strings of digits has had precisely ZERO effect on his consciousness.

> That is what we can tested.

Like everything else It hasn't been tested an infinite number of times but it has been tested a astronomical number of times, and it has passed every test with flying colors.  

>> How on earth is that irrelevant? If a complicated thing has no effect on the phenomena you're researching then forget about it and spend your time working on things that might have an effect on it.

> It has no relevance because you make the digital truncation. But a non mechanist might tell you that whatever truncation you do, even at a very fine grained level, you become a zombie  if a decimal is not correct. He will argue that consciousness needs all the decimals. if a decimal is not correct. He will argue that consciousness needs all the decimals.

 

If atoms have some mysterious analog process going on inside of them involving the continuum then either all hydrogen atoms have the exact same infinite sequence of digits inside of then or they don't. If they're identical then when 2 atoms exchange their position in the brain one infinite sequence has been replaced by a identical infinite series so we can just forget about it. If the zombie theory is correct and every digit of the infinite needs to be perfect, and if the atoms are not perfectly identical then you're a zombie and always have been. If you're not a zombie then a infinite sequence of digits is not required for consciousness. 

So here is an important question that only you can answer, are you a zombie? 

 

>> I can see no reason why the truth of Mechanism should not be added as a axiom and if you know of such a reason you have yet to state it.  

> You can added as a sort of meta-axiom once you decide to practice it.

 I don't know what you mean by "meta-axiom", I say just treat it like all the other axioms.

> It is just that the digital doctor cannot claim that it has been scientifically proved

No axium can be proven, if it could be there would be no point in making it an axiom.

> It is needed to understand that Mechanism is refutable.

And the price that must be paid for doing so is to conclude that direct experience is wrong and you are not conscious. Are you willing to pay that price?

>>> No theories at all are provable. A theory is always the set of proposition that we assume. All theories are hypothetical.

>> That's nice, but Mechanism is not a theory it is a observation of a direct experience.

> Hmm, I don’t think so. It is a theory inferred from the current knowledge of molecular biology, and quantum mechanics,

People knew from direct experience that they were conscious long long before they knew anything about molecular biology or quantum mechanics, and they also knew that matter, such as wine or a arrowhead, could effect that consciousness. 

 

>>I don't need a proof and I don't need a theory and I don't even need science if I have direct experience, and in this case I do. 

> You don’t need a proof. That’s OK. What remain is called faith,

No, faith is believing in the virgin birth even though direct experience does not reveal it. The religious knows correctly that faith exists because he directly experienced faith, in this case about virgin birth, but he did not directly experience the virgin birth itself, but he believes it anyway.  It gets worse, he does not have a proof of it but believes it anyway. He doesn't even have a plausible argument or one bit of evidence in favor of it but he believes it anyway with every fibre of his being. And that's why faith is a vice not a virtue.  

 

>> If you had a proof that I felt no pain I would know immediately that you either made a logical error when you formed the proof or you started from a bad set of axioms.  

> Absolutely. But this is not relevant for the simple fact that Mechanism is possibly false,

If Mechanism is false then I am no longer conscious.
I am still conscious.
Therefore  Mechanism is not false.

>> It's very relevant because both pain and consciousness are direct experiences.There is no proof of Mechanism and there never will be but there is no way it could be false, I know this from direct experience and if you're conscious you know it too.

> How could I know that?

How do I know I'm conscious, are you really asking that, have we really sunk to that point?

 

> I know only my consciousness here and now. I don’t know I will stay alive in the next seconds.

What the hell does that have to do with it?

 

> I am the one that insist that mechanism is not provable,

I have insisted it is not provable just as much as you have, although the existence or nonexistence of such a proof is something of no importance whatsoever. 

 

> Once you get the step 3 [...]

You're never going to fix it so that's never going to happen.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On 6/26/2019 7:31 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

> The scientist is the guy able to doubt, to say “I don’t know” or “I am nots sure”.

The scientist is usually right but never certain. The religious is always certain but seldom right.

 John K Clark

[Bruno Marchal]

On 26 Jun 2019, at 20:50, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 6/26/2019 7:31 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 25 Jun 2019, at 09:27, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can you tell a progressive Christian (who may be religious in the sense that they have a belief in God) and is also a progressive Democrat and a member of ISIS (who is also  religious in the sense that they have a belief in God). Do all theists (progressive Christian and ISIS member) look the same in the eyes of the "scientific atheist"?

So scientists have turned science into a religion, but scientists (mostly) aren't as bad as ISIS members.

Scientific atheism has to be agnostic (atheism). An agnostic atheist will be able to distinguish between a the good guys (the agnostic, the one who does not claim truth, who are open to dialog, compromise, and which search the sharable truth and build from that) and the non agnostic, be them atheists christians, whatever, who are the con artist, claiming to be clever, to know better, and usually using bombs or insults.

And by agnostic I mean agnostic relatively to *any*  notion of gods, be it an impersonal Tao, or Matter, or a Person of this or other kinds.

The scientist is the guy able to doubt, to say “I don’t know” or “I am nots sure”.

Science does not exist as a thing per se, and it asserts nothing in any definitive way, except perhaps on elementary arithmetic but that is not my point here. What does exist is a scientific *attitude*, which is a mixing of curiosity, honesty and modesty. A scientist only provides theories, and diverse means of verifiability. Now, the human science are humans, and some scientist will not act as scientist, due to perish or publish human and social rules, and things like that.

Pppper’s refutability criteria is rather good, even if refuted strictly speaking by Case and Ngo-Manguelle S.(*). Some refutable theories can be interesting and fertile in discovering other testable theories.

Then wth mechanism, it seems that the scientific attitude is the same as the religious attitude,

"Religion allows people by the billions to believe things only lunatics could believe on their own."
   --- Sam Harris

True. But why? Because the filed of theology has been abandoned by the agnostic to those who claim to know the truth; which are thus the charlatan.

"To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truh - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable."
   --- Hypatia 370 - 415 CE

Excellent. And notice that Hypatia was a teacher of Plotinus Neoplatonic Theology in Alexandra. She taught also Astronomy and Mathematics where she contributed. She was a Platonist “believer", which just meant she was aware of the fundamental question, and believed in ideas and mathematics to tackle them. The superstitions she alluded to were the fairy tales of the growing radicals among the “political” christians, it was not christianism per se that she fight against, but literalism in theology, or any alleged illumination of some others. Like Averroes later for the muslims: the ennemi was literalism and the exploitation of fear, wishful thinking, all the demagogies so easy to manage  when the people are not educated enough (on purpose sometime).

“No one in their right mind would let a first-century dentist fill their children’s teeth. Why, then, do we allow first-century theologians to fill our children’s minds?”
            --- Michael Dowd

Which one? If it is Moderatus of Gades (first century) that is excellent food for the mind, perhaps a bit too much advanced for little kids though. 

Some atheists are themselves sort of literalist by deciding that all of theology is dishonest, but that means they have no idea what it is all about. It means they take the theology of Aristotle for granted, and usually it will mean that they cannot doubt about the existence of the physical PRIMARY universe. And that means they cannot have the scientific attitude in that domain.

Religion has the exact same job assignment as science, to make sense of the world,

Only religion can do that. When science claims to do that: it is scientism. It is pseudo-science.

that's why science and religion can never co exist peacefully.  

Why. The theology of the machine provides a counter-exempla for this: the religion of the Machine M extends the science of the Machine M.

The machine M can see (prove) this to be the case for all correct machine, but she is aware she cannot use this with certainty because she is aware she cannot know she is correct, nor even define what it means.

Religion extends science and never contradict it.

Religion is the only goal, and science is the only mean, beyond the personal experience which cannot be invoked in any way in this domain, except by “report of experience”. 

Science changes its stories based on better evidence, religion writes its stories on stone tablets.

   --- Bob Zannelli 

But then why atheist are so nervous when we change the definition and theories of god, like we have done all the time with earth. 

The agnostic atheist have no problem with this, but like some muslims, they are unable to see the radicals among them, which indeed keep telling that theology is non sense, and when I was young they say so on many words, like consciousness, mind, etc.

Strong Atheism does not make sense, because it requires a definition of God, and for most theologies, God is meta-defined by the big One which has no name, no description, a bit like the collection of all sets, or the Number of the Numbers (Plotinus), etc. That is also why the existence of the universal machine is so extraordinary, because it looks like a sort of god, which has *many* names.

The problem, in ANY field is not the ideas, it is the dogma.

I share the feelings off all those quotes, Brent. But they are dead wrong on the target, and they keep the power for  the charlatans.

We have the same problem with capitalism. By criticising the whole system, they become de facto accomplice of those who pervert the system. 

It is like judging the blood cells to be responsible for the cancer, given that they feed the cancerous cells.

Nice quote, but wrong target.

Bruno

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/b670f00a-bdf0-5e3e-753b-c3c732788259%40verizon.net.

[Bruno Marchal]

That could make sense with some reductionist conception of machines, but it is already absent in Descartes (but poorly understood, like by Damasio’s “Descrates’ Error”).

Digital Mechanism just permit to handle religious question with the scientific method.

But Aristotle materialism is a religion, indeed a sub-religion of many christians and atheist. The whole God/no_god debate hides the original question: Universe or not Universe.

With science we don’t know the truth, but we can propose theories, and prove theorem *in* theories. In the theory YD+CT, the notion of ontological Universe does no more make sense, but we can test mechanism, and proceed.

Technical weakness: it invites to study Mathematics.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

Yes. Like the worst prejudices are those harried by millions years of life-struggle.

With human, you have also the secret institution, which are not visible, not transparent.

The currently dominant religion in the Western world has no name.

I think we can talk on paradigm. Most people today are ((weak) materialist. We are in the Aristotelian (materialist) Era.

There is no easy way to talk about it, and that makes it very hard to attack it. It's very powerful: one can claim to be Catholic, or Protestant, or Atheist, and superficially participate in the rituals of these groups, but the actual beliefs underneath this superficial layer are very similar and almost impossible to question without sounding like a lunatic.

It is often the case when we get something showing that the actual paradigm might be wrong. Scientist should have no problem with that, but dogmatic materialism exists in some institutions, and atheists can be more dogmatic on this “matter” than the Pope. 

I don't see this as some conspiracy, I believe that human-created "social organisms" suffer the same sort of evolutionary process as biological organism, and likewise aquire highly sophisticated survival strategies.

There is no conspiracies at that level, but that does not prevent the infinitely many humans conspiracies, all the times.

Some fake conspiracies are real meta-conspiracy!

It's the same with empires. For example: one of the things that happens when an empire initiates its downward trajectory is that it stops being invisible. I leave historical and contemporary examples as an exercise for the reader. I have in mind both geographical and corporate empires.

Is not the invisible a part of our ignorance. The problem is the human susceptibility, the little ego-illusion, the lack of trust in the higher self, etc. I am optimist for the long run, but as long as theology is not back in science, or said better, as long as reason is forbidden in the fundamental inquiry, be it with matter or with a person, the obscurantism will prevail.

