On 18 Nov 2008, at 14:14, Kory Heath wrote:
>
>
> On Nov 18, 2008, at 3:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> This question is addressed mainly to Jason and Kory, who, it seems
>> to me, have still a little problem with step 7, if I may say,
>
> As far as I know, I understand and accept your step 7, but clearly
> something I've said makes you think otherwise. I'm going to reply to
> your previous replies to me, but life is getting in the way, so it may
> be a day or two.
>
> In the meantime, I at least want to say that I'm pretty sure you've
> read a lot more into my term "mathematical physicalism" than I
> intended. I use "mathematical physicalism" simply to refer to the idea
> that the materialist's picture of matter is problematic in the way
> that the vitalists idea of the "life force" is problematic, and that
> mathematical facts-of-the-matter unproblematically fill the role that
> this problematic "physical matter" is supposed to fill.
OK. But then what's the difference with mathematicalism?
> I thought that
> you agreed with this, but with all of your talk about how you don't
> have "positions", I'm not so sure anymore. :)
>
> Anyway, I *don't* intend for "mathematical physicalism" to refer to
> (for instance) the idea that the Physics that emerges from the gluing
> conditions on machine dreams is capable of being described by a
> computable mathematical object.
OK.
Note that eventually that idea can be true, but the point of the UDA
is to show that if this is true, this has to be derived in computer
science.
It is not a question of choice, or position.
> (Is that what you thought I was
> saying?)
I have made a sentence which could indeed be interpreted like that.
The fact is that I believe mathemaricalism is probably false too, but
it could be false in the same sense that incompleteness phenomenon à-
la- Skolem-Tarski could be used to justify that "the whole of
mathematics" cannot be a mathematical object itself. Now I know that
sophisticated set theories, like Quine New Foundation (NF), can be
used to built "realm of sets in which the Universe of Sets is a set
itself". But this would lead us too far of the present concern with
matter and mind. The nature of the ultimate big thing is, well, not
conceivable by us. Plotinus ONE is a good approximation perhaps ....
If you agree that physics has become a statistic on computations "as
seen from inside", everything is ok. Then MGA will show what you
already believe, which is that the computations does not need to be
implemented in our, or any other, stuffy primitive material universe.
> In fact, I suspect that the physics that emerges from from
> comp is "uncomputable", or worse.
Yes? Note this is a problem with comp, given that the empirical world
seem computable (cf Everett). But even this is not clear (cf
Copenhagen). The problem here is that we have to distinguish the
observable cosmos (one history), the multiverse (big picture on all
relative observables), and the unknown "physical" thing, or comp-
physical thing which we have to extract from the relative measure on
the computations.
> But I don't know enough math and
> logic to go any further than that at the moment.
>
> Also in the meantime, where can I now find your steps 1-8? All of the
> old links seem to be dead.
You mean "links in the list". This happens. And the old links do not
work. But the UDA in 8 steps can be found here (and this link should
work):
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
You can choose between the PDF or HTML. The unique slide is useful as
a memo for the numbering of the steps.
Tell me if you have a download problem.
Best,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Tue Nov 18 2008 - 12:28:09 PST