On 31 Dec 2008, at 03:02, Kim Jones wrote:
>
> Military talk - if you have seen the movie "Contact" (based on Carl
> Sagan's novel of the same name) the character Ellie Arroway (played
> by the superlative Jodie Foster) says this many times as she sits
> inside "the Machine" - the teleporter or whatever that purportedly
> sends her to Vega.
I remember now. And I agree: Jodie Foster is very good to go. I mean
very good. In many movies.
> There is great doubt in the minds of the controllers outside the
> machine that it will work properly but she affirms her deep
> conviction that the voyage should be undertaken in this fashion as
> they continually check in with her during the launch countdown. See
> it if you haven't already - a truly inspirational sci-fi (novel and
> film). Also has a lot to say about the interface of science and
> religion. Are you a Sagan freak? I miss Carl sorely...
>
>>>
>>>
>>> Have teleported it to my screen...
>>
>>
>> You should print it and put it in your kitchen or toilet, and put a
>> big red cross on each step you understand well, so that your
>> partner can see your progress. Well this is just basic self
>> elementary encouragement tricks. Never mind.
>
>
> Good idea. Given that she is ahead of me without even studying any
> of this stuff, maybe SHE should put the big red cross on each step
> when she is happy with my progress!
Excellent. Remember we are platonist, and we have all the time. Better
to go slow and deep than quick and superficial.
>
>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Of course Everett could be wrong, and comp could be wrong, and
>>>> naturalism could be right: but it is up to the naturalist to say
>>>> what
>>>> is the machine's atomic operation that a Turing machine cannot
>>>> complete. If it is the generation of a truly random event, and if
>>>> this
>>>> is based on the wave collapse, then I can understand (but you will
>>>> have to solve all the problem raised by the collapse, you will
>>>> have to
>>>> abandon the theory of relativity like Bohm and Bell suggested,
>>>> etc.).
>>>> Or you say like Searle that "only special machine can think:
>>>> biological brain".
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> If Searle (and Penrose) are right, then why not a simple biological
>>> brain transplant? Why bother with looking for "the right
>>> substitution
>>> level" at all in this case?
>>> Just pilfer a wet, messy brain from a road accident victim and shove
>>> it into your skull. But where would we now stand with respect to the
>>> indeterminacy?
>>>
>>> I asked my partner today whether she felt she would be the same
>>> person
>>> after receiving a biological brain transplant and she said "Of
>>> course
>>> not! I would now be the dead person whose brain I have inherited.
>>> Who
>>> I am is generated only by MY brain." Proves she is a materialist/
>>> physicalist, I guess. We all know people like this. Sigh.
>>
>>
>>
>> Ah gosh Kim, be careful or add enough smileys when you do jokes.
>
>
> OK - will use emoticons from now on - I promise! (I am very slack
> here, agreed, but then - as you now know - the Everything List Court
> Jester reserves the right to lace a lot of his discourse with
> humour! What are court jesters for, after all? Smilies ultimately
> weaken the power of the humour,
I agree with you. Totally. Good comics looks terribly serious.
> just like in (a good many but by no means all) Hollywood films where
> the moral of the story is ALWAYS given at the end in case the
> audience was too dumb or too drunk to follow the discourse and its
> implications.
I love American Movies but I agree with you, "moral" is like "humour",
it cannot be said. Few "moralist" are aware of that. In my opinion,
the champion is Lie-Tseu: his teaching is by little stories and
dreams---thought experiments if you want----: without any conclusions.
> There appears to me to be a certain point in leaving the listener to
> wonder whether it was a joke or not - this, for me, is the 'serious'
> aspect of humour, that I have alluded to in the past - if that isn't
> too self-contradictory.
No no no. You fly only near inconsistency, the land of the terrible
jokes! I think you will appreciate the intrinsic humor of the
universal machine. Not everyone appreciates.
I think Alan Kay, one of the inventor of object oriented laguages, was
a jazz musicien, and told that he quit music for computer science as a
natural generalisation capable of providing more emotions and
imagination spaces.
Universal machine are universal dynamical mirrors, you already go near
inconsistency when you put two universal machine in front of each other.
