Re: Maudlin's Demon (Argument)

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 15:43:48 +0200

Le 05-oct.-06, à 13:55, <jamikes.domain.name.hidden> a écrit :

> Can we 'emulate' totality? I don't think so.


I don't always insist on that but with just the "Church thesis" part of
comp, it can be argued that we can emulate the third person describable
totality, and indeed this is what the Universal Dovetailer do.

The key thing, but technical (I was beginning to explain Tom and
George), is that such an emulation can be shown to destroy any
reductionist account of that totality, and still better, make the first
person totality (George's first person plenitude perhaps) infinitely
bigger (even non computably bigger, even unameable) than the 3 person
totality.
There is a Skolem-Carroll phenomena: the first person "inside" view of
the 3-totality is infinitely bigger than the 3-totality, like in the
"Wonderland" where a tree can hide a palace ...




> Can we copy the total,
> unlimited wholeness?

Not really. It is like the quantum states. No clonable, but if known,
preparable in many quantities. At this stage it is only an analogy.


> I don't think so.
> What I feel is a restriction to "think" within a model and draw
> conclusions
> from it towards beyond it.

Mmmh... It is here that logician have made progress the last century,
but nobody (except the experts) knows about those progress.



> Which looks to me like a category-mistake.


It looks, but perhaps it isn't. I agree it seems unbelievable, but
somehow,we (the machine) can jump outside ourself ... (with some risk,
though).


Bruno

PS Er..., to Markpeaty and other readers of Parfit: I think that his
use of the term "reductionist" is misleading, and due in part to his
lack of clearcut distinction between the person points of view.


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


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Received on Fri Oct 06 2006 - 09:44:10 PDT

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