> It seems to me that the best one can do is say that energy is conserved in each branch, even over splitting.
> If new branches are continually forming out of any branch, there is no
> way the energy could be conserved without it being obvious to the
> observer of the photon incident on the half-silvered mirror. (Or is
> any other quantum interaction.) As any world branches, energy cannot
> be conserved without it being obvious along any decohered history.
>
> Carroll given another example; "I have, say, a bowling ball, with a
> certain mass and potential energy. But then someone in the next room
> observes a quantum spin and branches the wave function.
The other room? How about Alpha Centari? Or another galaxy?
In fact
the lesson the C60 buckyball experiment is that there doesn't have to be
anyone measuring anything. All that's needed is decoherence into the
environment and you and the rest of the universe have split.
> Now there are two bowling balls, each of which has the energy of the
> previous one. No?" He answers: "That ignores the amplitudes of the
> branches. The contribution of the bowling ball to the energy of the
> universe isn't just the mass and the potential energy of the ball;
> it's that, times the weight of its branch of the wave function. After
> the splitting it looks like you have two bowling balls, but together
> they contribute exactly as much to the energy of the wave function as
> the single bowling ball did before."
>
> Clearly, when the split is due to a quantum event in another room,
> you are not aware of the split and of the sudden reduction of the
> mass-energy of everything around you. So you could get away with that
> by a simple renormalization. But if you are observing the atom in the
> S-G magnet, how does this approach avoid the conclusion that you would
> have to see its energy halve?
How you would see it. The act of observing it splits you too.
It seems to me that the best one can do is say that energy is conserved in each branch, even over splitting. That is, after all, what is observed. Consequently, the energy of the overall wave function is not conserved. This might cause some problems for the insistence on unitary evolution of the wave function as a whole...........
Bruce
The principle of conservation of energy, in MWI, seems obscure to me, at least.
"In more general cases, where there are superpositions of states of different energy, energy can increase in one universe at the cost of decreasing in another." -David Deutsch
"Now, there isn't really a story to tell about what the total energy in individual universes is during that whole process [of measurement]. Because the universes are not autonomous during it. But one thing's for sure, there is no way of construing it so that the energy in each particular universe is conserved, for the simple reason that the whole system starts out the same on each run of the experiment (before the non-sharp state is created), and ends up different". -David Deutsch
> Of course. It is well known that global energy is not conserved in a non-static universe; where there is no time-like Killing vector field. But that was not the issue I was addressing. Energy is conserved locally, even in GR with a non-static universe. So is it conserved in each branch of the wave function separately?
> Or only in the total wave function, as Deutsch (and Carroll) seem to suggest?
It is just a form of matrix majorization. The total energy is E = sum_n p_nE_n prior to each splitting and after. The observer who finds an outcome E_i is in a sense frame dragged along a geodesic direction in the Fubini-Study metric corresponding to p_i = |ψ_i|^2. This means from the phenomenology of that observer the observable world is along that geodesic and p_i → 1. So the observer may find that energy is conserved, but this appears not consistent with MWI.
This is really one of the least concerns I have with MWI.
On 11/27/2019 4:27 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
I don't think you have seen the point I am trying to make.
I don't think I do either.
Certainly we think energy is (locally) conserved in the world we observe, which according to MWI is only one branch. So either energy is created in order supply it for all the other branches, or there's some scaling principle (which LC seems to suggest) such that if everything in a branch is scaled to the appropriate probability, including the energy, then there will be no observable difference. The latter is why I brought the half-silvered mirror case, since it's not just energy that is conserved, but the energy-momentum. And there's angular momentum too, and charge. It's not just energy.
> I think your [Brent Meeker] point about other conservation laws is interesting -- especially charge. How would you divide the charge of a state among the superposed basis states according to the Born rule and get charge conservation in every branch?
Bruce
Bruce
Our branch of the multiverse is electrically neutral and it seems likely all of them are, so preserving conservation of charge doesn't seem like much of a problem.> Consider firing an electron at a screen. There are a very large number of sub-branches created -- one for every position that the electron can land. There was only one negative charge originally -- now there are a very large number. Where did the extra charges come from?
