Re: To observe is to......

From: David Nyman <david.nyman.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 11:46:08 -0000

Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote:

[Colin]
> I know enough about EC. You know enough about COMP. The goal is to get to
> a more concrete formal understanding of the difference between reality and
> computation, physics, logic, maths and 'being' through contrasting Entropy
> Calculus (EC) as the actual logic of the noumenon (reality as a
> mathematics, which becomes a physics when you are IN it, made of it,
> trying to understand it) with COMP, as a 'master abstractor' of
> everything.

[Scene: Night-time. Fathers Ted and Dougal are in bed.

Ted: "Dougal, that's a great idea! Can you tell me more?"
Dougal: "Whoa, Ted - I want out! I can't take the pressure."]

......However, purely on the understanding that I'm a mere COMP
kibbitzer, and of course -
> This is to be FUN.
> Not work.
- let us by all means throw caution to the wind.

[Colin]
> STEP 1: The noumenon that is EC
>
> In EC I would write U(.) (for universe)
>
> NOTES:
> 1) U(.) is our singular reality. It. The only one we truly know.
> 2) U(.) is not an abstracted computation.
> 3) U(.) is not a mathematical abstraction of reality.
> 4) U(.) is treated as a function for reasons of the later logic
> 5) U(.) is merely a symbol which 'points' to reality as a computation.
> U(.) is an interpretive tool, not a generative tool.
> 6) U(.) is made of EC/recursive logic of a class as not yet defined.
> 7) U(.) is literally made of a relationship between the original axiomatic
> origins.
> 8) U(.) has no 'appearance', is not an 'observation' of anything.
> 9) A side issue: U(.) can be regarded as a 'free-form' cellular automata
> which manufactures its own cells and the cells and their relationships
> emerge as collaborations of cells within cells. eg. At one level an 'atom'
> is a cell. Also, if you collected all wolframs 'cellular automata
> drawings' and condensed them into single cell in a new collective CA,
> making whole CAs relate to each other ...and so on... to an arbitrary
> depth, you can get an idea of where I'm headed.

[David]
The first comment that I would make for clarity is that your definition
of the function U(.) is of course an abstraction (as you acknowledge,
it merely points to reality). As you said earlier, our only *direct*
grasp of the noumenon is our subjectivity (it's Real In The Sense I
Am Real). Everything else consists in what we can mutually 'point'
to via relational modelling and abstraction. The 'modesty' of COMP
entails the acknowledgement that what we can claim to 'know' is
limited to what can be ascertained by interviewing 'machines' that
function relationally - and this includes ourselves. The 'ground'
of all this (i.e. the ultimate, not the relative, turtle) can't be
captured in this process, but COMP's point is that this is irrelevant
to what is being explicated. We deal only in relata. Hence COMP is at
pains to define the formal system to be used to define and manipulate
the relata.

(This last point may be confusing. In a recursive, nested reality,
there may be any number of 'turtles' that instantiate 1-person
povs, each of which is 'inaccessible' at this level, in virtue of
its being the 'medium' of communication for 3-person relational
transactions that occur *in terms of this medium*. In this sense, the
1-person medium is 'incommunicable', but the data distributed via
the medium is capable of re-instantiation, thus recreating 1-person
experiential analogs. This is a process that occurs both within, and
between, 'selves'. The transactions entailed in this can be
modelled independent of any commitment to what, if anything in all of
this, might be deemed RITSIAR.)

[Colin]
> 10) The reality of EC is such that the |+| is NOT POSSIBLE! In other words:
> X(.) cannot exist without NOTX(.). There is no real boundary. No real
> separation. At the same time U(.) is not a continuum in the
> spatial/mathematical abstraction sense, although for practical empirical
> purposes, because of the sheer deth of the structure, it can be regarded
> as a continuum at certain scales.
>
> 11) 'fundamental building blocks are IMPOSSIBLE in EC. Fundamental
> building blocks means that there exists X(.) and NOTX(.) for which no |+|
> exists. This assumption is the 'biggee' about which science is curently
> deluded.
>
> 12) Having said (11) the 'axioms' are in fact 'fundamental'... but "the
> ways of the turtles" offers a way out of this - which will become apparent
> later (I hope!)

[David]
Vis-a-vis your comments re boundaries vs. the continuum: I have a
sneaking suspicion that we come up against some sort of conceptual
barrier in this area. We are trying to describe or model a domain that
appears to have profoundly conflicting characteristics (e.g. particle /
wave). There are ways of dealing with this mathematically, but in the
end they amount to tricks that beg the question, if 'reality' is
our goal (and this is of course is the problem, not the solution).
Perhaps we need to accept that whatever we're embedded in embraces
what inevitably looks like paradox in terms of the relata that emerge
from it - i.e. a necessarily seamless whole that is at the same time
'divided'.

[Colin]
> NEXT STEP:
> I am going at this TOP-DOWN. When that is done the 'bottom up' axiomatic
> beginnings will emerge. I hope. On route towards an empirically testable
> outcome we'll look at what happens when X(.) is considered to be a human
> and how to depict a human including all the layers of nested hierarchy
> that we see as brain material. I'll also introduce a 'being' operator.
>
> We can later look at COMP equivalence at any level of what I have called
> in the past 'Turing Granularity'. A bit like what Chalmers did in his
> 'silicon replacement' zombie thought experiments....Except at multiple
> scales. At some point consciousness will be effected/affected. This will
> be COMP replacement instead of silicon. Bruno(COMP)-granularity? :-)

[David]
IMO in order to do this we will need to model the 'sensible matter'
aspect of 'brain material', which is precisely what we do not
'see' when we look at brains, or for that matter, computers. In
other words, if we are right, we will never recover the qualitative
1-person by modelling 'matter' or 'computation' solely in terms
of NOTX(.) relata. The instantiation must compute the *medium* in order
to incorporate (sic) the message - this is the issue of substitution
level, i.e. what is required to re-instantiate (an analog or copy of)
X(.)