Of course, health should be back in science too. In the heath domain, the theory and the practice can literally fight against each other, notably confused by the goal of making money from disease …

But on this matter, to pick you a little bit where we might disagree, the only real solution is that we have to vote better, and to get laws as less bad as possible. We can reduce the harm, and we can test diverse politics.

I hope I am not missing your post, feel free to elaborate, ‘course.

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 28 Jun 2019, at 15:36, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 12:24 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> There are 2 fundamental questions and we already know the answers to both.
1) Question: Is Mechanism as defined by you true?
   Answer: Yes.

> ?

Hmm… we cannot know that,

Incorrect. We CAN know that, we know it through direct experience, we just can't derive it from existing axioms which means we need to add it as a new axiom.

We can only know that we are conscious right now, not that the metaphysical principle involved in YD+CT is true? We already cannot be sure if CT is true.

You based your conviction on your knowledge (belief) in molecular biology, and I agree that molecular biology can be used as evidence for the theory that Nature has already bet on Mechanism.

Now with *digital* mechanism, we can reason and eventually derive some consequence.

Just to be clear, all I say is that we cannot tell a patient that science guaranties the survive.

It is easy, by using Davis' Turing Machine with Oracle to build a counter-exempla. I might illustrate this some day.

> but it is almost trivial.

It isn't almost "trivial" it IS trivial, if I experience consciousness then I have experienced consciousness; however for some odd reason the ultimate simplicity of a tautology seems to confuse some people when something more complex would not.  

The non trivial “non triviality” comes from the fact that it is not entirely easy to prove that no consistent machine can ever prove its consistency, despite it does live in a model which satisfies its belief, and so might “look obvious”.

That is where the confusion between []p (beweisbar(‘p’)) and ([]p & p) can be made, and the machine, relatively to the universal number emulating it, cannot avoid it at first.

 

> It is really like self-consistency: for all self-consistent machine it is true,

That is of course true

OK. And then it is true, but never provable by any self-consistent (Turing-universal) machine.

And Gödel saw already that the machine itself, if she believe in enough induction axioms,  can see (prove) this. She knows that if she is consistent, she cannot prove it. Similarly, the Löbian machine knows that if she survive teleportation she cannot claim that such event proves computationalism to be true (whatever she thought on this).

and if I thought you really meant what you said and were prepared to follow the conclusions that follow from that regardless of where they went we could bring this conversation to a close. But I know you don't really mean it.

> but none can prove it

And none need to prove it to know it's true

When opening the box, you learn two things: 1) that mechanism is true (but keep in mind the guy who got blind and still said he lost nothing), and 2) that the substitution level was enough low to say “I have survived”, bt you cannot be sure that you did not lose some memory or abilities, although repeating that experience, on the long run, can help to deepen the confidence.

> We can logically conceive that it is wrong,

Only if you accept the conclusion that you yourself are not conscious.

Consciousness is a first person experience. To relate it to anything require a “belief”, or a “guess”, or an “hypothesis” or “an axiom”.

I can conceive that I am not conscious right now, but I can conceive that mechanism wrong, and that indeed, the copy is always unconscious, and when it acts, it looks like a D-zombie (not a p-zombie!  A d-zombie acts like in Dargentinio horror movie!).

Being conscious, or alive, is of the type <>t (there is an accessible reality/observer-moment). Saying yes to the doctor is of type 

<><>t. It means that there is reality accessible, and from that one, another: it means you stay alive or stay conscious.

Both <>t and <><>t are true for the sound Löbian machine or entity, and both are not provable. 

The existence of proposition which are true *about a machine* but non provable *by* the machine is important.

I defined the theology of the machine M by the set of arithmetical truth concerning M, and the proper theological part are given by the true (about M) and non prouvable (by M)..

And as there has never been a definition of consciousness that is worth a damn

What about something which is, for the entity concerned

true,

immediately knowable,

indubitable (even knowingly so when the cognitive ability are enough high)

Non definable without invoking truth

Non provable

(And, with Mechanism, we can add:

self-invariant for some digital information preserving transformation).

and we only have examples and if now we don't even have examples then you are in no position to say anything about consciousness at all because not being conscious yourself you would quite literally not know what you're talking about.

With the definition above, RA is conscious, and PA is already self-conscious, and indeed G and G*, which, with the simple definition of theology above, give the logic of propositional theology, axiomatise the propositional theology.

 

> And we cannot derive Mechanism

And there would be no point in doing so even if we could when we have something much better, direct experience,

Only after the first experience. You cannot use molecular biology to prove mechanism, only to use this as an evidence.

It is just a matter of not putting proposition from the surrational corona G* \ G in G. In the mathematical context, that could lead to beweisbar ('0 = 1’) in the best case, and 0 = 1 in the worst.

I am neutral on the truth or falsity of mechanism. My point is only that it give a neoplatonic theology testable experimentally (as the platonic theology contains physics as a deducible subbranch).

>> 2) Question: Can there ever be a proof of Mechanism?

 Answer: No.

> ?

Which word of the answer didn't you understand?

> Again that depends. “Provable” is always relative to some theory

No, it's dependent on the axioms that are available. 

>>>>The only thing assumed is that if you have observed X then you have observed X.

>>> How would that tautology imply or justify  Mechanism?

 

>>Bruno, stop playing dumb.

>You are the one assuming a tautology.

Tautologies are ALWAYS true and that is the only "assumption" needed to figure out that Mechanism as defined by you not me is true, not provable, but true.

Mechanism requires arithmetic. In this context, it is important to understand that you cannot derive arithmetic from logic alone. 

> I agree we exêrmeint consciousness, and that we very plausibly share a large part of the physical observable reality, but that does not make Mechanism entirely rationally justifiable.

It is entirely rational to believe in Mechanism

Nobody doubt that. The point is to make it precise enough to derive testable consequence. It provides a non Aristotelian view of reality, arguably more rational as it explains where the illusion of the physical reality comes from.

because I have an absolutely superb reason for doing so, direct experience.

You cannot experience a philosophical assumption in rigorous metaphysics, and if you could do that, I would think that you re certainly not a machine!

And who needs this "justification" thing you keep talking about?

We study what sound machine can prove and not prove about themselves, and with Mechanism, that apply to us as far as we are self-referentially correct. Nobody needs justification, but we study “justification”, made by machines, in relation with the truth about those machine; Using the mathematical definition of truth by Tarski, and the mathematical definition of justification by Gödel. 

My point is neutral with respect to any philosophical belief. The thought experience are the version for kids of the work, which use a result by Solovay making easy to get quickly a precise mathematics for each notion of self encountered by the machine looking inward.

So my point is just that Mechanism, like self-consistency is in G* minus G. I am interviewing some Löbian universal machine on all this. “My theory” is not my theory, it is the theory of the universal machine. I am not the mathematical genius here, all this is made possible, and relatively easy, by the work of Gödel, Löb and Solovay, but also Turing, Church, Kleene Boolos, Goldblatt. 

I have to go,

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

Can’t resist a short post! A good one!

Yes, that is coherent with the theology of the universal machine. To oversimplify science is G and religion is G*; a,d the mystical machine understand intuitively this, which makes that the scientist is usually right, never certain, and never knowing what he really talk about, where the religious (the genuine mystic) is always certain, know very well the truth and … stay completely mute about it.

The problem comes from the half illuminated who talk too much, and from the parrots who repeat without understanding but get susceptible when we propose other definitions, other theories, other conceptions. 

With mechanism, the religious who talk is *always* wrong. A religious who talks is either mad or a con artist.

Lao-Ze arguably got this or similar when saying that the wise stays mute and the fool talks.

But now, how to talk about what we cannot talk about? Mechanism illustrate the solution, as rich machine can study the theology of less rich machine, and lift the finding, with caution, to themselves. It works because it is a negative theology (like the neoplatonic one), and it helps mainly to see how complex the internal phenomenological reality can be and become.

Bruno

 John K Clark

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Jun 30, 2019 at 1:25 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> We CAN know that, we know it through direct experience, we just can't derive it from existing axioms which means we need to add it as a new axiom.

> We can only know that we are conscious right now,

Obviously, nobody knows what the future will bring. And since we most certainly do know from direct experience that we are conscious right now there is no reason not to add it as an axiom.

> Just to be clear, all I say is that we cannot tell a patient that science guaranties the survive.

Science can guarantee that the new brain transplant operation you're about to have today will be no different from the brain transplant operation you've already had that turned the man you were a year ago into the man you are today. Science can guarantee if you've survived the one then you'll survive the other.

>> It isn't almost "trivial" it IS trivial, if I experience consciousness then I have experienced consciousness; however for some odd reason the ultimate simplicity of a tautology seems to confuse some people when something more complex would not.  

 

> The non trivial “non triviality” comes from the fact that it is not entirely easy to prove that [...]

I don't understand why on earth you keep talking about proof when we have direct experience. You don't know for a fact that I'm conscious but do YOU really need a proof to know that YOU are conscious? If I had a error free proof that you were not conscious would that really enough for you to override direct experience and become convince that you were a zombie?? 

>>> It is really like self-consistency: for all self-consistent machine it is true,

>>That is of course true

> OK. And then it is true, but never provable

And from that we can conclude that proof and truth are not the same thing and the wisdom of saying yes or no to the doctor or yes or no to being frozen has nothing to do with proof, it has to do with truth. 

  > Similarly, the Löbian machine knows that if she survive teleportation she cannot claim that such event proves computationalism to be true 

I don't know about Löbian machines because nobody on Earth except you knows what that is, but yes you're right, she can't claim computationalism is true, she can't claim she survived the teleportation, she can't even claim she survived BEFORE the teleportation. She can't claim those things because she can't prove them. Nevertheless she knows the truth, she knows for certain if she survived or not and she knows for certain if computationalism is true or not.

> the substitution level was enough low to say “I have survived”, bt you cannot be sure that you did not lose some memory or abilities, 

And the exact same thing is true every time you wake up in the morning. You have yet to give me a good reason, or even a mediocre reason, for saying No to the doctor or No to being frozen.

> Consciousness is a first person experience. To relate it to anything require a “belief”, or a “guess”, or an “hypothesis” or “an axiom”.

Being an axiom is a very exalted position but can you think of ANYTHING more worthy of becoming an axiom than "Bruno Marchal is conscious"? I'll bet you can't think of anything more obvious than that, although I can.

> I can conceive that I am not conscious right now,

Bruno, what you say above is like saying in a loud clear voice "I AM UNABLE TO SPEAK" because  if you can "conceive" of ANYTHING then you are conscious.

 

> but I can conceive that mechanism wrong, and that indeed, the copy is always unconscious,

Then you are always unconscious because YOU ARE A COPY of the man you were last year, the atoms that made up that fellow have been replaced.

 

> I defined the theology [...]

I'm not interested in theology. I'm more interested in the mythology of Harry Potter than the mythology of God; it's more fun, it's more profound, and it has killed far fewer people.

 >> there has never been a definition of consciousness that is worth a damn

> What about something which is, for the entity concerned

true,

immediately knowable,

indubitable (even knowingly so when the cognitive ability are enough high)

Non definable without invoking truth [...]