> So the number of coulombs in a branching Many Worlds grows exponentially .
Under the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, which took effect on 20 May 2019,[2] the elementary charge (the charge of the proton) is exactly 1.602176634×10−19 coulombs. Thus the coulomb is exactly the charge of 1/(1.602176634×10−19) protons, which is approximately 6.2415090744×1018 protons (1.036×10−5 mol). The same number of electrons has the same magnitude but opposite sign of charge, that is, a charge of −1 C.This was the issue about mass raised weeks ago when Sean Carroll's book came out.There has never been an answer.@philipthrift
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> The trouble seems to be that this account is different from the account given in the energy case, where we were supposed to weight the sub-branches by their corresponding Born weights.
On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 2:51 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:> So the number of coulombs in a branching Many Worlds grows exponentially .There are both positive coulombs and negative coulombs, when you add them all up in each branch you get exactly zero, and zero times a number, even a very large number, is zero. And 0,0,0,0.... is not an example of exponential growth.John K Clark
The paper discusses the possibility of a universe that is not electrically neutral but has a net positive charge. It is claimed that such a universe contains a homogeneous distribution of protons that are not bound to galaxies and fill up the intergalactic space. This proton `gas' charges macroscopic objects like stars and planets, but it does not generate electrostatic or magnetic fields that affect the motion of these bodies significantly. However, the proton gas may contribute significantly to the total dark matter of the universe and its electrostatic potential may contribute to the dark energy and to the expansion of the universe.
Subjects: | General Physics (physics.gen-ph) |
MSC classes: | 83F05 |
Cite as: | arXiv:1201.6585 [physics.gen-ph] |
> Much the same would happen if the cosmos has a net angular momentum, where that spacetime would have features of the Gödel universe.
Really there are no duplicate Carroll's or Crowell's or anyone else. There are amplitudes for such with a distribution given by a decoherent set, and phenomenologically any of these in such a branch "renormalize" the probabilities to one. It is not so much that I branch and am duplicated, but that I am also existent in other branches.LC
>> That electron existed in a electrically neutral universe, if you multiply that by "a very large number" you've got a very large number of electrically neutral universes and charge conservation is preserved in each branch and of course in the entire multiverse.
> And you could apply the same reasoning to energy. Almost all ways of assigning a total energy to the universe find it to be zero.
On Fri, Nov 29, 2019 at 5:12 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 11/27/2019 11:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
This was the issue about mass raised weeks ago when Sean Carroll's book came out.
There has never been an answer.
If you think in terms of the wf of the multiverse, it's just a ray in Hilbert space and moves around. It doesn't split. What "splits" is the subspace we're on. So when we measure a spin as UP or DOWN, our subspace splits into two orthogonal subspaces on which the ray projects. But they are only orthogonal on that one dimension (the spin of that particle), so any other variable encoded in the ray gets projected with the same value as before, e.g. the energy or the particle.
Right. The subsystem we are considering (an electron fired at a screen or through an S-G magnet) is just a subspace of the full Hilbert space. We can take the tensor product of this subspace with the rest of the universe to recover the full Hilbert space:
|universe> = |system>{\otimes}|environment>
We can then analyse the system in some basis:
|system> = Sum_i c_i |basis_i>,
where c_i are complex coefficients, and |basis_i> are the basis vectors for (i = 1, ..,, N), N being the dimension of the subspace.
It is assumed that the normal distributive law of vector algebra acts over the tensor product, so each basis vector then gets convoluted with the same 'environment' in each case, we have
|universe> = Sum_i c_i (|basis_i>|environment>).
Each basis vector is a solution of the original Schrodinger equation, so it carries the full energy, moment, change etc, of the original state.
The environment is just the rest of the universe minus the quantum quantities associated with the system of interest. So each term in this sum has the full energy, charge, and so on of the original state.
If we take each component of the above sum to represent a self-contained separate world, then all quantum numbers are conserved in each world. Whether there is global conservation depends on how we treat the coefficients c_i. But, on the face of it, there are N copies of the basis+environment in the above sum, so everything is copied in each individual world. Exactly how you treat the weights in this situation is not clear to me -- if they are treated as probabilities, it seems that you just have a stochastic single-world model.