> Comes of being a composer (of music) - an aesthete. I like to
> occasionally trick the audience or test their ability to view
> something from an unexpected perspective (maybe not the best thing
> to do with scientists, mathematicians and logicians!). Example: in
> the second movement of Sir William Walton's 1st Symphony (Scherzo,
> con Malizia) I say that there is much "malicious use of musical
> humour" but some do not get this when they hear it. As if the
> composer's own use of "con malizia" to describe the mood and tempo
> of his piece does not already provide an "external clue"... but
> musical humour is hard for many to appreciate, particularly as here
> - in a symphony; an instrumental composition where there are no
> words being sung to "explain" the accompanying music. There is no
> musical equivalent of the emoticon because ALL of music is an
> emotional "con job" - much poetry is the same - would you ask
> Shakespeare to use smilies? ;-D
That would be comical!
To be or not to be ;-)
I believe and appreciate very much humour in Music.
I have also a theory according to which british humour is obtined by
taking classical logic seriously enough. The comical effect comes from
the fact that in the real work classical logic NEVER works. Dutch
humour is the opposite. It is based on constructive logic which always
work, which explains the absence of comical effects.
>
> OK - we are doing serious explanatory work here so I will cut back
> on the cryptic stuff
>
> To get back on-topic:
>
>
> Actually I wasn't joking! Sorry to be an "inconsistent machine" (or
> more likely just a momentarily confused and chatty one). Up to now I
> felt that the basis of MEC was the existence of the substitution
> level which allows that all body parts, indeed anything "immaterial"
> is simulable. Consciousness itself is not simulable as you say;
> because consciousness is not even yet "immaterial" (having no shape,
> form, ideal description etc.) It probably does not supervene on
> brain activity but is the conjunction of the many-histories of the
> "I". For me, that means that one functional brain (digi or wet) is
> as good as another provided it functions correctly. A brain is, in
> the first instance at least, a receiver, not a transmitter. We can
> transmit thoughts, feelings, ideas etc. to each other only after we
> have downloaded today's emails from Platonia.
>
> I now accept though, that the thing that I wasn't taking into
> account was the "encoding" of the neurons with the contents of the
> histories as memories. Part of my personhood is reflected in the
> fact that I can recall my own past.
Yes. And Freud and Jung would add that even memories that you cannot
recall may be part of your personhood. The very structure of the human
brain, that you normally are not even aware of, is part of your
personhood. And the point of MEC (2.1) is that *you* are in the
immaterial connections or the relations between the elementary parts,
even the "reptile in you". The elementary parts can be substituted by
any equivalent machinery. You are immaterial. This does not mean you
are unreal, conventional, eliminable, or anything negative like
that ... on the contrary.
>
>
>> It is of course your partner who is right.
>> Assuming the neurophysiological evidences, your biological wet
>> brain in your skull is the one responsible for your personal
>> memories, character and identity. That is why we have to scan and
>> copy brain (in the teleportation experiences) at a sufficiently
>> fine grained level.
>
>
> But I have a digi-brain. Perhaps you already have most of its
> contents backed-up on your system - so the scanning procedure can be
> simplified; just a quick synchronisation required ;-)
That could be done, but then this would give another thought experiment.
>
>
>
>> If I take your brain out of your skull, and put the brain of a pig
>> in there: the pig survives, with your body.
>
>
> entendu - the history-traces of pighood are encoded in the neurons
> of its brain. I felt previously that these might evaporate on
> removal of the pig's brain from its body - like volatile RAM. I
> guess this thought, were it true, would be to assume that the mind
> is the "ghost in the machine" and then we are no longer dealing with
> comp
Again I am not sure. If the pig neuronal connections are volatile, and
if I have a backup of your instantaneous description, then to save you
through the pig brain would be reasonable or conceivable.
>
>
>> You die or disappear, in the usual clinical sense. I guess you are
>> OK with this, I mean with this point, if not (re)read the 2.1 posts
>> (or drink more coffee, I dunno ...).
>
>
>
> Accompli - probably needs more study
You can understand, and then forget and understand again, and then
forget again. Yes it is work demanding.
>
>
>
>
>>
>> When your partner said "Who I am is generated only by MY brain",
>> she is not making necessarily a "materialist commitment" . her
>> statement could as well be interpreted as a computationalist
>> commitment: she *has* a brain. Tell her that, assuming MEC, she
>> could have more than one brain, with backup of instantaneous past
>> state.
>>
>>
>
> Yes
>
>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I then asked her if she would feel herself to be the same person
>>> after
>>> a digi-brain transplant. She responded that this was maybe possible,
>>> but she felt dubious about it.
>>>
>>> Would there in fact be any difference? After all, we are assuming
>>> that
>>> wet, messy brains and digi-brains are equivalent, all things
>>> considered?
>>
>>
>> With MEC (and the neurophysiological evidences) Wet-brain and digi-
>> brain are equivalent in their potentialities (and are indeed
>> equivalent with any universal machine).