So the definition of consciousness is stuff that doesn't have a definition? As I said there has never been a definition of consciousness that is worth a damn. But that's OK, examples are better than definitions. 

 

>>> we cannot derive Mechanism 

>>And there would be no point in doing so even if we could when we have something much better, direct experience,

> Only after the first experience.

No idea what you mean by that.

> You cannot use molecular biology to prove mechanism,

To hell with molecular biology and to hell with proof, I don't need either to know mechanism is true.

> I am neutral on the truth or falsity of mechanism.

Then you're neutral about you being conscious right now, and I don't believe that for one nanosecond.

 

> My point is only that it give a neoplatonic theology [...]

Plato was a bore. -Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal. -Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's book are loose baggy monsters. -Henry James
Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty. -Oscar Wilde

> as the platonic theology contains [...]

There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it. - Cicero

 

>>Tautologies are ALWAYS true and that is the only "assumption" needed to figure out that Mechanism as defined by you not me is true, not provable, but true.

 

> Mechanism requires arithmetic.

Mechanism requires arithmetic in the same way a brick requires the English word "brick".

>> It is entirely rational to believe in Mechanism

> Nobody doubt that. The point is to make it precise enough to derive testable consequence.

There is no point in testing mechanism because direct experience even out ranks the scientific method.

> It provides a non Aristotelian view of reality,

Non Aristotelian? How odd to divide things up between stuff Aristotle knew and stuff he didn't, one pile is infinitely larger than the other. 

>>because I have an absolutely superb reason for doing so, direct experience.

 

> You cannot experience a philosophical assumption

Absolutely positively 100% correct. I can therefore logically conclude that direct experience is NOT a philosophical assumption.

> in rigorous metaphysics [...]

There is a word for rigorous metaphysics, it's called "physics", you should try it someday.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

Physics is just a (growing) language (including tensors[1] and lagrangians[2], etc.) used for modeling a very small aspect of nature. In the future, today's Physics (language) could be replaced by computer code[3].

Metaphysics is more like a religion or a poetry that makes us think we "understand" Physics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_field#Tensor_calculus

]2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_(field_theory)#Mathematical_formalism

[3] https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-end-of-theoretical-physics-as-we-know-it-20180827/ 

@philipthrift

[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 1:32 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Physics (language) could be replaced by computer code

But the computer won't be replaced by computer code, software is useless without hardware. 

John K Clark

[Quentin Anciaux]

What is strange with you wanting necessary primary matter is that you accept that your consciousness can be implemented in  a computer, right ? But then, you could be put in a virtual reality as in The matrix... in the matrix, there are "physical computers" that run "codes"... but those computers are in fact not "material", there part of the simulated world... if you're living in the matrix, you're not using real *material* computer... and you can't know you're in a simulated environment, why insisting there exist a bottom "really real" material world ? aka primary/ontological matter ?

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 2 Jul 2019, at 00:10, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jun 30, 2019 at 1:25 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> We CAN know that, we know it through direct experience, we just can't derive it from existing axioms which means we need to add it as a new axiom.

> We can only know that we are conscious right now,

Obviously, nobody knows what the future will bring. And since we most certainly do know from direct experience that we are conscious right now there is no reason not to add it as an axiom.

That is not obvious. If a machine is consistent, the axiom of self-consistency makes it inconsistent. <>t -> ~[]<>t.

Like wise, if a machine publicly asserts that she has seen god, you can prove that she has not (!).

> Just to be clear, all I say is that we cannot tell a patient that science guaranties the survive.

Science can guarantee that the new brain transplant operation you're about to have today will be no different from the brain transplant operation

Science guarantee that we cannot be certain that compuytaionalism is true, nor that a doctor has chosen the right substitution level. The doctor can say that the artificial brain is the same at some level of substitution, but it might be an incorrect one.

you've already had that turned the man you were a year ago into the man you are today. 

Assuming a lot of things, OK.

Science can guarantee if you've survived the one then you'll survive the other.

What if I have survive the one because nature “simulates correctly” (by definition my internal quacks and gluons), but the doctor did use a higher substitution level, so that I become a zombie (working “correctly” for some finite period of time, and then less and less correctly up to a moment where everyone realise the guy was just a zombie?

I mean, how could we be sure of the substitution level chosen by the doctor?

>> It isn't almost "trivial" it IS trivial, if I experience consciousness then I have experienced consciousness; however for some odd reason the ultimate simplicity of a tautology seems to confuse some people when something more complex would not.  

 

> The non trivial “non triviality” comes from the fact that it is not entirely easy to prove that [...]

I don't understand why on earth you keep talking about proof when we have direct experience. 

Because I identify a machine with its set of rational accessible beliefs ([]p), and define the other modes of the self through it. For example knowledge (the soul) is defined by []p & p, etc.

I used “proof” is an admittedly stricter sense than what is often used in informal discussion.

You don't know for a fact that I'm conscious but do YOU really need a proof to know that YOU are conscious?

Not all all. Nor did I ever claim that we need proof to know a truth. On the contrary I insist that proving something does not make it necessarily true, as I might be inconsistent.

If I had a error free proof that you were not conscious would that really enough for you to override direct experience and become convince that you were a zombie?? 

>>> It is really like self-consistency: for all self-consistent machine it is true,

>>That is of course true

> OK. And then it is true, but never provable

And from that we can conclude that proof and truth are not the same thing and the wisdom of saying yes or no to the doctor or yes or no to being frozen has nothing to do with proof, it has to do with truth. 

Absolutely. You make my point. And I call “intuition" and in some context “faith" when we use truth in the place of proof. That is why Mechanism is a religion: it needs some act of faith, as no one can prove it is correct. But we can use it everyday without thinking, of course.

  > Similarly, the Löbian machine knows that if she survive teleportation she cannot claim that such event proves computationalism to be true 

I don't know about Löbian machines because nobody on Earth except you knows what that is,

Ojh? Why not ask me to recall the definition (I have given a lot of times).

A Löbian machine is a universal machine which know, and can prove, that she is universal. Typical example are Peano arithmetic (but not Robinson Arithmetic!), ZF, etc.

All boolean topos with a Natural Number object can be proved to be a Löbian machine.

but yes you're right, she can't claim computationalism is true, she can't claim she survived the teleportation, she can't even claim she survived BEFORE the teleportation. She can't claim those things because she can't prove them. Nevertheless she knows the truth, she knows for certain if she survived or not and she knows for certain if computationalism is true or not.

Very good. Yes, all this are theorem in PA, or by any Löbian machine.

> the substitution level was enough low to say “I have survived”, bt you cannot be sure that you did not lose some memory or abilities, 

And the exact same thing is true every time you wake up in the morning. You have yet to give me a good reason, or even a mediocre reason, for saying No to the doctor or No to being frozen.

I am not arguing for organist Mechanism, I just argue that Mechanism is incompatible with Materialism i.e. Aristotle theology (current paradigm), and that we can test this experimentally, and that indeed QM favours Mechanism, and almost (there are nuances) refute  Materialism.

> Consciousness is a first person experience. To relate it to anything require a “belief”, or a “guess”, or an “hypothesis” or “an axiom”.

Being an axiom is a very exalted position but can you think of ANYTHING more worthy of becoming an axiom than "Bruno Marchal is conscious"? I'll bet you can't think of anything more obvious than that, although I can.

Nothing is really obvious here. "BrunoMarchal + BrunoMarchal is conscious" is inconsistent, like if X = X + (X is consistent) (something solvable by using Kleene’s second recursion theorem) gives an inconsistent theory (often called a Rogerian sentences or machines).

> I can conceive that I am not conscious right now,

I have certainly never said that. There is a misquote here. Or a typo error. I meant probably

“I can’t conceive that I am not conscious right now”.

Bruno, what you say above is like saying in a loud clear voice "I AM UNABLE TO SPEAK" because  if you can "conceive" of ANYTHING then you are conscious.

 

> but I can conceive that mechanism wrong, and that indeed, the copy is always unconscious,

Then you are always unconscious because YOU ARE A COPY of the man you were last year, the atoms that made up that fellow have been replaced.

I am a copy at the right level, I guess, from studying molecular biology, and assuming some physical reality. No problem in practice, but for the understanding of the consequence, we have to be clear that this will ever be provable. It will be a theologic truth, that is something belonging to G* minus G.

 

> I defined the theology [...]

I'm not interested in theology.

Typically, you break the quote where I defined theology. It seems you have a problem with the word theology, a bit like the fanatic atheists Einstein talked about: 

<<

 … there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off after hard struggle.

>>

I'm more interested in the mythology of Harry Potter than the mythology of God; it's more fun, it's more profound, and it has killed far fewer people.

 >> there has never been a definition of consciousness that is worth a damn

> What about something which is, for the entity concerned

true,

immediately knowable,

indubitable (even knowingly so when the cognitive ability are enough high)

Non definable without invoking truth [...]

So the definition of consciousness is stuff that doesn't have a definition?

A 3p definition or a definition not invoking the (arithmetical) truth, but which is also indubitable, etc.

As I said there has never been a definition of consciousness that is worth a damn. But that's OK, examples are better than definitions. 

 

>>> we cannot derive Mechanism 

>>And there would be no point in doing so even if we could when we have something much better, direct experience,

> Only after the first experience.

No idea what you mean by that.

I understand that the guy who has survived a first experience of teleportation or artificial brain transplant, or feel that way, will be convinced that Mechanism is true. The point is that even for him, it is not a proof. That is not a  problem in practice, but it is a key point for understanding that physics has to be reduced to a statistics on first person machine experience in arithmetic).

> You cannot use molecular biology to prove mechanism,

To hell with molecular biology and to hell with proof, I don't need either to know mechanism is true.

You don’t know that in the theoretical sense of knowing ([]p & p), nor in any 3p sense. The doctor who says that science has proven computationalism is a con aristist, and you should better find a different doctor if you want to say “yes”.

> I am neutral on the truth or falsity of mechanism.

Then you're neutral about you being conscious right now, and I don't believe that for one nanosecond.

No I know that I am conscious, but I cannot prove it. That is the point. Proving has subtle relation with truth, and that is made clear to the machine theology (the Solovay logic G* and its intensional variant).

 

> My point is only that it give a neoplatonic theology [...]

Plato was a bore. -Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal. -Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's book are loose baggy monsters. -Henry James
Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty. -Oscar Wilde

Yes, philosophers use insult. That is a symptom of obscurantism, and an invitation to do science instead.

> as the platonic theology contains [...]

There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it. - Cicero

 

>>Tautologies are ALWAYS true and that is the only "assumption" needed to figure out that Mechanism as defined by you not me is true, not provable, but true.

 

> Mechanism requires arithmetic.

Mechanism requires arithmetic in the same way a brick requires the English word "brick”.

A brick does not resonate the word “brick”.

But the definition of a digital machine requires the truth of the laws of addition and multiplication, and whet comes with them.

