Hi, Bruno,
you just 'tricked' me into another response. Let me interject into the post some remarks in Italics - no topical conclusion attached. I apologize for my "concentrate" in this loose form, I meant 'study', 'draw valid conclusions, "find reasons and characteristics for", "understand" etc.
John
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruno Marchal" <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 9:50 AM
Subject: Re: Barbour's mistake: An alternative to a timless Platonia
Hi John,
Le 30-sept.-06, à 21:45, <jamikes.domain.name.hidden> a écrit :
> Whatever we 'concentrate on' for comprehensibility, is *our* way of doing.
> Within our HUMAN comprehension. We cannot >concentrate on things we cannot comprehend.<
I don't understand. We do research because there are things which we don't comprehend with the hope to comprehend them. We don't comprehend the cosmos but we can look at it and learn things.
"We look into what we THINK it "is" - We learn what we think."
> Don't even KNOW such things.<
I can know things like pain and pleasure, although there are no theory which can explain them. But I can look at them and interrogate them.
"So you COMPREHEND pain and pleasure. To have "theories" is secondary , explanation ditto (you KNOW pain and pleasure)"
> We may assume that "there may be
> incomprehensible other features' inaccessible to our >human mind, but *so* they are. So we may say that >numbers (??) or comp CAN comprehend more than
> we do, but nothing can be said about that 'more' in >human discours. We cannot even phantasize about >'those' items.<
I know that many on this list have a trouble with Godel's
incompleteness theorem. The revolutionary character of such a theorem is that it explains how numbers and machines (and we are that, once we assume comp) can apprehend, if not comprehend, their limitations.
Machine can look, well, not right into their blind spot, but on the border of their blind spot, and discover its creative nature.
> What I referred to is that we cannot detail such >unknowables (= the incomprehensibles) into our image->composition of the existence.
> How do you know that (those?) numbers HAVE >limitations to see?
> My "human prejudice" is the recognition of my >limitations< - . <
All what I claim is that this "prejudice" is much more general than human. Even without the comp assumption we can show that all machine developing correct theories about themselves will discover such limitations, and even discover the common mathematical structure of those limitations. The UDA shows the physical laws come from that.
"That is how YOU formulate these concepts in YOUR mind (i.e.
comprehension),"
> If you include into your discours the features >comprehensible for the numbers or comp (beyond the >human one) you must reduce the number- or comp
> comprehensibility to a human level to talk about it.<
The number comprehensibility is a priori simpler, but then longer.
"The way you comprehend and formulate them"
> Like: To turn infinite into very much/big.<
Big finite things are usually more complex than the infinite which has been introduced mainly for simplifying things.
"Ha ha, as being put into our incomprehensible fantasy-world"
> Domesticate the wild.
> I find it neither sad nor comical. I find it >incomprehensible.<
I apologize if I have been a little rough. My point is that many interventions you are doing fit very nicely with what I try to express myself, except that I refer to machine's limitations instead of human limitations (this is natural once we assume the comp hyp.).
"Puzzles me: are WE not ALL machines? Can we 'comprehend' the limitations of some "bigger" (=more comprehensive <G>) construct of which we are part of?"
the study of machine's limitation has become a branch of math and/or computer science, and this gives, assuming comp, a way to tackle more systematically that limitation
phenomena. Of course this leads to more technical posts. I will perhaps put some label like [tech] so that people who wants to skip more technical posts can do it even automatically.
On the contrary the Universal Dovetailer Argument (UDA) needs only a very minimal amount of computer science, to get the idea of universal dovetailing.
I think most people understand the first seven steps of the eight steps
"(Do I envy them)"
version of the UDA like in my "SANE" paper. The 8th step is intrinsically more difficult.
Bruno
"John"
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Wed Oct 04 2006 - 12:09:15 PDT