On 11/28/2019 4:17 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Right. The subsystem we are considering (an electron fired at a screen or through an S-G magnet) is just a subspace of the full Hilbert space. We can take the tensor product of this subspace with the rest of the universe to recover the full Hilbert space:
|universe> = |system>{\otimes}|environment>
We can then analyse the system in some basis:
|system> = Sum_i c_i |basis_i>,
where c_i are complex coefficients, and |basis_i> are the basis vectors for (i = 1, ..,, N), N being the dimension of the subspace.
It is assumed that the normal distributive law of vector algebra acts over the tensor product, so each basis vector then gets convoluted with the same 'environment' in each case, we have
|universe> = Sum_i c_i (|basis_i>|environment>).
Each basis vector is a solution of the original Schrodinger equation, so it carries the full energy, moment, change etc, of the original state.
?? The basis just defines a coordinate system for the Hilbert space. It doesn't mean that the wf ray has any component along a basis vector.
The c_i can be zero; in which case that basis vector doesn't carry anything. No every Schrodinger equation solution is realized because initial conditions may make it zero.
The environment is just the rest of the universe minus the quantum quantities associated with the system of interest. So each term in this sum has the full energy, charge, and so on of the original state.
If we take each component of the above sum to represent a self-contained separate world, then all quantum numbers are conserved in each world. Whether there is global conservation depends on how we treat the coefficients c_i. But, on the face of it, there are N copies of the basis+environment in the above sum, so everything is copied in each individual world. Exactly how you treat the weights in this situation is not clear to me -- if they are treated as probabilities, it seems that you just have a stochastic single-world model.
Yes, I think that's right. Which is the attraction of the epistemic interpretation: you treat them as probabilities so you renormalize after the measurement. And one problem with the ontic interpretation is saying what probability means. But it seems that the epistemic interpretation leaves the wf to be a personal belief.
On 02-12-2019 09:39, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 7:19 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> "even in many-worlds you end up on only one branch (stochastically)"
>
> Sean Carroll himself has said (in a tweet) that if you let
> probabilities (stochasticity) in - like the camel's nose under the
> tent - you might as well have a one world - not many worlds - theory.
>
> We do have only one world. Do you know of anyone who lives in more
> than one branch of the multiverse?
>
> Bruce
Your subjective state (everything that you're aware at some instant),
doesn't fully specify the exact physical state of your brain. The number
of distinct physical brain states is so astronomically large that your
mindset and how you are feeling about everything isn't going to be
consistent with only one physical brain state. This means that given
your subjective state, the physical state of your MWI sector should be
described as a very complex superposition involving a large number of
brain states that are entangled with the environment.
If we assume that we can bypass this problem and that we can locate
ourselves in one single branch, then this leads to the following
paradox. Consider simulating such a conscious entity on a computer. At
all moments in time, the physical state of the computer is just
transitioning from one particular state to another state. Since
consciousness is related to the actual physical state of the computer,
replacing the computer by a dumb device that doesn't compute anything,
which simply cycles through physical states that the computer would move
through given some particular set of inputs, will render exactly the
same consciousness.
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption,
it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals.
Clearly actions
as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for
consciousness,
but there is no room to do that within classical single
World physics. But as I pointed out above the generic state of a
conscious involves being located not in a single branch, but being
distributed over an astronomically large number of different branches.
LC--
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@philipthrift
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Brent
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The reason is that many different
quasi-classical brain states will be consistent with that thought...not
only different quantum superpositions.