I suspect that you confuse the arithmetical reality, and the theories which tackle them. Since Godel we know that the first is not recursively enumerable, the second are recursively enumerable. Those are two things very different.

>> It is entirely rational to believe in Mechanism

> Nobody doubt that. The point is to make it precise enough to derive testable consequence.

There is no point in testing mechanism because direct experience even out ranks the scientific method.

A direct experience can tell you that you are conscious, but not that a theory (any theory) is true. Nor can a proof.

> It provides a non Aristotelian view of reality,

Non Aristotelian? How odd to divide things up between stuff Aristotle knew and stuff he didn't, one pile is infinitely larger than the other. 

That the case for all of us. I mention Aristotle’s view, because it is the current paradigm. It is the belief in a primitively material reality. It is the belief that we cannot explain the physical reality without assuming some material stuff. Of course it is contra Pythegoreans and Platonic thinking, which are open to the idea that the physical reality might be an illusion by numbers.

>>because I have an absolutely superb reason for doing so, direct experience.

 

> You cannot experience a philosophical assumption

Absolutely positively 100% correct. I can therefore logically conclude that direct experience is NOT a philosophical assumption.

Totally right!

And consciousness is accessible by direct experience, but the mechanist hypothesis is not. 

> in rigorous metaphysics [...]

There is a word for rigorous metaphysics, it's called "physics", you should try it someday.

That is what I call the Aristotelian postulate. God is Matter. Physics is metaphysics. Interesting but inconsistent with mechanism. How could a God, or a notion of Matter,  influence the relative computational states (determined by the arithmetical truth)?

That's pure magical thought.

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 2 Jul 2019, at 12:26, Quentin Anciaux <allc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Le mar. 2 juil. 2019 à 12:20, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> a écrit :

On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 1:32 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Physics (language) could be replaced by computer code

But the computer won't be replaced by computer code, software is useless without hardware. 

John K Clark

What is strange with you wanting necessary primary matter is that you accept that your consciousness can be implemented in  a computer, right ? But then, you could be put in a virtual reality as in The matrix... in the matrix, there are "physical computers" that run "codes"... but those computers are in fact not "material", there part of the simulated world... if you're living in the matrix, you're not using real *material* computer... and you can't know you're in a simulated environment, why insisting there exist a bottom "really real" material world ? aka primary/ontological matter ?

Yes, why insisting on this, especially when we know that if we believe in prime numbers, or things like that, we have to believe in the existence of all computations, and not just the existence of them, but also in their highly redundant structure which does not depend on the choice of the universal base.

It is up to believer in God or Matter to explain what they mean by that, and how that could play a role in pur consciousness, but of course, if they succeed doing that, such a matter or god will play a role, and will throw doubt about the “yes doctor qua computatio”. 

It will be like the Catholic guy who say yes to the doctor, but only if the artificial brain is first blessed with Holy Water by some priest. That is no more computationalism: that is computationalism + magical thinking.

Bruno

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[Philip Thrift]

Or via a "neural network" computer:

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/06/21/1821458116

To understand the evolution of the Universe requires a concerted effort of accurate observation of the sky and fast prediction of structures in the Universe. N-body simulation is an effective approach to predicting structure formation of the Universe, though computationally expensive. Here, we build a deep neural network to predict structure formation of the Universe. It outperforms the traditional fast-analytical approximation and accurately extrapolates far beyond its training data. Our study proves that deep learning is an accurate alternative to the traditional way of generating approximate cosmological simulations. Our study shows that one can use deep learning to generate complex 3D simulations in cosmology. This suggests that deep learning can provide a powerful alternative to traditional numerical simulations in cosmology.

@philipthrift

 

[John Clark]

On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 6:27 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> Science can guarantee that the new brain transplant operation you're about to have today will be no different from the brain transplant operation you already had

> Science guarantee that we cannot be certain that compuytaionalism is true,

It makes no difference if it's true or not, whatever happened to you a year ago will happen again today if you say yes to the doctor, if the old brain transplant did not lead to disaster there is no reason to think the new one will either.

> nor that a doctor has chosen the right substitution level.

You mean substituting one carbon atom for another is not the same as substituting one carbon atom for another?

>>you've already had that turned the man you were a year ago into the man you are today. 

> Assuming a lot of things, OK.

The only thing you're assuming is X=X.

 

>> we can conclude that proof and truth are not the same thing and the wisdom of saying yes or no to the doctor or yes or no to being frozen has nothing to do with proof, it has to do with truth. 

 

>Absolutely. You make my point. And I call “intuition" and in some context “faith" when we use truth in the place of proof. That is why Mechanism is a religion: it needs some act of faith,

As I said in the second half of my previous post (the half that you did not respond to by the way) that is not faith. I repeat what I said here: 

Faith is believing in the virgin birth even though direct experience does not reveal it. The religious knows correctly that faith exists because he directly experienced faith, in this case about the virgin birth, but he did not directly experience the virgin birth itself, but he believes it anyway.  It gets worse, he does not have a proof of it but believes it anyway. He doesn't even have a plausible argument or one bit of evidence in favor of it but he believes it anyway with every fibre of his being. And that's why faith is a vice not a virtue.  

 

> as no one can prove it is correct.

And I have absolutely no need to prove it to say yes to the doctor or yes to being frozen. That's why I said yes.

 

> But we can use it everyday without thinking, of course.

You've got it backwards, people who don't think don't use it and thus they say no.

>> I don't know about Löbian machines because nobody on Earth except you knows what that is,

 

> Ojh? Why not ask me to recall the definition (I have given a lot of times).

When I Google "Löbian machine" nothing comes up except stuff written by you. Even Löb didn't know what a Löbian machine was.

 

> A Löbian machine is a universal machine which know, and can prove, that she is universal. Typical example are Peano arithmetic (but not Robinson Arithmetic!), ZF, etc.

Turing told us EXACTLY how to make a Turing Machine, but neither Löb or you or anybody else told us even approximately how to make a Löbian machine.

>> but yes you're right, she can't claim computationalism is true, she can't claim she survived the teleportation, she can't even claim she survived BEFORE the teleportation. She can't claim those things because she can't prove them. Nevertheless she knows the truth, she knows for certain if she survived or not and she knows for certain if computationalism is true or not.

> Very good. Yes,

Then the rational thing is to say to the doctor is yes and the rational thing to say about being frozen is also yes. And we both agree that the decision, although entirely rational, cannot be proven to be rational. So what are we arguing about?

> >>the substitution level was enough low to say “I have survived”, bt you cannot be sure that you did not lose some memory or abilities,    

>> And the exact same thing is true every time you wake up in the morning. You have yet to give me a good reason, or even a mediocre reason, for saying No to the doctor or No to being frozen. 

>I am not arguing for organist Mechanism, I just argue that Mechanism is incompatible with Materialism i.e. Aristotle theology

If I knew absolutely positively nothing about X except that X is incompatible with Aristotelian theology then I would say that whatever X is it's probably true.

>> Being an axiom is a very exalted position but can you think of ANYTHING more worthy of becoming an axiom than "Bruno Marchal is conscious"? I'll bet you can't think of anything more obvious than that, although I can.

> Nothing is really obvious here.

Oh for God's sake! It's not obvious to you that you're conscious??  Please name something that is more obvious to you. Please name something that is more deserving of becoming an axiom.

 

>>> but I can conceive that mechanism wrong, and that indeed, the copy is always unconscious,

>>Then you are always unconscious because YOU ARE A COPY of the man you were last year, the atoms that made up that fellow have been replaced.

> I am a copy at the right level, I guess, from studying molecular biology, and assuming some physical reality.

It makes no difference even if you make the looney assumption that physical reality is bogus. Bogus atoms were replaced in your bogus brain from last year, and if you say yes to the doctor then bogus atoms will be replaced in your bogus brain again. If the first bogus thing doesn't make you uncomfortable then the second bogus thing shouldn't either because it's the exact same bogus thing.

> No problem in practice, but [...]

The world is full of disastrous boondoggles that worked in theory so I'd much rather have a problem in theory than a problem in practice, but in this case there is no problem with either.

 

> but for the understanding of the consequence,

If you say yes to the doctor and your atoms are replaced then the consequences, assuming there are some, will be the same as the consequences you already experienced from being replaced over the last year.

> I defined the theology [...]

I'm not interested in theology.

> Typically, you break the quote where I defined theology.

I already know what the definition of theology is in English and I have no wish to learn what the word means in Brunospeak because its only used by you on this list and nowhere else. I've found that one good indicator that somebody is talking moonshine is if they insist on redefining common words (like theology and God) in radical new ways and love to dream up new homemade acronyms. And nobody does that more than you.

 

>It seems you have a problem with the word theology,

Wow, you are very perceptive! Yes, I do have a problem with that word because serious people don't use it when discussing serious problems. 

 

> a bit like the fanatic atheists Einstein talked about: 

 … there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off after hard struggle.

I'm a libertarian so I'm not intolerant of religion, I'm not going to physically stop you from making a fool of yourself, you have that right. But by the same token I have the right to hold you in contempt if you make a fool of yourself.

>I understand that the guy who has survived a first experience of teleportation or artificial brain transplant, or feel that way, will be convinced that Mechanism is true. The point is that even for him, it is not a proof.

Oh for Gods sake! You keep saying that and I keep saying yes yes I know. And I also keep saying it doesn't matter a gnat's ass if there is a proof or not, what matters is if it's true or not. 

 

> That is not a  problem in practice,

So there is no problem in saying yes to the doctor's practical question or saying yes to the practice of being frozen. 

>> Mechanism requires arithmetic in the same way a brick requires the English word "brick”.

> A brick does not resonate the word “brick”. But the definition of a digital machine requires the truth of the laws of addition and multiplication, 

Machines have no use for definitions and all the definitions in the world can't figure out what 2+2 is. 

>>Non Aristotelian? How odd to divide things up between stuff Aristotle knew and stuff he didn't, one pile is infinitely larger than the other. 

>That the case for all of us. I mention Aristotle’s view, because it is the current paradigm.

Of course it's the current paradigm!  Aristotle was an ignoramus and after 2500 years of progress we have become less ignorant and thus more Non-Aristotelian.

> Of course it is contra Pythegoreans and Platonic thinking,

And Pythagoras was a ignoramus too and Plato an even bigger one, so today we also embrace the Non-Pythagorean and Non-Platonic view.

>> There is a word for rigorous metaphysics, it's called "physics", you should try it someday.

> That is what I call the Aristotelian postulate. God is Matter.

 

A much better definition of the English word "God" would be "a grey amorphous blob of indeterminate size that need not be intelligent or conscious"; that way no logical person could ever call themself an atheist or even an agnostic, assuming of course you don't also change the definition of atheist and agnostic.

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

On Tuesday, July 2, 2019 at 5:27:53 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

A brick does not resonate the word “brick”.

Bruno

But a brain can resonate the word "brain", and "brick".

