John,
Is not the difference between human and non human a human illusion?
With Church Turing thesis we can suspect the existence of universal
illusions.
Bruno
On 01 Aug 2009, at 21:52, John Mikes wrote:
> David,
> I thought you are facing the Scottish mountains for a relaxation and
> instead here is a long - enjoyable- tirade about ideas which I try
> to put below into a shorthand form by my vocabulary. But first a
> plea to Mrs. N:
> 'please, do keep David away from te computer for the time of the
> Scottish tourism, as he suggested it, to get him a good
> mountaineering relaxation what we all would luv if we just can
> afford it....'
> and now back to David:
>
> "causal accounts" are model-based originating choices in a view
> reduced into the figment of a 'physical world' i.e. in a
> conventional science lingo, so ingeniously formed over the
> millennia. It is our perceived reality, with math, based on the most
> pervasive (dominating?) principle, called physics, all - in the
> ongoing "HUMAN" ways of our thinking.
>
> Everything exists what we 'think of' in our MIND (nonexistent? no
> way, we think of that, too). There is nosuch thing as a '3rd
> pers.explanation, it is a 1st pers. idea, interpreted by all the
> "3rd persons" into their own (1st pers) "mindset"(?).
>
> Ontology is today's explanation of today's epistemic inventory.
> A nice, reductionist philosophy. Not applicable for tomorrow's
> discoveries. A 'physical realist' is a conventional scientist within
> the given figments. This list tries to overstep such 'human'
> limitations - falling repeatedly back into the faithful application
> of it.
>
> As Brent asked: "Is the physics account of life incomplete or
> wrong? Do you consider "life" to have been eliminated?"
>
> "eliminated" WHAT? I spent some braingrease to find out what many
> (some?) of us agree upon as 'life' - no success. YET it does exist
> even in Brent's mind (who is a very advanced thinking list-member).
> (Robert Rosen identified life as his 'M&R' (Metabolism and Repair)
> based on his (mathematical) biology ways. I may extend the domain
> into 'ideation' and 'not-so-bio' domains, even into the stupidly
> named "in-animates").
>
> Our millennia-evolved human (reductionistic - conventional) views
> are based on timely evolving observational skills what we call
> "physical" - worldview, science, explanatory base etc. So no wonder
> if everything is touching it. It is not 'more real' than anything we
> could sweat out for explaining the unexplainable.
> It all undergoes (ontological etc.) changes as epistemy grows.
> I don't want to touch here the chicken-egg topic of "numbers", yet
> this, too, is a HUMAN dilemma between Bruno and friends vs. David
> Bohm. And we are figments within the totality, not the original
> creators. We don't 'see' too far.
> Somebody asked me: "How do we learn something that is aboslutely 'N
> E W' ? I had no answer. I tried: by playing with unrelated
> relationships - which is only manipulting the existent.
> Even Star Trek relied on modified knowables as novelty, the absolute
> new is not available to us - unless already having been hinted in
> some corner of the totality as a 'findable' relation. The quality
> from quantity Leninian principle may give a clue to it, if a large
> enough background can be checked (cf. Bruno's words to get to
> anything by using enough many numbers for it). Still such cop-outs
> include my usual retort: applying the "somehow"
>
> Finally: COMP and reality? not this embryonic binary algorithm based
> (physical) contraption, not even an advanced fantasy kind of similar
> deficiencies can approach what we cannot: the unfathomable 'reality'
> of them all. It is not a 'higher inventory', it (if there is such an
> 'it' - I did not say: exists) is beyond anything we can imagine
> humanly. We can speculate about reality's 'human' type aspects of
> partial hints we can humanly approach and make a pars pro toto dream
> of it - we are wrong for sure.
>
> Have a healthy mountain-climb in Scottland
>
> John M
>
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 5:39 PM, David Nyman <david.nyman.domain.name.hidden>
> wrote:
>
> I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
> and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
> real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
> Hmm.......
>
> Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
> the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
> functional or computational rationale. I'm going to make an attempt
> to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
> feedback specifically on this issue. You will recall that this is at
> the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
> computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
> derived as an emergent from this. Step 08 of the UDA addresses these
> issues in a very particular way.
>
> However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
> just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
> computational notions based on physical entities and relations
> conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
> please). So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
> clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
> experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
> eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
> further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
> this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).
>
> The argument runs as follows. To take what physics describes with
> maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
> take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
> extent. God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
> these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
> set of nomological-causal principles we possess. Consequently, taking
> these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
> principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
> least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
> principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals. Any other
> position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
> realist.
>
> Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
> I'm merely articulating it. It follows from the foregoing that
> although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
> historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
> reducible to their physical bases. We also know that although we may
> speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
> and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
> retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
> So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
> physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
> foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
> shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
> the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
> realisation in the world.
>
> To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
> we place it under analysis - is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
> set of first person concepts which finds its way into the physical
> account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions. The
> macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
> computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
> illumination of pixels on screens, etc. All of these, of course, can
> - and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
> 'ultimates'. At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
> this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
> (don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
> they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
> first person context. But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
> concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
> a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
> significance in terms of the physical account. After all, what could
> this possibly mean? Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
> 'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
> changing their outcomes? Of course not. How could they? And why
> would they need to? Everything's going along just fine by itself by
> purely physical means.
>
> I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
> computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
> don't exist in the world. They're semantic formulations - ways of
> speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
> and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
> kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
> eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
> whit. Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
> account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
> to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
> 'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
> another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
> However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here. Rather my
> intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
> physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
> eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.
>
> I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
> of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
> account of mind (and body, as it happens). To be absolutely explicit:
> if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
> fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
> foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
> physical account. But for that to be the case, all other causal
> relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
> account. But now, of course, this must include physics itself.
>
> Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP. But if you want to be a
> physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
> explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
> Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
> in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts. The
> alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
> incomplete, or else it is wrong. But that's another story.
>
> David
>
>
>
>
> >
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Mon Aug 03 2009 - 12:43:33 PDT