Bruno,
let me continue as 'enfent terrible':
Isn't the Church Thesis - and whatever WE suspect by it - also human
illusions?
(Watch out: the next question will concern 'numbers'!)
John M
On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 6:43 AM, Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> 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 - 08:47:17 PDT