Simple. Next step please!

David


> Ok David,
> Let's start afresh and do this. At least give it a go. This is to be FUN.
> Not work.
>
> I know enough about EC. You know enough about COMP. The goal is to get to
> a more concrete formal understanding of the difference between reality and
> computation, physics, logic, maths and 'being' through contrasting Entropy
> Calculus (EC) as the actual logic of the noumenon (reality as a
> mathematics, which becomes a physics when you are IN it, made of it,
> trying to understand it) with COMP, as a 'master abstractor' of
> everything.
>
> We can jointly address epistemological and ontological issues along the
> way. We can do this incrementally, one posting at a time. Nice and slowly
> so we can follow it and point to where we fly off into
> respective weeds. I can pose symbols and relata. You can tear it to bits
> and interpose COMP interpretations.
> ======================================================
> STEP 1: The noumenon that is EC
>
> In EC I would write U(.) (for universe)
>
> NOTES:
> 1) U(.) is our singular reality. It. The only one we truly know.
> 2) U(.) is not an abstracted computation.
> 3) U(.) is not a mathematical abstraction of reality.
> 4) U(.) is treated as a function for reasons of the later logic
> 5) U(.) is merely a symbol which 'points' to reality as a computation.
> U(.) is an interpretive tool, not a generative tool.
> 6) U(.) is made of EC/recursive logic of a class as not yet defined.
> 7) U(.) is literally made of a relationship between the original axiomatic
> origins.
> 8) U(.) has no 'appearance', is not an 'observation' of anything.
> 9) A side issue: U(.) can be regarded as a 'free-form' cellular automata
> which manufactures its own cells and the cells and their relationships
> emerge as collaborations of cells within cells. eg. At one level an 'atom'
> is a cell. Also, if you collected all wolframs 'cellular automata
> drawings' and condensed them into single cell in a new collective CA,
> making whole CAs relate to each other ...and so on... to an arbitrary
> depth, you can get an idea of where I'm headed.
> ====================================================
>
> STEP 2: Ontological demarcation (notional virtual cells)
>
> In EC, if there is a chunk of noumenon that I would wish to depict I can
> draw a completely fictional CLOSED boundary around any subset of U(.), say
> X(.) and define its relationship to U(.) thus:
>
> U(.) = X(.) |+| NOTX(.) (1)
>
> NOTES:
> 1) |+| must be regarded as messy/complex.
> 2) |+| must be regarded not as addition, but SURGICAL RESECTION or JOINING
> 3) |+| includes all entropy in and out of X(.).
> 4) |+| is to be thought of as a 2 way interchange over a notional
> boundary.
> 5) INPUTS to X(.) are OUTPUTS from NOTX(.). If X(.) was a human then |+|
> includes inputs (food/water/photons/heat/potential/kinetic energy,
> impacting nuetrinos, cosmic rays, everything)
> 6) OUTPUTS from X(.) are INPUTS to NOTX(.) waste material, heat energy,
> phonons, kinetic energy dissapation, potnetial energy reliquishment and so
> on).
> 7) |+|, despite all the above complexity, mentally can be conceptualised
> as addition. Just a very very messy addition.
> 8) X(.) and NOTX(.), like U(.) are NOT abstractions. They are pointers to
> real EC entities just like U(.)
> 9) boundary CLOSURE makes the whole system lossless in an entropy sense.
> This means that |+|, as a 'joining' of X(.) and NOTX(.)
>
> 10) The reality of EC is such that the |+| is NOT POSSIBLE! In other words:
> X(.) cannot exist without NOTX(.). There is no real boundary. No real
> separation. At the same time U(.) is not a continuum in the
> spatial/mathematical abstraction sense, although for practical empirical
> purposes, because of the sheer deth of the structure, it can be regarded
> as a continuum at certain scales.
>
> 11) 'fundamental building blocks are IMPOSSIBLE in EC. Fundamental
> building blocks means that there exists X(.) and NOTX(.) for which no |+|
> exists. This assumption is the 'biggee' about which science is curently
> deluded.
>
> 12) Having said (11) the 'axioms' are in fact 'fundamental'... but "the
> ways of the turtles" offers a way out of this - which will become apparent
> later (I hope!)
> =============================================
>
> NEXT STEP:
> I am going at this TOP-DOWN. When that is done the 'bottom up' axiomatic
> beginnings will emerge. I hope. On route towards an empirically testable
> outcome we'll look at what happens when X(.) is considered to be a human
> and how to depict a human including all the layers of nested hierarchy
> that we see as brain material. I'll also introduce a 'being' operator.
>
> We can later look at COMP equivalence at any level of what I have called
> in the past 'Turing Granularity'. A bit like what Chalmers did in his
> 'silicon replacement' zombie thought experiments....Except at multiple
> scales. At some point consciousness will be effected/affected. This will
> be COMP replacement instead of silicon. Bruno(COMP)-granularity? :-)
> ======================================================
>
> Over to you. On with the fun.
>
> Colin Hales


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Received on Wed Oct 18 2006 - 07:46:26 PDT

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