Thank you all for an interesting thread.
Bruno, you wrote:
"I believe in free will, but I would prefer to say simply just "will".
Free-will is a bit of an oxymoron"
Wouldn't it be more correct to say that (assuming comp) you DON'T
believe in free will, then? If everything (that the physical laws of
the universe / programme allow) happens anyway, then free will (in the
traditional sense) is an illusion, I would say.
> I present an (older) argument that if we take the hypothesis that "we"
> are (turing) emulable, then we can doubt that there is a "physical
> level" at all.
> Put in another way, the appearance of a physical level could be a
> higher-order cognitive phenomenon, not specifically human, but
> "universal machinian", if I can say. Physical laws could emerge from
> some gluing property of machine's possible histories. In fine, the
> laws of physics would come from statistical relation on numbers
> relations.
I'm glad you bring this up, because it really puzzles me. How can
physical conceps like constants and energy, etc, be (or emerge from)
pure mathematics? In the usual definitions of mathematics there are NO
physical concepts. If your answer is that "the appearance of a
physical level could be [just] a higher-order cognitive phenomenon"
then mathematical structures is all that exist. In that case we will
have to re-define the meaning of mathematics a lot, I guess, including
a description of HOW mathematics produces a "cognitive phenomenon"?
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Received on Sat Nov 29 2008 - 23:34:35 PST