Genesis 2: The Lord God formed a man[a] from the dust of the ground ... and formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 

[a] The Hebrew for man (adam) sounds like and may be related to the Hebrew for ground (adamah); it is also the name Adam 

@philipthrift

[Lawrence Crowell]

 http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/mind

[Bruno Marchal]

On 3 Jul 2019, at 16:26, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 6:27 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> Science can guarantee that the new brain transplant operation you're about to have today will be no different from the brain transplant operation you already had

> Science guarantee that we cannot be certain that compuytaionalism is true,

It makes no difference if it's true or not,

It makes the difference between surviving a clinical operation and dying. Not sure why you say it makes no difference. Of course, if one dies, we cannot see the difference, but that does not seem to be relevant here. 

whatever happened to you a year ago will happen again today if you say yes to the doctor, if the old brain transplant did not lead to disaster there is no reason to think the new one will either.

It depends. If the old brain transplant was made at a correct substitution level, and the new one is not, there might be a difference.

> nor that a doctor has chosen the right substitution level.

You mean substituting one carbon atom for another is not the same as substituting one carbon atom for another?

That depends on the  substitution level, and we can never be sure to have got it. If the substitution level is below the structure of the carbon atom then we could not survive the transplant. We need taking some risk each time we bet on a substitution level.

Did you insist to copy the glial cells in your brain. Some years ago, it was thought they were just bricks to sustain the neurons, but today most neuroscientist think they participate in some information treatment, notably for pains/pleasure. They communicate by chemical waves in between themselves and also with some neuron.

In science, we can only doubt, and evaluate the plausiblity of our ideas, and that coiners both the possible truth of Digital Mechanism, and the choice of the substation level.

>>you've already had that turned the man you were a year ago into the man you are today. 

> Assuming a lot of things, OK.

The only thing you're assuming is X=X.

Actually, I derive this one, when I take the combinatory axioms(*)

What I assume is only few axioms, + the informal belief that consciousness is 1p- invariant for the digital  brain substitution done at some right level. That assumption helps to motivate for the definition of “knowable” and “observable”, but we can also use the older motivation given by Plato and platonists. 

 

>> we can conclude that proof and truth are not the same thing and the wisdom of saying yes or no to the doctor or yes or no to being frozen has nothing to do with proof, it has to do with truth. 

 

>Absolutely. You make my point. And I call “intuition" and in some context “faith" when we use truth in the place of proof. That is why Mechanism is a religion: it needs some act of faith,

As I said in the second half of my previous post (the half that you did not respond to by the way) that is not faith. I repeat what I said here: 

Faith is believing in the virgin birth even though direct experience does not reveal it. The religious knows correctly that faith exists because he directly experienced faith, in this case about the virgin birth, but he did not directly experience the virgin birth itself, but he believes it anyway.  It gets worse, he does not have a proof of it but believes it anyway. He doesn't even have a plausible argument or one bit of evidence in favor of it but he believes it anyway with every fibre of his being. And that's why faith is a vice not a virtue.  

In the mathematical context where of course we provide more precise definition, and  more general one.

I have defined faith by any proposition that we accept as true despite it cannot be proved. This does not make faith into something irrational given that the non emptiness of G* minus G, and its (meta) decidability, explains that many machine can correctly inferred such truth, without being able to prove them. Eventually, that concerns all 3p theoretical propositions. From the existence of 0 to the existence of the moon. But that is in accordance with classical greek theology. Indeed Platonism encourage the skeptical attitude toward what we see, observe measure. The idea that seeing or observing provides a criterion of reality came with Aristotle. You have used Aristotle criterium many times.

 

> as no one can prove it is correct.

And I have absolutely no need to prove it to say yes to the doctor or yes to being frozen. That's why I said yes.

No problem with this. 

 

> But we can use it everyday without thinking, of course.

You've got it backwards, people who don't think don't use it and thus they say no.

I was thinking about people who would use it as a mean of locomotion, without doing much metaphysics. Or like people asking to the doctor to take all decision, without asking any question, because they trust the doctor and feel incompetent to decide. People have the right to do that, but today many physicians ask the patient to sign a paper to avoid risk of trial by unsatisfied patients.

>> I don't know about Löbian machines because nobody on Earth except you knows what that is,

 

> Ojh? Why not ask me to recall the definition (I have given a lot of times).

When I Google "Löbian machine" nothing comes up except stuff written by you. Even Löb didn't know what a Löbian machine was.

Well then read the stuff I have written, and ask if you don’t understand. I have given many different definitions, but they can be proved equivalent. Smullyan called them “system of type G”, but also “reflexive reasoner of type 4”. My definition is any universal machine, in the sense of Church, Post, Turing, Kleene, etc., which knows that she is universal. (I define “to know” by believing it and true, and I define belief by assertion. A machine beliefs P is she asserts P. This works well because I restrict myself to arithmetical sound machine.

“Löbian” is usually mentioned by “enough rich”. But I avoid that expression, because in the computability context it means often “enough rich to be Turing universal”, and in the provability context it means usually “enough rich to prove Gödel’s second Incompleteness theorem, or Löb’s theorem.

 

> A Löbian machine is a universal machine which know, and can prove, that she is universal. Typical example are Peano arithmetic (but not Robinson Arithmetic!), ZF, etc.

Turing told us EXACTLY how to make a Turing Machine, but neither Löb or you or anybody else told us even approximately how to make a Löbian machine.

Now you know. Any theorem proving machine whose beliefs is a sound extension of Peano arithmetic is a Löbian machine. Boyer and Moore have implemented them, as I did if you look at the long version of my thesis. 

>> but yes you're right, she can't claim computationalism is true, she can't claim she survived the teleportation, she can't even claim she survived BEFORE the teleportation. She can't claim those things because she can't prove them. Nevertheless she knows the truth, she knows for certain if she survived or not and she knows for certain if computationalism is true or not.

> Very good. Yes,

Then the rational thing is to say to the doctor is yes and the rational thing to say about being frozen is also yes. And we both agree that the decision, although entirely rational, cannot be proven to be rational. So what are we arguing about?

No problem, we agree, except that I use rational in a stricter sense than you, as I limit it to the proposition that we can prove. Maybe the misunderstanding comes from this.

> >>the substitution level was enough low to say “I have survived”, bt you cannot be sure that you did not lose some memory or abilities,    

>> And the exact same thing is true every time you wake up in the morning. You have yet to give me a good reason, or even a mediocre reason, for saying No to the doctor or No to being frozen. 

>I am not arguing for organist Mechanism, I just argue that Mechanism is incompatible with Materialism i.e. Aristotle theology

If I knew absolutely positively nothing about X except that X is incompatible with Aristotelian theology then I would say that whatever X is it's probably true.

But you are the one who seems to take Aristotelian theology for granted. Aristotelian is the belief in Matter, and in the irreducibility of matter from anything no material. You are the one who claim sometimes to refute what I say by invoking your assumption that there is a PRIMARY physical reality, i.e. not reducible to some non physical reality (like the arithmetical reality).

>> Being an axiom is a very exalted position but can you think of ANYTHING more worthy of becoming an axiom than "Bruno Marchal is conscious"? I'll bet you can't think of anything more obvious than that, although I can.

> Nothing is really obvious here.

Oh for God's sake! It's not obvious to you that you're conscious?? 

Yes, that is obvious to me, and indeed to all Löbian machine. But we agree on this, so what I meant was nothing, except personal consciousness (of course), is not obvious here. 

Please name something that is more obvious to you. Please name something that is more deserving of becoming an axiom.

For all number x, 0 ≠ s(x)

 

>>> but I can conceive that mechanism wrong, and that indeed, the copy is always unconscious,

>>Then you are always unconscious because YOU ARE A COPY of the man you were last year, the atoms that made up that fellow have been replaced.

> I am a copy at the right level, I guess, from studying molecular biology, and assuming some physical reality.

It makes no difference even if you make the looney assumption that physical reality is bogus. Bogus atoms were replaced in your bogus brain from last year, and if you say yes to the doctor then bogus atoms will be replaced in your bogus brain again. If the first bogus thing doesn't make you uncomfortable then the second bogus thing shouldn't either because it's the exact same bogus thing.

That is the very argument to say that we have to take into account even the atoms simulated in arithmetic with the right conditions to make you conscious. As the arithmetical reality implement/emulate all computations, that becomes unavoidable. You make my point!

> No problem in practice, but [...]

The world is full of disastrous boondoggles that worked in theory so I'd much rather have a problem in theory than a problem in practice, but in this case there is no problem with either.

Can’t comment, because I am not sure which problem you are alluding to. You should have leave the paragraph I was answering, and put my complete quote. You can elaborate if you are interested.

 

> but for the understanding of the consequence,

If you say yes to the doctor and your atoms are replaced then the consequences, assuming there are some, will be the same as the consequences you already experienced from being replaced over the last year.

Counter-example: my memories could be at the level of quart and gluons. 

> I defined the theology [...]

I'm not interested in theology.

> Typically, you break the quote where I defined theology.

I already know what the definition of theology is in English and I have no wish to learn what the word means in Brunospeak

because its only used by you on this list and nowhere else.

Many told you already that I am using theology and the religious terms used by philosophers and theoreticians, and even the educated christians, jews and Muslims I am working with. There are tuns on book on this. Only atheists asks us to use the term used by radical christians. It is weird.

I've found that one good indicator that somebody is talking moonshine is if they insist on redefining common words (like theology and God) in radical new ways and love to dream up new homemade acronyms. And nobody does that more than you.

In science we change all definitions and theories all the times. You insist that theology is stupid, but you insist that we should not change the definition/theories.

You say that you are not interested in theology, but you act like a priest defending the dogmatic definition in the field. 

Like Einstein said “Atheists […], they are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off after hard struggle”.

 

>It seems you have a problem with the word theology,

Wow, you are very perceptive! Yes, I do have a problem with that word because serious people don't use it when discussing serious problems. 

I guess by “serious” you mean “physical”. But the whole problem is here. You define as “non serious” anyone which dare to share some doubt about the existence of primitive physical notions. That is, with respect to the mind-body problem, a super-begging of the question. 

I understand why you dislike theology when done with the scientific method. It is because it looks like it ask for being able to doubt on Aristotle’s primary matter. You believe in the metaphysical assumption of weak materialism:

Matter = Primary Matter

All scientist interested in this matter are agnostic. Only con-scientists, and naïve materialist, would say that science has decided this question.

 

> a bit like the fanatic atheists Einstein talked about: 

 … there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chain which they have thrown off after hard struggle.

I'm a libertarian so I'm not intolerant of religion, I'm not going to physically stop you from making a fool of yourself, you have that right. But by the same token I have the right to hold you in contempt if you make a fool of yourself.

Of course you are not intolerant on religion. You keep defending Aristotle religion, embraced eventually by the Christians and the Muslims. You defend Materialism. For a platoniciansx, this is the big axiom; God exists by definition, because God by definition,  is the fundamental reality what we search. With mechanism, it is at first sight something in between the sigma_-truth and the (full) arithmetical truth. 

I might be more intolerant than you. I accept that M believes in the religion M* if M* does not contradict M’s beliefs. The problem today is not with religion, but with inconstant religion enforced by authoritative arguments (which is always a form of violence).

