Hi Bruno,
>> So, basically, you are saying that I'm offering an alternative
>> argument against materialism, correct?
>
> It seems to me you were going in that direction, yes.
>
Well, *I* was suggesting that we run up against the problem of time in
*either* direction (physical reality / mathematical reality); so the
real problem would be a naive view of time, rather than COMP + MAT.
But, you are probably right: the problem really only applies to MAT.
On the other hand, I might try to take up the argument again after
reading UDA. :)
> With the MEC hypothesis, a "believer" in comp "go to hell". (Where a
> "believer"in , is someone who takes p for granted).
> Comp, is like self-consistency, a self-observing machine can guess it,
> hope it, (or fear it), but can never take it for granted. It *is*
> theological. No machine can prove its theology, but Löbian machine can
> study the complete theology of more simple Löbian machines, find the
> invariant for the consistent extensions, and lift it to themselves,
> keeping consistency by "consciously" being aware that this is has to
> be taken as an interrogation, it is not for granted, so that saying
> "yes" to the doctor needs an act of faith, and never can be imposed.
> (Of course we can argue biology has already "bet" on it).
Yes, this is fundamentally interesting :).
> Maudlin shows that for a special computation, which supports in time
> some consciousness (by using the (physical) supervenience thesis), you
> can build a device doing the same computation with much less physical
> activity, actually with almost no physical activity at all. The
> natural reply is that such a machine has no more the right
> counterfactual behavior. Then Maudlin shows that you can render the
> counterfactual correctness to such machine by adding, what will be for
> the special computation, just inert material.
> But this give to inert material something which plays no role, or
> would give prescience to elementary material in computations; from
> which you can conclude that MEC and MAT does not works well together.
I am not sure this convinces me. If the "inert" material is useful to
the computation in the counterfactual situations, then it is useful,
cannot be removed.
> Abram, are you aware that Godel's incompleteness follows "easily" (=
> in few lines) from Church thesis? Not the second theorem, but the
> first, even a stronger form of the first.
No, I do not know that one.
>> --Abram
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Received on Fri Nov 28 2008 - 17:20:26 PST