Bruno,
Just coming at this after not thinking about it much. Sometimes
that's an advantage, but sometimes it results in forgetting pertinent
points that were understood before. So if it's the latter, I hope you
forgive me.
Taking two of your statements and trying to synthesize them, first
this one:
On Dec 27, 11:51 am, Bruno Marchal <marc....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> ...
> Then I propose an argument that IF we say yes to the doctor, that is,
> IF there is a level of self-description such that a digital
> substitution preserves my identity feeling and my consciousness THEN
> numbers (or combinators, ...) have to be enough at the ontological
> level. The rest can be described as internal gluing epistomologies,
> the lawful "many dreams". This is going in *your* direction, it seems
> to me.
>
>From your first statement, my initial "off the cuff" (quick) reaction
was that there is a contradiction between two parts of the supposed
theory of everything:
A) "(IF) there is a level of self-description such that a digital
substitution preserves my identity feeling and my consciousness"
B) "The rest can be described as internal gluing epistomologies, the
lawful "many dreams""
The "rest" in B is truly huge, is it not? And it is part of reality
is it not? Out "internal gluing epistemolgies" are something that is
going on in our mind, and our mind is part of reality. And this
"rest" is larger than anything that can be simulated (digitally,
computably), right? And yet it is something in our consciousness,
that is, it is part of A. It seems that wanting to have non-
simulatable "internal gluing epistemologies" and also have a
simulatable consciousness is like wanting to have your cake and not
have your cake too.
But then perhaps this is not a contradiction in light of your last
statement:
>
> After the discovery of the Universal Machine, the Mechanist
> hypothesis, or even just the "strong AI" thesis, is not a
> reductionism, it is an openness of our mind toward a peculiar Unknown
> which invites itself to our table.
>
> Bruno
The supposed contradiction was that it seemed you were wanting
reductionism and non-reductionism at the same time. But here you say
otherwise. It seems that you are saying that if our consciousness is
simulatable then there is an Unknown that will always remain unknown,
in other words, this implies that there can be no theory of
everything.
Tom
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Sat Dec 27 2008 - 16:51:01 PST