Brent
On 29 Nov 2019, at 22:59, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Friday, November 29, 2019 at 2:49:17 PM UTC-6, Lawrence Crowell wrote:On Friday, November 29, 2019 at 12:33:26 PM UTC-6, Philip Thrift wrote:In any case, in the case of MWI, in the types of examples Sean Carroll talks about, here's a concrete case:In one branch, Sean Carroll goes out for a jog around the park.In another branch, Sean Carroll; stays home and takes a nap.I don't see how the two Seans (running, napping) are in "superposition", or how Sean's energy is distributed to and within these two worlds.@philipthriftIt really is not so much that a person is in a superposition than the quantum particles and states that compose them are.LCIn the MWI branch world Jog where Sean is jogging and in the branch world Nap where Sean is napping, the jogging-Sean particles in Jog and the napping-Sean particles in Nap are in superposition.Then there is another branching of Jog where Sean is hit by a car Jog-HitByCar and one where he isn't Jog-NotHitByCar. Particles in superpositions: Nap, Jog, Jog-HitByCar, Jog-NotHitByCar, ...This seems like it should make no sense.Yet, that happens in the arithmetical reality. So it certainly makes sense, up to verify this regularly (the theory might be false). It is counter-intuitive, but there is no contradiction, and it is the simpler way to reconcile mind and matter, and the observations.Bruno
On 3 Dec 2019, at 03:18, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 12:39 PM smitra <smi...@zonnet.nl> wrote:On 02-12-2019 09:39, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 7:19 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> "even in many-worlds you end up on only one branch (stochastically)"
>
> Sean Carroll himself has said (in a tweet) that if you let
> probabilities (stochasticity) in - like the camel's nose under the
> tent - you might as well have a one world - not many worlds - theory.
>
> We do have only one world. Do you know of anyone who lives in more
> than one branch of the multiverse?
>
> Bruce
Your subjective state (everything that you're aware at some instant),
doesn't fully specify the exact physical state of your brain. The number
of distinct physical brain states is so astronomically large that your
mindset and how you are feeling about everything isn't going to be
consistent with only one physical brain state. This means that given
your subjective state, the physical state of your MWI sector should be
described as a very complex superposition involving a large number of
brain states that are entangled with the environment.My brain currently has only one state.
Other states may be consistent with my current conscious state, but these do not exist. The idea that I am a superposition of all brain states consistent with my consciousness is just idle speculation. How would you ever prove such a thing?
If we assume that we can bypass this problem and that we can locate
ourselves in one single branch, then this leads to the following
paradox. Consider simulating such a conscious entity on a computer. At
all moments in time, the physical state of the computer is just
transitioning from one particular state to another state. Since
consciousness is related to the actual physical state of the computer,
replacing the computer by a dumb device that doesn't compute anything,
which simply cycles through physical states that the computer would move
through given some particular set of inputs, will render exactly the
same consciousness.Yes, and so what? If my consciousness is a sequence of brain states, anything that produces that same sequence of brain states will produce my consciousness. Substrate independence, after all.This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption,It is not absurd in the least. Argument ad absurdum is not a logical argument. What is absurd to you may be perfectly reasonable to someone else.it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals.
How can a counterfactual exist? By definition, it is counter to the facts, hence, non-existent.Clearly actions
as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for
consciousness,But there cannot be any such thing as a counterfactual input. You might consider "What if...." scenarios. But they are not relevant for my current brain state. It will do what it will do, whatever the input.but there is no room to do that within classical single
World physics. But as I pointed out above the generic state of a
conscious involves being located not in a single branch, but being
distributed over an astronomically large number of different branches.Different branches are, by definition, non-interacting, so different branches correspond to different persons. Anyway, I choose not to accept this load of speculative rubbish.
Bruce
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On 3 Dec 2019, at 03:18, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:My brain currently has only one state.How do you know that? How could you know that.
Other states may be consistent with my current conscious state, but these do not exist. The idea that I am a superposition of all brain states consistent with my consciousness is just idle speculation. How would you ever prove such a thing?We cannot prove the existence of a physical universe, and if we assume mechanism, we cannot see how a universe could choose one state against the infinitely many others which lead to the same consciousness.
Of course, this should not be a problem for a non-mechanist, except that he has to provide its non-mechanist theory of mind, and still explain the role of the (not finitely descriptible) substrate in generating its consciousness.
The opposite of experiential realism.
@philipthrift
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On 3 Dec 2019, at 23:06, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 8:03 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:On 3 Dec 2019, at 03:18, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:My brain currently has only one state.How do you know that? How could you know that.It is a pretty good hypothesis.Other states may be consistent with my current conscious state, but these do not exist. The idea that I am a superposition of all brain states consistent with my consciousness is just idle speculation. How would you ever prove such a thing?We cannot prove the existence of a physical universe, and if we assume mechanism, we cannot see how a universe could choose one state against the infinitely many others which lead to the same consciousness.The answer is simple. Do not assume mechanism. Then the physical universe is what it is,
and your brain, being part of it, is what it is. No need to choose anything.
