Re: Platonism vs Realism WAS: ROADMAP (well, not yet really...

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 16:18:45 +0200

Le 22-août-06, à 15:26, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :

> OK, I suppose you could say "I'm intelligent" but not "I + my
> environment are intelligent".
> That still allows that an inputless program might contain intelligent
> beings, and you are left
> with the problem of how to decide whether a physical system is
> implementing such a program
> given that you can't talk to it.


People who believes that inputs (being either absolute-material or
relative-platonical) are needed for consciousness should not believe
that we can be conscious in a dream, given the evidence that the brain
is almost completely cut out from the environment during rem sleep. I
guess they have no problem with comatose people either.
Of course they cannot be even just troubled by the UD, which is a
program without inputs and without outputs.

Now, without digging in the movie-graph, I would still be interested if
someone accepting "standard comp" (Peter's expression) could explain
how a digital machine could correctly decide that her environment is
"real-physical". If such machine and reasoning exist, it will be done
in Platonia, and, worst, assuming comp, it will be done as correctly as
the real machine argument. This would lead to the fact that in
Platonia, there are (many) immaterial machines proving *correctly* that
they are immaterial. Contradiction.

Remark: the key idea which is used here is that not only programs
belong to Platonia, but their relative computations also. It is
important to keep the distinction between (static) programs and their
"dynamical" computations. I will write Fi, as the function computed by
the ith programs in some universal enumeration of partial recursive
functions (like an infinite list of fortran programs, say). I will
write Fi(x) for the value of that function with input x, if that value
exists. I will write sFi(x) the "s-trace" of that program (with input
x), where the trace stops after the sth steps in the relative run of
Fi(x). The trace is computer scientist name for a description of the
computational steps---it can be shown that such computational steps can
always be defined for the Fi and Wi.
I will define a (3-PERSON) computation of Fi(x) as being the sequence
1Fi(x), 2Fi(x), 3Fi(x), etc ...
This is well defined relatively to some universal number or code. In
this sense, computations belong to Platonia. The reason why I feel
myself here and now can then be reduced to the relative 1-person comp
indeterminacy a-la Washington/Moscow. Note that the adjective
"relative" is capital here. Without it, the indexical conception of
time (and space) would not work.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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Received on Tue Aug 22 2006 - 10:20:37 PDT

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