Le 05-juil.-07, à 02:40, David Nyman a écrit :
> On 03/07/07, Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> > But it might then be
> > questioned how observer and physical narratives could somehow
> > 'converge' on a common or consistent environmental interface as a
> > result of any form of co-evolution. Such a notion would seem to imply
> > that equivalent selection effects could be operating on both
> > environments despite their orthogonal orientation. It is not
> > immediately apparent why this should be so.
>
> As far as I understand, this is *the* problem. It seems insoluble
> untill you take into account explicitly the incompleteness phenomenon
> which put high constraint of what sound machines can believe, bet,
> observe, feel ... (that what the hypostases are all about).
>
> DN: On reflection, I have something else to ask about this. If I
> have understood, the comp project is to give an account, as you say,
> of what emerges from interviewing (computationally) sound machines
> about their beliefs, bets, observations, feelings etc.
OK. I would insist that the "comp project" (extract physics from comp)
is really just a comp obligation. This is what is supposed to be shown
by the UDA (+ MOVIE-GRAPH). Are you OK with this. It *is*
counterintuitive.
Then, the interview of the universal machine is "just" a way to do the
extraction of physics in a constructive way. It is really the
subtleties of the incompleteness phenomena which makes this interview
highly non trivial.
> In other words, the maximal description of their mental and physical
> worlds that is possible under such constraints. What would still be
> indeterminate would be exactly how a specific machine's account could
> be correlated with a physical description of the machine itself: i.e.
> the perennial 'mind-body problem'. But do you believe that there can
> be a way of closing this question theoretically? Is comp agnostic to
> this correlation being 'functional' or 'physical'?
I think that the interview provides the best we can hope concerning the
mind-body problem in the comp frame. This could still currently lead to
a refutation of comp in case empirical facts contradicts the
comp-physics (the physics extracted from comp). There is no direct
(still less one-one) correlation between the mental and the physical,
that is the physical supervenience thesis is incompatible with the comp
hyp.
[A quale of a pain] felt at time t in place x, is not a product of the
physical activity of a machine, at time t in place x. Rather, it is the
whole quale of [a pain felt at time t in place x] which is associated
with an (immaterial and necessarily unknown) computational state,
itself related to its normal consistent computational continuations.
> Or will 'yes doctor' remain always a gamble in the sense of "you
> picks your theory and you takes your choice"?
Hmmm... It is hard to answer this. Comp makes the "yes doctor" a
gamble, necessarily. That is: assuming the "theory comp" you have to
understand that, by saying yes to the doctor, you are gambling on a
level of substitution. At the same time you make a "gamble" on the
theory comp itself. There is double gamble here.
Now, the first gamble, IF DONE AT THE RIGHT COMP SUBSTITUTION LEVEL, is
comp-equivalent with the natural gamble everybody do when going to
sleep, or just when waiting a nanosecond. In some sense "nature" do
that gamble in our place all the time ... But this is somethjng we
cannot know, still less assert in any scientific way, and that is why I
insist so much on the "theological" aspect of comp. This is important
in practice. It really justify that the truth of the "yes doctor"
entails the absolute fundamental right to say NO to the doctor. The
doctor has to admit he is gambling on a substitution level. If comp is
true we cannot be sure on the choice of the subst. level.
Comp predicts that machine will be more and more "dizzy" when either
introspecting themsleves close enough, or by looking at nature close
enough. The math predicts even thresholds and jumps in that endeavor.
Does this help? I assert some propositions without justifying them,
because the justification are both already on the list, or in my
papers. But, please, don't hesitate to ask for more if interested. From
what I understand about your intuition, you are quite close to the
"natural first person discourse" of the lobian machine. And the closer
you are, the more severe my comments will be on the details, so please
indulge my critical way of talking ...
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Thu Jul 05 2007 - 09:46:02 PDT