Of course, this should not be a problem for a non-mechanist, except that he has to provide its non-mechanist theory of mind, and still explain the role of the (not finitely descriptible) substrate in generating its consciousness.So why should that be a problem? My non-mechanist theory of mind is that mind is what brains do.
Why should I need to explain the role of the substrate in generating consciousness? I simply have to do normal science and explore the relationship between my physical brain and my conscious experience. Maybe difficult, but noinsurmountable conceptual issues. Your problems here are all of your own making.
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we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.
@philipthrift
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we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.
I don't think mind (intelligence + consciousness) is a form of matter anymore than fast is a form of racing car, mind is what a form of matter does when it is organized in certain ways.
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
On 3 Dec 2019, at 23:06, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 8:03 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:On 3 Dec 2019, at 03:18, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:My brain currently has only one state.How do you know that? How could you know that.It is a pretty good hypothesis.Other states may be consistent with my current conscious state, but these do not exist. The idea that I am a superposition of all brain states consistent with my consciousness is just idle speculation. How would you ever prove such a thing?We cannot prove the existence of a physical universe, and if we assume mechanism, we cannot see how a universe could choose one state against the infinitely many others which lead to the same consciousness.The answer is simple. Do not assume mechanism. Then the physical universe is what it is,In which theory of mind? Once you assume non-mechanism, you need to give your theory of mind, and explain how it allows a unique universe.
On 4 Dec 2019, at 21:04, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.John K ClarkI don't think mind (intelligence + consciousness) is a form of matter anymore than fast is a form of racing car,
mind is what a form of matter does when it is organized in certain ways.
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On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my dog died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding the counterfact I get another dog.
The same thing eventuates tomorrow. Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.
Hence Mechanism is false.
Brent
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On 5 Dec 2019, at 01:22, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 9:33 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:On 3 Dec 2019, at 23:06, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 8:03 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:On 3 Dec 2019, at 03:18, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:My brain currently has only one state.How do you know that? How could you know that.It is a pretty good hypothesis.Other states may be consistent with my current conscious state, but these do not exist. The idea that I am a superposition of all brain states consistent with my consciousness is just idle speculation. How would you ever prove such a thing?We cannot prove the existence of a physical universe, and if we assume mechanism, we cannot see how a universe could choose one state against the infinitely many others which lead to the same consciousness.The answer is simple. Do not assume mechanism. Then the physical universe is what it is,In which theory of mind? Once you assume non-mechanism, you need to give your theory of mind, and explain how it allows a unique universe.No I don't. It is only in your mind that such a thing is necessary.
Science does not need to explain everything before it gets started.
A theory of mind can develop in the normal course of science -- it is not an a priori requirement.
In fact, quantum mechanics has moved resolutely in the direction of eliminating any requirement of mind, measurement, or observers as fundamentals for the theory.
Consequently mechanism, postulating that the physical universe arises out of the statistics over all consistent extensions of the computations underlying consciousness, is going in completely the wrong direction.
By making consciousness central to your theory,
you are destroying all possibility of an objective science.
Putting the observer as a central element of the theory is what went wrong with the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. The elimination of the personal, the mind, and the observer is central to modern physics.
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On 5 Dec 2019, at 02:12, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 10:44 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my dog died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding the counterfact I get another dog. The same thing eventuates tomorrow. Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.
Hence Mechanism is false.I think the point Bruno is making is that consciousness requires "counterfactual correctness”,
by which he appears to mean that consciousness must be such that if the inputs are changed (counterfactually), then the output must also change.
This hypothesis -- that consciousness requires this "counterfactuall correctness" -- was introduced ad hoc in order to protect the movie graph argument. If we take the sequence of states through which a computation proceeds to give a particular conscious experience and reproduce exactly those states on a film or something similar, then running through those states will reproduce the same conscious experience. They want to avoid this conclusion, so they impose the restriction that the sequence of state must be "counterfactually correct", i.e., it must respond differently to different input -- which the movie graph, being fixed, clearly cannot.