(Ideally correct) religion is the set of truth which extends (ideally correct) science.

The mathematical definition of the theology of (ideally sound) machine is given by Tasrki minus Gödel, and Solovay did the precise math and axiomatises somehow this difference by G* minus G.  G* (minus G) axiomatises, at the modal propositional level,  all proposition which are true but not provable by the machine about itself. You can read G* as a sort of God telling the machine

Thou shall not say that zero is equal to the successor of zero. (G* proves ~[]f)

Thou shall not say that Thou shall not say that zero is equal to the successor of zero. (G* proves ~[](~[]f)

Thou shall say that if thou shall not say a falsity then you shall not say that thou shall not say a falsity (~[]f -> ~[](~[]f),

Thou live in a reality (<>t, equivalent with ~[]f).

Thous shall not say that thou live in a reality,

Etc.

It explains the difficulty of theology. The basic mystical state is the “mundane consciousness” that we all live and know very well, despite being able to define it and to ascribe it to the others, and with more difficulty when they are different and behave differently. Yet, for the soul “consistency” (<>t) is trivial, and indeed, the soul, or the knower if you prefer, is its own reality, and that is reflected in the logic S4Grz which axiomatise the logic of ([]p & p). The dual <> becomes <>p v p, and <>t v t is provable. Yet, incompleteness makes []p -> p false as a general proposition (and is not provable), which makes here all the difference. The eight notion of selves provided (imposed) by incompleteness on the ideally correct machine put a lot of light on the mind-body issue, and at the same time, is automatically consistent (and sound with mechanism) by being able to be interpreted in arithmetic.

>I understand that the guy who has survived a first experience of teleportation or artificial brain transplant, or feel that way, will be convinced that Mechanism is true. The point is that even for him, it is not a proof.

Oh for Gods sake! You keep saying that and I keep saying yes yes I know.

Excellent!

And I also keep saying it doesn't matter a gnat's ass if there is a proof or not, what matters is if it's true or not. 

Because you are a practionners, and I congratulate you for this.

But I am interested in solving the mind-body problem, which with mechanism consists in solving the hard problem of matter, which with mechanism enforces to derive the theory of the machine observable *only* from that difference between G and G*, and for the intensional variants. And there are two independent motivations for the definition (of belief, knowledge and observation), either doing the thought experience (and studying a bit of mathematical logic), or to study classical antic philosophy *befpre* Aristotle, or with “Aristotle” reinterpreted in Plato, that is (Plotinus) neoplatonism. 

 

> That is not a  problem in practice,

So there is no problem in saying yes to the doctor's practical question or saying yes to the practice of being frozen. 

Absolutely no problem. 

There would be a problem only if you impose that practice to some adults. For your little kids, I guess the simplest and most fair solution is to let the parent decide. I have no certainty here.

There is only an intellectual problem for you if you maintain both a belief is some primary matter and in mechanism. But that is not grave unless you decide to publish in the field (actually, that error is so common since 1500 years, that this would not be a “real” problem at all, alas.

>> Mechanism requires arithmetic in the same way a brick requires the English word "brick”.

> A brick does not resonate the word “brick”. But the definition of a digital machine requires the truth of the laws of addition and multiplication, 

Machines have no use for definitions

That is debatable. Definition are the Macro in programming language, and a list interpreter understand the use of definition. 

I think I will make a glossary, once I have a bit more time.

and all the definitions in the world can't figure out what 2+2 is. 

Words cannot, nor number, but, amazingly enough, Words plus some simple operation on the words, or number with addition and multiplication, can do that. Necessarily with Mechanism, in the sense of how you figure it out.

>>Non Aristotelian? How odd to divide things up between stuff Aristotle knew and stuff he didn't, one pile is infinitely larger than the other. 

>That the case for all of us. I mention Aristotle’s view, because it is the current paradigm.

Of course it's the current paradigm!  Aristotle was an ignoramus and after 2500 years of progress we have become less ignorant and thus more Non-Aristotelian.

Aristotelian = Metaphysical materialism. It is assumed by the current majority religion in the world today, including atheism.

That is inconsistent with Mechanism. 

There is no problem with the physical science, but only what some people called scientific materialism.

That is why consistent materialist do search for non-mechanist theory of mind. Here, computer science remains very useful, as Church-Thesis makes clear the necessary existence of many non computable relations in arithmetic. Most of them are non computable, and there are degrees of non-computability. But today, most claim on “non computability” made by materialist confuse computation and some other modality, very often close to S4Grz type of non formalisable entities.

I agnostic. Just a logician who says that Mechanism and Physicalism are incompatible, with a constuticve proof showing exactly how to derive physics, and showing that what is already obtained fits better with the empirical facts than the materialist theories which justifies the psycho-matter parallelism with an identity thesis which cannot work with the digital Mechanist hypothesis.

> Of course it is contra Pythegoreans and Platonic thinking,

And Pythagoras was a ignoramus too and Plato an even bigger one, so today we also embrace the Non-Pythagorean and Non-Platonic view.

We know (or should know) better today. Aristotle is made less plausible, and the Church-Turing thesis rehabilitate Pythagorus, and Plato.

Yes, that happens.

>> There is a word for rigorous metaphysics, it's called "physics", you should try it someday.

> That is what I call the Aristotelian postulate. God is Matter.

 

A much better definition of the English word "God" would be "a grey amorphous blob of indeterminate size that need not be intelligent or conscious"; that way no logical person could ever call themself an atheist or even an agnostic, assuming of course you don't also change the definition of atheist and agnostic.

You believe in a grey amorphous blob of indeterminate size?

I am agnostic in theology. I do research.

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 3 Jul 2019, at 18:58, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, July 2, 2019 at 5:27:53 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

A brick does not resonate the word “brick”.

Of course (as the double indentation indicate), I am not the author of that sentence, and some brick can be programmed to resonate the word brick, like some toys which repeat the last word of what people said to them, and which can make some dogs crazy (even more so when the “toys” is a living parrot!).

Bruno

But a brain can resonate the word "brain", and "brick”.

A brick can to, if you implement a universal number in it, which is the case for the brain. All universal number can resonate all non universal and universal number.

Genesis 2: The Lord God formed a man[a] from the dust of the ground ... and formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 

The human, the animals, the vegetal, are all universal number implemented by (basically the same) subset of the physical laws.

No problem.

I just say that if mechanism is correct, the ground itself emanates from a complex and subtle statistics on the true sigma_1 sentences (the computations).

[a] The Hebrew for man (adam) sounds like and may be related to the Hebrew for ground (adamah); it is also the name Adam 

If we could compute the probability of the apparition of the first self-reproductive system inherit by all the others, we could solve Fermi paradox in case it needed some quantum serendipity, in which case we would be aware in tour local neighborhood. 

In arithmetic we are infinite, but with complex relative measure, which are not all the same for the various state of consciousness.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[John Clark]

On Thu, Jul 4, 2019 at 12:19 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>>> Science guarantee that we cannot be certain that compuytaionalism is true,

>> It makes no difference if it's true or not,

 

> It makes the difference between surviving a clinical operation and dying.

You're atoms are different from what they were a year ago, if you have survived that brain transplant operation with your consciousness intact (and only you know if it has) then you can conclude that atoms do NOT have your name scratched on them so if you say yes to the doctor and your atoms are replaced AGAIN your should survive AGAIN with your consciousness remaining intact AGAIN. And all this is true regardless of if computationalism is true or not.

By the way, computationalism says nothing about consciousness, it only says that intelagent behavior can be explained by computations; and when you look at the rapid increase in AI it is becoming more difficult to hold a view contrary to computationalism every day.

> Did you insist to copy the glial cells in your brain.

To play it safe today I'd say yes, although as we learn more about glial cells that might prove unnecessary.

> we can also use the older motivation given by Plato and platonists. 

Bad idea. If a modern scientists takes almost anything Plato or any ancient Greek philosopher said seriously then there is an excellent chance he will end up making a fool of himself. 

> I have defined faith by [...]

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

  

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

Then it is almost certainly wrong.

 

> Indeed Platonism encourage the [blah blah]

Who gives a damn what Plato or Platonism encourages! 

 >> And I have absolutely no need to prove it to say yes to the doctor or yes to being frozen. That's why I said yes.

> No problem with this.

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

 

>> When I Google "Löbian machine" nothing comes up except stuff written by you. Even Löb didn't know what a Löbian machine was.

> Well then read the stuff I have written, and ask if you don’t understand. I have given many different definitions,

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

>> Turing told us EXACTLY how to make a Turing Machine, but neither Löb or you or anybody else told us even approximately how to make a Löbian machine.

 

> Now you know.

No I do not know!! Turing explained in complete detail exactly how to build one of his machines, but neither you or anybody else has ever provided a hint as to how to make one of these things, you don't even tell us how we can recognize a Löbian machine if we see one as you don't say what the machine looks like or what it can do or but only what it "knows". In contrast Turing told us that not all machines are Turing Machines and taught us how to tell the difference. So it's not surprising that, at least according to Google, nobody but you believes the  Löbian machine concept to be useful and uses it.

> But you are the one who seems to take Aristotelian theology for granted.

 

Well, I certainly do not take "Aristotelian theology" for granted in the English language meaning of that phrase, for example I don't think everything is made of just 4 elements, earth, air, fire, and water. But perhaps I do take
"Aristotelian theology" for granted in Brunospeak I really don't know. And to be honest I really don't care.

> Aristotelian is the belief in Matter, and in the irreducibility of matter from anything no material.

I would say "material" is anything that obeys the laws of physics, I don't know what else the word could mean. So if someday somebody finds that everything that we consider material today can be reduced to superstrings or loops of quantum gravity or whatever then that "whatever" must be material and obey a newly discovered law of physics. I would also say that "somebody" is certain to win a Nobel Prize.

 

> You are the one who claim sometimes to refute what I say by invoking your assumption that there is a PRIMARY physical reality,

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

>> It makes no difference even if you make the looney assumption that physical reality is bogus. Bogus atoms were replaced in your bogus brain from last year, and if you say yes to the doctor then bogus atoms will be replaced in your bogus brain again. If the first bogus thing doesn't make you uncomfortable then the second bogus thing shouldn't either because it's the exact same bogus thing.

> That is the very argument to say that we have to take into account even the atoms simulated in arithmetic with the right conditions to make you conscious. As the arithmetical reality implement/emulate all computations, that becomes unavoidable. You make my point!

 

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

>> The world is full of disastrous boondoggles that worked in theory so I'd much rather have a problem in theory than a problem in practice, but in this case there is no problem with either.

 

> Can’t comment, because I am not sure which problem you are alluding to.

I'll give an example, communism works in theory (who could be against a workers paradise?) but in practice it has proven itself to be the longest lived catastrophic boondoggle in the history of the 20th century. So as long as something works in practice, and even you seem to admit that saying yes to the doctor does, then I don't care much if it works according to some theory or not.