>
>
> This affirms my feeling, expressed earlier
>
>
>
>> But once "programmed", by relative life events or by copy or
>> whatever, they are no more identical and differentiates through
>> memories and experiences. Nor is your computer hard disk identical
>> with mine, despite they are both digi-brain, with similar capacities.
>
>
> This is what I was missing. Virgin tabula rasa brains are difficult
> to come across, I guess. Even the newborn does not possess this
No, but there is a sense in which the newborn can be said to be
closer. In a sense the closest will be the universal machine.
>
>
>
>>
>> I am talking for the short terms, the everyday life prediction,
>> which the UDA will show that they have to be explained or re-
>> explained if we assume MEC.
>> What you say could be interpreted again in a larger sense, at
>> another level (once you identify yourself with the universal
>> machine: then indeed you survive even with a pig brain
>> substitution, but not in a useful way to derive the physical laws.
>> It concerns the *very* long run only.
>>
>> Messy brains, digi-brains, whatever- brains, what makes us is what
>> is written there.
>
>
> I think you mean that they make us what is encoded in them, their
> contents are all-important
Yes. Digital mechanism is roughly captured by the idea that your mind
is the software acting through your brain-body/hardware. Your
consciousness can manifest itself where brains can execute (or "run")
your software in the correct-relative way.
>
>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> In that case we have to suppose something very
>>>> special about the brain: it generates consciousness.
>>>
>>>
>>> This made me laugh out loud. I just love it when you say things like
>>> this. Perhaps we must give up on the notion that personhood has
>>> anything at all to do with a brain?
>>
>>
>> I'm afraid I must a bit temper your enthusiasm. Without my brain
>> and my computer, it would be hard for me to answer your post. What
>> will happens, is that MEC will show that the brain is not
>> responsible for the existence of your consciousness, it is needed
>> only to entangle your computations (going through to your states of
>> mind) with mine, so that we can share a conversation, indeed an
>> history (or a sheaf of similar histories). OK?
>
>
> OK - it is more a question of the brain's role as a node or a hub -
> not as a generator (except in the trivial, everyday sense)
Yes. Note that I was anticipating.
>
>>>
>>>
>>>> But this is just
>>>> a blocking argument: it could be interesting only if it points on
>>>> something special in the brain that a digital machine cannot
>>>> imitate.
>>>> Without such specification it is just equivalent with the
>>>> *assumption*
>>>> that the brain is not a digital machine.
>>>
>>>
>>> Enter the soul, enter religion - enter the supernatural. Hummmph!!
>>
>>
>> Soul? Of course it all depends on the sense of the words. I like to
>> identify or define the 3-soul by the coded body/brain or its
>> backup, and the 1-soul, by the owner of that code.
>
>
> Makes sense. But we are computationalist practitioners. Materialist/
> physicalists (like Dawkins and Dennett) still do not understand
> this. I wish they did, because everything else they are doing I
> consider heroic and positively necessary! Please get onto
> RichardDawkins.net and unburden yourself, Bruno!
I am so glad you wish Dawkins and Dennett understand the consequence
of digital mechanism. I share your enthusiasm for their heroic defense
of reason. But it seems to me they fall in the trap of religious
naturalism or atheism. Their critics on religion is misguided.
If you say "theology" is a crakpot thing, then you abandon theology to
the crakpot people, who will make theology even more crackpot.
Dennett at least seems aware of the "consciousness" or "mind-body"
problem, but being rather rigorous he is attracted toward
consciousness elimination. Brrr...
>
>
>
>> The immaterial one who choose a new body every morning and evening
>> (if you remember 2.1).
>
>
> Ah, oui
>
>
>
>>
>> Religion? Well, that could be more problematical indeed, like
>> ideologies or anything using long term moral authoritative
>> normative arguments (full of hidden or not logical errors usually).
>
>
> THIS is the thing that Dawkins and Dennett heroically fight. Neither
> have yet managed to say anything about ultimate reality, if you are
> right.
They take for granted that the ultimate realm is the physical realm.
It is normal. Most believe so since Aristotle, and before Pythagorus.
Look at the time made by physicists to "swallow" Everett. Things go
slowly.
Then mathematical logic is just not taught in most places, only as
option in pure mathematics. UDA is simple, but unbelievable by experts
without a familiarity with Everett and Godel. Without mentioning the
taste you need to inquire in so fundamental matter.
>>
>>
>> Then for 2.7; either you take my word for some key point, and then
>> 2.7 can be made easily (as easily as the preceding steps), or, (as
>> I secretly hope) you don't take my word and ask for the true
>> understanding of the seventh step, but then we have to open the
>> gate of mathematics.