That this ad hoc manoeuvre does not prove anything about consciousness was shown by Maudlin in his "Olympia" argument.
One can restore counterfactual correctness by additional ad hoc additions to the graph, without altering the fact that the movie record still reproduces the conscious experience.
The "competition" is irrelevant to consciousness in this case.
Bruce
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On 5 Dec 2019, at 02:12, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:
The "competition" is irrelevant to consciousness in this case
?Bruno
On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my dog died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding the counterfact I get another dog.
In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant here, but it has to make sense)
The same thing eventuates tomorrow. Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.
You will need to elaborate this part. You lost me here.
Hence Mechanism is false.
?
Bruno
Brent
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On 5 Dec 2019, at 02:12, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 10:44 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my dog died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding the counterfact I get another dog. The same thing eventuates tomorrow. Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.
Hence Mechanism is false.
I think the point Bruno is making is that consciousness requires "counterfactual correctness”,
Not just “consciousness”, also the simpler notion of computation requires or even define a notion of counterfactual correctness. It is not much more than a semantic for the “if A then B else C”.
by which he appears to mean that consciousness must be such that if the inputs are changed (counterfactually), then the output must also change.
… must also change (counterfactually). OK.
This hypothesis -- that consciousness requires this "counterfactuall correctness" -- was introduced ad hoc in order to protect the movie graph argument. If we take the sequence of states through which a computation proceeds to give a particular conscious experience and reproduce exactly those states on a film or something similar, then running through those states will reproduce the same conscious experience. They want to avoid this conclusion, so they impose the restriction that the sequence of state must be "counterfactually correct", i.e., it must respond differently to different input -- which the movie graph, being fixed, clearly cannot.
Who they? Not me, and Maudlin makes that move to get a reductio ad absurdum of having both mechanism and materialism. Then at the end he choses materialism, where I keep Mechanism, but both Maudlin and me showed that indeed it is absurd to believe in both mechanism and the idea that consciousness is related exclusively to some material events.
That this ad hoc manoeuvre does not prove anything about consciousness was shown by Maudlin in his "Olympia" argument.
That is weird. Maudlin, and men did prove something about consciousness, mechanism and materialism.
We show that materialism -> non mechanism, or equivalently that mechanism -> non materialism. You can’t have them both.
One can restore counterfactual correctness by additional ad hoc additions to the graph, without altering the fact that the movie record still reproduces the conscious experience.
But the added piece have no role in the actual computation, and so that would endow the movie with consciousnes, but also the movies with the holes, and all consciousness will supervene on anything, making the theory inconsistent.
It is much simpler to study what is a computation, and understand that consciousness is in the computation, not in this or that implementation of the computation, except statistically below our substitution level.
The "competition" is irrelevant to consciousness in this case.
?
Bruno
Bruce--
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On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my dog died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding the counterfact I get another dog.
In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant here, but it has to make sense)
So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs". You meant responses in some different world, where the input and the response (and maybe everything else) are different.
On 6 Dec 2019, at 00:45, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my dog died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding the counterfact I get another dog.
In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant here, but it has to make sense)
So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs". You meant responses in some different world, where the input and the response (and maybe everything else) are different.
Brent
The same thing eventuates tomorrow. Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.
You will need to elaborate this part. You lost me here.
Hence Mechanism is false.
?
Bruno
Brent
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On 6 Dec 2019, at 00:53, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/5/2019 9:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 5 Dec 2019, at 02:12, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 10:44 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my dog died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding the counterfact I get another dog. The same thing eventuates tomorrow. Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.
Hence Mechanism is false.
I think the point Bruno is making is that consciousness requires "counterfactual correctness”,
Not just “consciousness”, also the simpler notion of computation requires or even define a notion of counterfactual correctness. It is not much more than a semantic for the “if A then B else C”.
by which he appears to mean that consciousness must be such that if the inputs are changed (counterfactually), then the output must also change.
… must also change (counterfactually). OK.
