On 16 Aug, 16:34, Bruno Marchal <marc....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> On 14 Aug 2009, at 14:34, 1Z wrote:
>
>
>
> > On 14 Aug, 09:48, Bruno Marchal <marc....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> >> You are dismissing the first person indeterminacy. A stuffy TM can
> >> run
> >> a computation. But if a consciousness is attached to that
> >> computation,
> >> it is automatically attached to an infinity of immaterial and
> >> relative
> >> computations as well,
>
> > There's your Platonism.
>
> Not mine. The one which follows from the comp assumption, if UDA is
> valid.
>
> > If nothing immaterial exists (NB "nothing",
> > I don't make exceptions for just a few pixies or juse a few numbers)
> > there is nothiign for a cosnc. to attach itself to except a propbably
> > small, probabuily singular set of stuiffy brains and computers.
>
> I can understand how easy for a materialist it is, to conceive at
> first sight, that numbers and mathematical objects are convenient
> fiction realized as space-time material configuration, perhaps of
> brains.
> But those space-time configuration are themselves described by
> mathematical functions far more complex that the numbers described or
> explain. This leads to major difficulties,
i dont; see why. THe neural underpinnings of the concept "horse"
are probably more complex than the concept "horse". If you folow that
reasonng through consistently, Plato's heaven is going to be densely
populated
and the brain will have no woro to do at all....
> even before approaching the
> consciousness problem.
mathematical stucture+matter gives you more to
tackle the consciousness problem with than mathematical structure
alone
> This shows that a purely physicalist explanation of numbers could lead
> to difficulties. But the same for a description of any piece of
> material things, by just that token.
By what token? You think there is some complex undepiining to
quarks?
> So, I am not sure that physicist can be said to have solved the
> "matter" problem either, and some physicists are already open,
> independently of comp, to the idea that physical objects are relative
> mathematical (immaterial) objects. Which of course are "no material".
> Wheeler, Tegmark, for example.
> But then with comp, you are yourself an immaterial object, of the kind
> person, like the lobian machine. You own a body, or you borrow it to
> your neighborhood, and "you" as an immaterial pattern can become
> stable only by being multiplied in infinities of coherent similar
> histories, which eventually the physicists begin to talk about
> (multiverse).
>
> I tend to believe in many immaterial things. Some are absolutely real
> (I think) like the natural numbers.
> Some may be seen as absolutely real, or just as useful fiction: it
> changes nothing.
I can't take a ride on pagasus. and I can;t be computed
by a convenient fiction
> This is the case for the negative number, the
> rational, a large part of the algebraic and topological, and analytical.
> Some are both absolutely real, and physically real, they live in
> "platonia", and then can come back on earth: they have a relatively
> concrete existence. For example, the games of chess, the computers,
> the animals, and the persons. But the concreteness is relative, the
> 'I' coupled with the chessboard is an abstract couple following
> normality conditions (that QM provides, but comp not yet).
> Some could have an even more trivial sense of absolute existence, and
> a case could be made they don't exist, even in Platonia, like the
> unicorns, perhaps, and the squared circles (hopefully).
>
> Each branch of math has its own notion of existence, and with comp, we
> have a lot choice, for the ontic part, but usually I take
> arithmetical existence, if only because this is taught in school, and
> its enough to justified the existence of the universal numbers, and
> either they dreams (if "yes doctor") or at least their discourse on
> their dreams (if you say no the doctor and decide to qualify those
> machines are "inexistent zombies").
Platonism is not taught in schools. You are conflatin
existence with truth
> There is a sense to say those universal machines do not exist, but it
> happens that they don't have the cognitive abilities to know that, and
> for them, in-existence does not make sense.
>
> And for a mathematicans, they exists in a very strong sense, which is
> that, by accepting Church Thesis, they can prove the existence of
> universal digital (mathematical) machine from 0, succession, addition
> and multiplication.
> Both amoebas colony (human cells), and engineers are implementing some
> of them everyday in our neighborhood, as we can guess.
>
> Bruno
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Tue Aug 18 2009 - 03:14:32 PDT