Le 02-janv.-07, à 08:14, Mark Peaty a écrit :
> SP: ' In the end, what is "right" is an irreducible personal belief,
> which you can try to change by appeal to emotions or by example, but
> not by appeal to logic or empirical facts. And in fact I feel much
> safer that way: if someone honestly believed that he knew what was
> "right" as surely as he knew 2+2=4, he would be a very dangerous
> person. Religious fanatics are not dangerous because they want to do
> evil, but because they want to do good. '
Just to be clear, I do agree with Stathis here. Completely. I have
already argue this is even a provable consequence of comp (or the
arithmetical comp).
>
> MP: I agree with this, saving only that, on a 'numbers' basis, there
> are those whose personal evolution takes them beyond the dynamic of
> 'good' or 'evil' into the domain of power for its own sake. This
> entails complete loss of empathic ability and I think it could be
> argued that such a person is 'legislating' himself out of the human
> species.
OK, except I don't see what you mean by on a "number" basis. We know
that number have a lot of quantitative interesting relationships, but
after Godel, Solovay etc. we do know that numbers have astonishing
qualitative relationship to (like the hypostases to mention it).
>
> MP: I think a key point with 'irreducible personal belief' is that
> the persons in question need to acknowledge the beliefs as such and
> take responsibility for them. I believe we have to point this out,
> whenever we get the opportunity, because generally most people are
> reluctant to engage in analysis of their own beliefs, in public
> anyway. I think part of the reason for this is the cultural climate
> [meme-scape?] in which Belief in a G/god/s or uncritical Faith are
> still held to be perfectly respectable. This cultural climate is what
> Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet have been criticising in recent
> books and articles.
Except that Dawking and Dennet fall in their own trap, and perpetuates
the myth of a "physical universe" as an explanation. They continue to
burry the mind/body problem under the rug.
>
> SP: 'I am not entirely convinced that comp is true'
>
> MP: At the moment I am satisfied that 'comp' is NOT true, certainly
> in any format that asserts that 'integers' are all that is needed.
> 'Quantum' is one thing, but 'digital' is quite another :-)
OK, but comp is *digital* mechanism. Then it is a theorem that a
digital machine cannot distinguish a "physically real computational
history" with a purely mathematical or even arithmetical computational
history. You can "add" Matter in the immaterial brain: it will change
nothing unless you give a non turing emulable role to that Matter. Why
not add magic directly?
Then the quantum has to be justified from the digital (that is not
trivial, see my url for more, or ask questions).
> The main problem [fact I would prefer to say] is that existence is
> irreducible whereas numbers or Number be dependent upon something/s
> existing.
>
> MP: Why are we not zombies? The answer is in the fact of
> self-referencing.
Right!
> In our case [as hominids] there are peculiarities of construction and
> function arisen from our evolutionary history, ...
Sure,
> ... but there is nothing in principle to deny self-awareness from a
> silicon-electronic entity that embodied sufficient details within a
> model of self in the world.
This is *comp* (unless you think about putative non turing emulable
silicon electronic).
> The existence of such a model would constitute its mind, broadly
> speaking, and the updating of the model of self in the world would be
> the experience of self awareness. What it would be like TO BE the
> updating of such a model of self in the world is something we will
> probably have to wait awhile to be told :-)
How could we ever know? Of course, *assuming* the comp hyp, we already
know: it is like being us here and now.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Tue Jan 02 2007 - 07:51:19 PST