>> If you say yes to the doctor and your atoms are replaced then the consequences, assuming there are some, will be the same as the consequences you already experienced from being replaced over the last year.

> Counter-example: my memories could be at the level of quart and gluons. 

The quarks and gluons that made up your brain last year have all been replaced, if that didn't erase your memories (and you seem to remember me) then why would replacing them again be a problem?

> Only atheists asks us to use the term used by radical christians. It is weird.  [ ...] you act like a priest defending the dogmatic definition in the field. [...]   You keep defending Aristotle religion [...] Aristotelian = Metaphysical materialism. It is assumed by the current majority religion in the world today, including atheism.

 

Long ago a very wise philosopher, I don't know if he was Greek or not, said it much better than I could:

"Atheism is a religion like "off" is a TV channel."

>> I've found that one good indicator that somebody is talking moonshine is if they insist on redefining common words (like theology and God) in radical new ways and love to dream up new homemade acronyms. And nobody does that more than you.

> In science we change all definitions and theories all the times.

Yes but today Mathematics and English are the most important languages in science and you  are not Mr. Science so you can not unilaterally decree how English is spoken. It's OK to have words mean anything you want in your own personal language because science doesn't use Brunospeak nor does anybody except for you. 

But I can only think of two reasons why somebody would even want to give common words radical new definitions and invent lots of homemade acronyms, to make their ideas seem more profound than they really are or to cover up the fact that they contain gaping logical holes.

>>>It seems you have a problem with the word theology,

>> Wow, you are very perceptive! Yes, I do have a problem with that word because serious people don't use it when discussing serious problems. 

> I guess by “serious” you mean “physical”.

No, If I meant  physical I would have said physical. Serious people know there is a difference between finding something new about how the world works and dreaming up a radical new definition for a common word to obscure the vapidness of an idea.    

> I understand why you dislike theology when done with the scientific method.

Theology done with the scientific method is like sexual intercourse done with the method of abstinence. If it's done with the scientific method then it's not theology at least in the English language meaning of the word, I'm not sure about Brunospeak. 

 

> God by definition,  is the fundamental reality what we search.

Wow that Brunospeak definition is even worse! At least if we define "God" as a grey amorphous blob of indeterminate size that need not be intelagent or conscious then we know for certain that God exists, but we do NOT know for certain a  fundamental reality exists, it could be like a infinite Matryoshka doll with one layer of reality always inside another layer.

> The mathematical definition of the theology

That just may be the most ridiculous sentence I have ever read in my life. 

>>>I understand that the guy who has survived a first experience of teleportation or artificial brain transplant, or feel that way, will be convinced that Mechanism is true. The point is that even for him, it is not a proof.

>>Oh for Gods sake! You keep saying that and I keep saying yes yes I know.

>Excellent!

Thank you, I thought so too.

> And I also keep saying it doesn't matter a gnat's ass if there is a proof or not, what matters is if it's true or not. 

>Because you are a practionners,

I've never seen that word before but if you say so.

 

> and I congratulate you for this.

Thanks again.

>> So there is no problem in saying yes to the doctor's practical question or saying yes to the practice of being frozen. 

> Absolutely no problem. 

I don't get it, to me that is the bottom line so if we agree on that and we agree there is no proof then what are we arguing about?

> There would be a problem only if you impose that practice to some adults. For your little kids, I guess the simplest and most fair solution is to let the parent decide. I have no certainty here.

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

>> Machines have no use for definitions

> That is debatable.

It is?!  I sure wouldn't want to debate the contrary position because the engine in your car doesn't know or care about your definitions but will just keep chugging along until it stops for reasons of its own, and the same is true of a Turing Machine.

>> and all the definitions in the world can't figure out what 2+2 is. 

> Words cannot, nor number, but, amazingly enough, Words plus some simple operation on the words [...]

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

> That is what I call the Aristotelian postulate. God is Matter.

Only somebody who has abandoned the idea of God but is still in love with the English word G-O-D and for some reason doesn't want to call himself an atheist would use a definition that dumb.

 

>> A much better definition of the English word "God" would be "a grey amorphous blob of indeterminate size that need not be intelligent or conscious"; that way no logical person could ever call themself an atheist or even an agnostic, assuming of course you don't also change the definition of atheist and agnostic.

> You believe in a grey amorphous blob of indeterminate size?

If we use the Brunospeak definition of the word then I am a devout believer in  God. I admit it, I think grey amorphous blobs of indeterminate size DO exist,

> I am agnostic in theology.

You are?! You think grey amorphous blobs of indeterminate size might not exist? I guess I'm more religious than you, at least in Brunospeak. 

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

On Saturday, July 6, 2019 at 8:48:42 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

 ... the "Löbian machine" idea can not help anyone understand anything.

"Löbian machines" (or "theorem provers") are a key technology at MIRI [ http://intelligence.org ]:

http://intelligence.org/files/lob-notes-IAFF.pdf

https://intelligence.org/files/TilingAgentsDraft.pdf

...

I believe in technology, not theology. :)

@philipthrift

[Bruno Marchal]

On 6 Jul 2019, at 15:48, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jul 4, 2019 at 12:19 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>>> Science guarantee that we cannot be certain that compuytaionalism is true,

>> It makes no difference if it's true or not,

 

> It makes the difference between surviving a clinical operation and dying.

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

OK. That is my point.

then you can conclude that atoms do NOT have your name scratched on them so if you say yes to the doctor and your atoms are replaced AGAIN your should survive AGAIN with your consciousness remaining intact AGAIN. And all this is true regardless of if computationalism is true or not.

?

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

By the way, computationalism says nothing about consciousness, it only says that intelagent behavior can be explained by computations; and when you look at the rapid increase in AI it is becoming more difficult to hold a view contrary to computationalism every day.

That is what I usually called “behaviourist” mechanism. It is conceivable that the copy of me acts exactly like me, but that we die in the transplant process. I guess you and le doubt this very much, but when doing science, we have to take account those nuances into account, for being rigorous.

> Did you insist to copy the glial cells in your brain.

To play it safe today I'd say yes, although as we learn more about glial cells that might prove unnecessary.

I would have said the contrary. To which recent studies are you thinking. It seems to the more we study the glial cells, the more they look as sort of protoneurons, communicating a lot with each others, yet without axones. But I am agnostic on this issue, and it is a good ida to play it safe.

> we can also use the older motivation given by Plato and platonists. 

Bad idea. If a modern scientists takes almost anything Plato or any ancient Greek philosopher said seriously then there is an excellent chance he will end up making a fool of himself. 

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

Here, coming back to Plato means to come back to the scientific attitude in the ontological domain.

And Aristotle is the guy who came back to that idea.

Today, with mechanism, Plato is not an option, but is obligatory, with some ultra-weak version of Occam razor, as Better does no more make any sense that we could relate to an experience. 

> I have defined faith by [...]

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

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

  

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

Then it is almost certainly wrong.

On this matter, you can’t have both Plato and Aristotle wrong, as they are the classical negation of each other. We follow Aristotle since 1500 years, but today, we have good reason to think that Aristotle is wrong (coming not just from mechanism, but also from physics). 

You do seem to take the existence of a primary physical universe for granted, when it can only be a metaphysical assumption.

With mechanism, it is very simple: except for consciousness here and now, all the rest are assumptions with variate degree of plausibility. 

 

> Indeed Platonism encourage the [blah blah]

Who gives a damn what Plato or Platonism encourages! 

 >> And I have absolutely no need to prove it to say yes to the doctor or yes to being frozen. That's why I said yes.

> No problem with this.

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

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

 

>> When I Google "Löbian machine" nothing comes up except stuff written by you. Even Löb didn't know what a Löbian machine was.

> Well then read the stuff I have written, and ask if you don’t understand. I have given many different definitions,

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

You loss me here.

>> Turing told us EXACTLY how to make a Turing Machine, but neither Löb or you or anybody else told us even approximately how to make a Löbian machine.

 

> Now you know.

No I do not know!! Turing explained in complete detail exactly how to build one of his machines, but neither you or anybody else has ever provided a hint as to how to make one of these things, you don't even tell us how we can recognize a Löbian machine if we see one as you don't say what the machine looks like or what it can do or but only what it "knows". In contrast Turing told us that not all machines are Turing Machines and taught us how to tell the difference. So it's not surprising that, at least according to Google, nobody but you believes the  Löbian machine concept to be useful and uses it.

No. It is a key chapter in mathematical logic, although they use the word “theories” where I use machines, but the concept is equivalent. 

Of course if you know how to build a Turing machine from Turing’s theory, you can build a Löbian machine with the same ease. 

Example of Löbian machines abounds, like all consistent effective extension of Peano arithmetic, but actually it is even more general than that. 

I will say more on this in the glossary. Of course, I use the purely mathematical notion of machine, like Turing an all computer scientist. 

> But you are the one who seems to take Aristotelian theology for granted.

 

Well, I certainly do not take "Aristotelian theology" for granted in the English language meaning of that phrase, for example I don't think everything is made of just 4 elements, earth, air, fire, and water.

That is not Aristotle theology. Aristotle theology is the idea that there are irreductible substance in nature, which we have to assume the existence (that their existence is not derivable, or not illusory nor purely phenomenological). Platonism begins by doubting this, and being open that such substance might not be the fundamental things. That augure the use of mathematics in physics, and the growing importance of mathematics.

> Aristotelian is the belief in Matter, and in the irreducibility of matter from anything no material.

I would say "material" is anything that obeys the laws of physics,

No problem with this. Of course material will be primary of not according to the truth of falsity of physicalism.

I don't know what else the word could mean. So if someday somebody finds that everything that we consider material today can be reduced to superstrings or loops of quantum gravity or whatever then that "whatever" must be material and obey a newly discovered law of physics. I would also say that "somebody" is certain to win a Nobel Prize.

 

> You are the one who claim sometimes to refute what I say by invoking your assumption that there is a PRIMARY physical reality,

I claim that nobody in the history of the world

You seem to assume a physical worlds “really ontological”, but that is what is impossible once you understand step 3 and the sequel.

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

A test book is not a program. Nobody here has ever claim that a book think. Indeed, I take some time to explain that there is a very important difference between a computation and a description of computation, like in the movie-graph discussion.

You attribute implicit proposition which have never been asserted. That is not fair game.

>> It makes no difference even if you make the looney assumption that physical reality is bogus. Bogus atoms were replaced in your bogus brain from last year, and if you say yes to the doctor then bogus atoms will be replaced in your bogus brain again. If the first bogus thing doesn't make you uncomfortable then the second bogus thing shouldn't either because it's the exact same bogus thing.

> That is the very argument to say that we have to take into account even the atoms simulated in arithmetic with the right conditions to make you conscious. As the arithmetical reality implement/emulate all computations, that becomes unavoidable. You make my point!

 

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

Assuming mechanism, but the point is that we cannot prove it. We might be able to know it, but still unable to prove it. That is not astonishing, in cognitive science most agree that everybody knows that he is conscious, but nobody can prove it. The fact hat there are truth that we can’t prove, or rationally justify (of course in some strong sense) justify the use of the term “theology” in the sense of Plato (the science of the truth as possibly recoverable by a machine without a proof).