This hypothesis -- that consciousness requires this "counterfactuall correctness" -- was introduced ad hoc in order to protect the movie graph argument. If we take the sequence of states through which a computation proceeds to give a particular conscious experience and reproduce exactly those states on a film or something similar, then running through those states will reproduce the same conscious experience. They want to avoid this conclusion, so they impose the restriction that the sequence of state must be "counterfactually correct", i.e., it must respond differently to different input -- which the movie graph, being fixed, clearly cannot.
Who they? Not me, and Maudlin makes that move to get a reductio ad absurdum of having both mechanism and materialism. Then at the end he choses materialism, where I keep Mechanism, but both Maudlin and me showed that indeed it is absurd to believe in both mechanism and the idea that consciousness is related exclusively to some material events.
That this ad hoc manoeuvre does not prove anything about consciousness was shown by Maudlin in his "Olympia" argument.
That is weird. Maudlin, and men did prove something about consciousness, mechanism and materialism.
We show that materialism -> non mechanism, or equivalently that mechanism -> non materialism. You can’t have them both.
But it assumes that computation exists in the abstract…
simply because there's a thing we invented called the existential quantifier.
It's as weak as St Anslem's ontological proof; which tellingly Goedel thought he could make sound.
Brent
One can restore counterfactual correctness by additional ad hoc additions to the graph, without altering the fact that the movie record still reproduces the conscious experience.
But the added piece have no role in the actual computation, and so that would endow the movie with consciousnes, but also the movies with the holes, and all consciousness will supervene on anything, making the theory inconsistent.
It is much simpler to study what is a computation, and understand that consciousness is in the computation, not in this or that implementation of the computation, except statistically below our substitution level.
The "competition" is irrelevant to consciousness in this case.
?
Bruno
Bruce--
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On 6 Dec 2019, at 02:30, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/5/2019 4:28 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 10:45 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my dog died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding the counterfact I get another dog.
In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant here, but it has to make sense)
So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs". You meant responses in some different world, where the input and the response (and maybe everything else) are different.
The whole question about counterfactuals relates back to philosophical questions about what counterfactuals can possible mean when the antecedent is manifestly false. I think it was Lewis who proposed an analysis of causation in terms of counterfactuals, giving them meaning through the concept of "possible worlds". Philosophy has moved on past this understanding of counterfactuals, but it seems that Bruno is attached to the idea of multiple worlds, so he thinks that consciousness depends on a "possible worlds" understanding of the response to counterfactual inputs.
Bruno is a logician, so he looks at in terms of Kripke's possible worlds modal logic.
But unlike a physicist who takes mathematics and logic to be rules of language intended to conserve the validity of inferences in the language, he takes them to be proscriptive of reality.
I'm bothered by his modal logic of "B" which seems to morph betweeen "believes" and "proves" (beweisbar) which he justifies by saying he's referring to perfect reasoner who therefore proves, and believes, everything provable.
But this not a model of human reasoning.
Factual doesn't enter into it, so how can counterfactual.
Brent
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On 6 Dec 2019, at 00:45, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.
Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy. I have a dog. If my dog died I'd get another dog. My dog didn't die today. The counterfact then is that my dog did die today. So responding the counterfact I get another dog.
In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant here, but it has to make sense)
So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs". You meant responses in some different world, where the input and the response (and maybe everything else) are different.
That is modal realism, but I made precise I don’t use this here. That is why I said “relatively real or not”. Usually, the counterfactuals and their consequences are judged unreal, but in modal realist context, like with Everett and with Mechanism, they get real (with high or low relative measure).The counterfactual reality are always as close as possible as the factual input. We can say, if Hitler was a nice guy there would not have been an holocaust (that is a common reasonable counterfactual). But we cannot say (to illustrate counterfactuals) “If Hitler was good, pigs would been able to fly”. That is not a counterfactual. It is at best a statement that Hitler (perhaps by definition of Hitler) is intrinsically bad, or something.
Similarly “if the alarm did not ring, the plane would have crashed” is a reasonable counterfactual statement. But “If the alarm did not ring chicken would have teeth”, would mean that it is absolutely impossible that the alarm could not ring.
It's as weak as St Anslem's ontological proof; which tellingly Goedel thought he could make sound.
This has nothing to do with the existence of computation, which you can prove from Peano arithmetic once you accept the Church-Turing definition.
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