>
>
> I will need to invest a lot of time in grappling with that. Maybe
> better if I just take your word for it! I will try though
Take it easy. We will see.
>
>
>
>> What is that point? It is the point of the existence of the
>> universal machine. This has to be seen as:
>> - a theorem in mathematical computer science
>> - a schema of theorems in mathematical computer science
>> - a thesis overlapping mathematics and philosophy
>
>
> When does it become an engineering problem that we can turn over to
> Brent? ;-)
For the two first points above the corresponding engineering problem
(the implementation of universal machine) has been solved, beyond
nature, by Babbage, Turing, Suze, von Neumann, and many others, and
this up to you right now in front of your computer (usual name for
this line of historical concrete universal machine "hand made" be it a
MAC or a PC: both are universal).
For the last point it becomes an engineering problem when
biotechnology extends itself into theotechnology. When some people
will bet on some level, where it is not illegal, etc.
>
>
>
>
>
>> To understand this, it is useful to understand the explosive "many
>> incompleteness" which is the price that the universal machine has
>> to pay for that universality. Assuming the MEC hypothesis, it is a
>> big price *we* have to pay ...
>
>
> The prison of our consciousness - we cannot get outside
Ah yes, that too ...
>
>
>>
>> 2.7 eliminates all the trace of "science-fiction" of the preceding
>> steps, and is needed to understand that the UD Argument is an
>> eliminative argument, that is a proof, up to a remaining "big"
>> hypothesis: the existence of a "concrete" universal dovetailing.
>
>
> I can "see" the UD? What does it look like?
It is a program. I have written a UD in LISP in 1991, and I let it
runs for some number of days. The program and the running is described
in my long version french thesis "Conscience et Mécanisme" (see my url
for more).
>
>
>>
>> Then 2.8, UDA 8, or the MGA (Movie Graph Argument) eliminates that
>> remaining "big" hypothesis, and completes the reversal. Darwin has
>> to be extended to the physical laws, they evolve through an
>> arithmetical self-reflection "process".
>
>
> Here Dawkins may want to agree with you but he hasn't the right to
> yet, being physicalist. Send him a bag of Salvia, Doctor....
Exactly! The Mazatec Shaman use Salvia for finding back the lost
objects. Lost of faith? Smoke Salvia!
But Vic Stenger would say that it is just a chemical reaction in the
brain,
And I would say: all right, but then recall that the belief in atheism
is also a chemical reaction in the brain, and the only question is how
we interpret those reactions.
Then it is a theorem. Self-perturbation leads universal machine to
"interesting" fixed points.
>
>
>
>>
>> Then 3? (cf the plan). It will depend of the appetite.
>
>
> My eyes are ALWAYS bigger than my belly (= my enthusiasm to
> understand always surpasses my technical ability to do so. I am
> working on that, with your expert help.)
You have the enthusiasm (*the* key)
You have the technical abilities (I have no doubt about that).
But you are a working man surrounded by a living environment entangled
to deep histories so it leads to time management problems. I can't lie
on this: it is time demanding to grasp what a universal machine is,
and in what (weak) sense a universal machine can happen to *know* she
is universal, can happen to bet on its incompleteness, and the
consequences (like how soul cannot not emerge and then fall and why
this can hurt).
>
>
>> UDA is enough to understand the reduction of physics to the
>> theology of numbers. 3 is really the "UDA for the dummies", where
>> the dummy person here *is* the (chatty) universal machine who knows
>> she is universal.
>
>
> Well, that sure sounds like moi. Thanks for being so politically-
> correct about it!!!
I guessed you were already enlightened.
>
>
>
>
>> 3 is really far simpler that the UDA, given that for 3 we really
>> presuppose only the understanding of three very elementary axioms
>> of arithmetic. Unfortunately, by this very token, by the fact that
>> the pure virgin umprogrammed universal machine is so dummy, the UDA
>> becomes far longer, and mathematics get only more sophisticated,
>> because we have to shorten the conversation. It happens that
>> Gödel, Löb, Solovay and others have already make the hard part of
>> that shortening. Take it easy, one step at a time.
>>
>
> VERY small steps, in my case. The tempo will doubtless quicken
> later. I can always play the music at a faster tempo after I know
> the notes :-)
Very small steps. Just tell me things like "pause", "stop", "next",
"repeat", "wtf", etc.
;-)
Happy New Year,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Wed Dec 31 2008 - 19:20:21 PST