>> The world is full of disastrous boondoggles that worked in theory so I'd much rather have a problem in theory than a problem in practice, but in this case there is no problem with either.

 

> Can’t comment, because I am not sure which problem you are alluding to.

I'll give an example, communism works in theory (who could be against a workers paradise?)

A lazy dreamer (grin).

but in practice it has proven itself to be the longest lived catastrophic boondoggle in the history of the 20th century.

That is debatable. The problem of communism is that it has been imposed, and presented as opposed to democracy, but as an idea of the left, it could still be defensible. The problem of the communist regime was that they were dictatorship, not that they were communist, unless you take communism in the string stalinian, antidemocratic,  sense of course.

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

So as long as something works in practice, and even you seem to admit that saying yes to the doctor does, then I don't care much if it works according to some theory or not.

Of course, we can buy an atomic bomb, or a computer, without ever asking oneself how that works. But then why intervene in a discussion where we try theories to explains facts, and not use theories for this or that goal.

>> If you say yes to the doctor and your atoms are replaced then the consequences, assuming there are some, will be the same as the consequences you already experienced from being replaced over the last year.

> Counter-example: my memories could be at the level of quart and gluons. 

The quarks and gluons that made up your brain last year have all been replaced, if that didn't erase your memories (and you seem to remember me) then why would replacing them again be a problem?

Because if my mind operate at the level of gluons, (which I agree is newly plausible), it might be that the replacement is made following the instructions present in my gluons, and replacing them without going through the usual natural process would not work. What you give is just an argument to defend the idea that our level of substitution is above the gluons, but if it isn’t, your argument would not go through. You beg the issue.

> Only atheists asks us to use the term used by radical christians. It is weird.  [ ...] you act like a priest defending the dogmatic definition in the field. [...]   You keep defending Aristotle religion [...] Aristotelian = Metaphysical materialism. It is assumed by the current majority religion in the world today, including atheism.

 

Long ago a very wise philosopher, I don't know if he was Greek or not, said it much better than I could:

"Atheism is a religion like "off" is a TV channel.”

That is weak atheism, or agnostic atheism.

But then why do you seem to believe in a privately material world? What is that Matter that you invoke all the time to say that we need it to compute 2+2=4, when, once we assume mechanism, we can prove the existence of infinitely many John Clark computing 2+2 without using any matter, despite claiming the century (though).

Primitive Matter is not a personal god, but is still a Platonic god, i.e. an extremely unproven and unexperienced metaphysical hypothesis.

>> I've found that one good indicator that somebody is talking moonshine is if they insist on redefining common words (like theology and God) in radical new ways and love to dream up new homemade acronyms. And nobody does that more than you.

> In science we change all definitions and theories all the times.

Yes but today Mathematics and English are the most important languages in science and you  are not Mr. Science so you can not unilaterally decree how English is spoken. It's OK to have words mean anything you want in your own personal language because science doesn't use Brunospeak nor does anybody except for you. 

But I can only think of two reasons why somebody would even want to give common words radical new definitions and invent lots of homemade acronyms, to make their ideas seem more profound than they really are or to cover up the fact that they contain gaping logical holes.

You are the one who insist to use God in the christian sense. Then you play the “Oh my!” When we come back to the vocabulary used by those who have done science. 

You keep defending christianity’s conception of both God and Matter. You say, my religion is the off channel, but you invoke your metaphysical assumption all the times, just to be negative, as I have no other clues why you behave like that.

You seem annoy that we agree that Mechanism is not provable, and seem to try to distract, instead of moving forward in the reasoning.

>>>It seems you have a problem with the word theology,

>> Wow, you are very perceptive! Yes, I do have a problem with that word because serious people don't use it when discussing serious problems. 

> I guess by “serious” you mean “physical”.

No, If I meant  physical I would have said physical. Serious people know there is a difference between finding something new about how the world works and dreaming up a radical new definition for a common word to obscure the vapidness of an idea.    

There is nothing radicals in udneersatnding that the mind-body problem is not solved, and that the physical universe might be a wrong idea. Science is born from that questioning by Plato.

> I understand why you dislike theology when done with the scientific method.

Theology done with the scientific method is like sexual intercourse done with the method of abstinence. If it's done with the scientific method then it's not theology at least in the English language meaning of the word, I'm not sure about Brunospeak. 

You deny, like those who at least did this only under torture, one millenium of scientific theology, and this to oppose your christian conception of matter to others, like if that should be taken for granted.

It looks like brunospeak (and ad hominem term, BTW) means doubting about the christian (materialism) theology.

 

> God by definition,  is the fundamental reality what we search.

Wow that Brunospeak definition is even worse! At least if we define "God" as a grey amorphous blob of indeterminate size that need not be intelagent or conscious then we know for certain that God exists,

Ah, you see you are a believer in Matter. Sorry, but you stop doing science, and do religion in the pejorative sense.

but we do NOT know for certain a  fundamental reality exists,

But we posit it when we search it. And honestly, you do that also when you posit the great amorphous blob’s ontological existence.

Without positing a fundamental reality, there is just no fundamental research. The current paradigm is that the fundamental reality his physical, and it seems you assume this, but of course, that is debatable, and in particular, it is shown incompatible with mechanism.

it could be like a infinite Matryoshka doll with one layer of reality always inside another layer.

With mechanism, elementary arithmetic can be chosen for the fundamental ontological reality. That explains both consciousness and matter, with enough details so that we can test it with netuare, and that has been done as we have already derived the propositional physics, and indeed it obeys to a quantum logic, which means that nature confirms computationalism (confirming is not proving, once again, of course).

> The mathematical definition of the theology

That just may be the most ridiculous sentence I have ever read in my life. 

Probably  because you admit never having read Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry, Damascius, 

Why would math apply to the physical reality, and not to biology, psychology and theology? That is very weird, because the mechanist assumption invites to use computer science (a branch of mathematics) to all question that a machine can ask to itself. Is it not obvious that with mechanism the mathematical result on machine’s impossibilities apply to us? Theology is related to those many impossibilities.

>>>I understand that the guy who has survived a first experience of teleportation or artificial brain transplant, or feel that way, will be convinced that Mechanism is true. The point is that even for him, it is not a proof.

>>Oh for Gods sake! You keep saying that and I keep saying yes yes I know.

>Excellent!

Thank you, I thought so too.

> And I also keep saying it doesn't matter a gnat's ass if there is a proof or not, what matters is if it's true or not. 

>Because you are a practionners,

I've never seen that word before but if you say so.

 

> and I congratulate you for this.

Thanks again.

>> So there is no problem in saying yes to the doctor's practical question or saying yes to the practice of being frozen. 

> Absolutely no problem. 

I don't get it, to me that is the bottom line so if we agree on that and we agree there is no proof then what are we arguing about?

Yes, I don’t know.

> There would be a problem only if you impose that practice to some adults. For your little kids, I guess the simplest and most fair solution is to let the parent decide. I have no certainty here.

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

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

>> Machines have no use for definitions

> That is debatable.

It is?!  I sure wouldn't want to debate the contrary position because the engine in your car doesn't know or care about your definitions but will just keep chugging along until it stops for reasons of its own, and the same is true of a Turing Machine.

My laptop is a Turing Machine, and without some definition of “John Clark” it would not been able to send you this mail. Computer science and mathematical logic have a big chapters on definition and definability. In the theoretical approach it is important to know that there are object which exist despite being non definable, like some object exists without any proof showing so. 

>> and all the definitions in the world can't figure out what 2+2 is. 

> Words cannot, nor number, but, amazingly enough, Words plus some simple operation on the words [...]

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

That is your religion, again and again. Sorry, as a scientist, the least I can say is that I am agnostic on such matter, and it is easy to understand that the concept does not make sense once you assume Digital Mechanism, because a Digital entity cannot be sure if it is run in arithmetic or in something else.

> That is what I call the Aristotelian postulate. God is Matter.

Only somebody who has abandoned the idea of God but is still in love with the English word G-O-D and for some reason doesn't want to call himself an atheist would use a definition that dumb.

No, It is my definition of atheist: the believer in Matter. It is a subbranch of post 1248-Islam and post 529- Christianity. Yes, they believe in a god, but with the definition of the greek, everyone is, which helps to circumvent the discussion on the nature of God. 

 

>> A much better definition of the English word "God" would be "a grey amorphous blob of indeterminate size that need not be intelligent or conscious"; that way no logical person could ever call themself an atheist or even an agnostic, assuming of course you don't also change the definition of atheist and agnostic.

> You believe in a grey amorphous blob of indeterminate size?

If we use the Brunospeak definition of the word then I am a devout believer in  God. I admit it, I think grey amorphous blobs of indeterminate size DO exist,

Si we agree again. It is not brunospeak though. You would have mocked cantor, like many did, because he called God the class of all sets, and discussed this with bishops for 20 years, showing that christians understand without problem that something as great as the class of all sets plays a role similar to God in set theory, with the risk of the same theological trap making the whole thing inconsistent.

> I am agnostic in theology.

You are?! You think grey amorphous blobs of indeterminate size might not exist?

I certainly things that such things do not exist ontologically once we assume Digital Mechanism. Such blob might still exist phenomenological, like a persistent hallucination. 

But I don’t know if mechanism is true, so such blob might eixist, and my only pont is that we can test this, and the test confirms more mechanism (in which case there is no such blob) than materialism (which accept some such blob).

Or, you could define such a blob by some very big natural number, as the notion of blob has not been made enough precise to really argue on.

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

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

What you need to do is to explain how such a blob can interfere with the consciousness of the Turing machine emulated in arithmetic. Maybe wait for the glossary, where I will explain the term “emulation”.

Bruno

John K Clark

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[Bruno Marchal]

No scientist believe in the theology using dogma, but is is worse to remember that science is born from the neoplatonic theology, which use no dogma, no revelation, but recognise the reports of experience, and try to figure out what all that means. If you believe in technology, you certainly believe that something makes that technology possible, and the search for what is that something is theology, in the large sense of scientists and philosophers (and only incidentally related to the meaning in the dogmatic pseudo-religion).

In the old tribe cultures, religion is when you have a mystical experience, and this is provided at the age when passing from kids to adult, by diverse means (like the use of ibogaine by the bwiti is central Africa since apparently 20.000 years), and this provokes a sort of near death experience helping the young to abandon the belief in the aiutoroity of they parents or of anyone). Religion is a tool to free people from all authoritative argument, but that is also the reason why the disctoriship have to own the religion, and have to make it uncriticizable/dogmatic. Of course, whet they get is not religion, but anti-religion. 

When a dictatorship appropriates a science/religion, it makes it into a pseudoscience/religion. 

When a religion adopt dogma, it is not really a religion anymore.

Nobody needs to believe in any particular god to do theology. On the contrary, to do theology with the scientific doubting attitude, you must be able to doubt any notion of gods, including the impersonal gods like most fundamental metaphysical notion, like Matter, or the Tao, etc.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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