On 28 Jul 2009, at 05:40, Brent Meeker wrote:
> The difficulty I have with COMP is in step 8, where some measure is
> invoked to
> make sense out of a computation that computes everything.
Cool.
But you will have to understand that UDA is far more modest than what
you are perhaps thinking.
I am not invoking a measure. What I argue for in UDA is just this:
IF you are willing to accept the comp hyp ("I am Turing emulable"),
then you have to find a relative measure on the computational
histories and you have to derive the physical laws or the physical
invariants from it.
The goal of UDA consists only in reformulating the mind-body problem
in the comp frame. And the new formulation of the mind-body problem is
a "pure" body-problem in a "pure" theory of mind.
I could have content myself with this, but in the seventies I was told
that this was just an obvious argument showing that comp is false. So
I provided AUDA which shows that this is false. The math shows the
"body" problem makes sense and is not trivial.
With comp, the theory of mind is easy: it is computer science,
especially the self-reference logic branch. The study of what sound
machine can believe, imagine and hope for about themselves and about
the most probable computations which bears them.
> What is this measure?
If the 3th, or 4th or 5th arithmetical hypostatic logics gives some
reasonable Quantum Logics (like it does apparently), then the measure
will be given ... by Gleason's theorem. It will be given uniquely by
the trace of some density operator.
If the 3th, or 4th or 5th arithmetical hypostatic logics gives some
unreasonable Quantum Logics, doubts will be reasonably held that
either comp is false, or that the Theaetetical definitions of
knowledge and matter will have to be revised.
>
> and what does it actually predict.
At the AUDA level: everything, except geography and history. That is
why it is easily testable in practice. It predicts everything non
contingent, from the actual taste of a pizza to the existence and mass
of the bosons (or comp is false).
The problem is technical. It may be possible that to predict the
existence of the bosons, you have to actually run the UD for n steps,
with n being a ridiculously large number (like OMEGA[OMEGA]OMEGA, if
you remember).
But comp has not been "invented" to predict physical things, only to
find a conceptually correct description of "reality" i.e. without
eliminating consciousness and persons.
> As I said before, an *everything*
> hypothesis is a cheap way to explain anything - unless you can
> explain why this
> rather than that. Bruno promises to be able to do that - so I'm
> waiting to see.
This is a gross overestimation of what I did.
The point of UDA is that if I am a machine, then I get the "comp-
everything" as a result. The "everything" is NOT an hypothesis. It is
more like the infinite terms in quantum filed theory. I just put them
NOT under the rug. Some things have been already derived: like the non
booleanity of the observable world, though.
The comp-everything is not a trivial "everything". It is already
amazing that it exists and that it can be defined mathematically
(Church thesis, Gödel's miracle). This is the purpose of doing the
seventh step with enough details.
Computer science imposes a highly non trivial structure on its
necessary "everything like structure", with an incredible high
redundancy of computational histories, and with amazing quantum like
property for the observable propositions, so we can definitely
conclude that comp leads to a new formulation of the mind body
problem, which is scientific in the Popper sense.
My thesis is much more a questioning than an answering. It is like:
"Do you realize that if we take comp seriously enough into account, we
have to explain the appearance of bodies, space and time from the
structure of numbers as "seen" by the numbers.
UDA can be said to solve conceptually he consciousness/reality
problem, but it leads to the obviously hard problem to extract the
laws of physics, and this could be very difficult. AUDA is just a
beginning, and I like it, because it attributes already a person to a
machine. It is a vaccine against person elimination. We can already
listen to the machine, that is what Gödel, Löb and Solovay really
actually did, although perhaps not so much consciously so (at least
for Gödel).
I show only that with comp we have to reduce the mind body problem to
an hard problem of matter.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
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 Tue Jul 28 2009 - 12:10:55 PDT