Re: real and virtual

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 12:45:01 +0200

At 12:48 +0200 25/07/2002, Lennart Nilsson wrote:

>I have been trying to comprehend the UD-Argument of Brunos,
>following the links supplied at
><http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m3044.html>http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m3044.html,
>and I find myself accepting step 1 to 10, but not some of the
>conclusions. ANY virtual reconstitution and computational stories
>going thrue it necesseraly has a real (physical) interpretation. So
>when Bruno casts away the hardware and says that all is software
>this doesn´t follow with any necessity. So what is question 11,
>Bruno?



The eleventh question is given at:

http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m3005.html

But I'm not sure it will answer your question. Don't hesitate telling me.


I acknowledge that I have not insisted very much on the elimination of
hardware because most in this list, including Joel Dobrzelewski, did
agree on this point right from the beginning. For example the idea that matter
and physical laws have a mathematical nature is more or less explicit
in the Everything papers by Tegmark and/or Schmidhuber. (Some conversation
with Schmidhuber makes me doubting that he accepts a literal
version of this "no matter at all", though).

Technically, if you answer "yes" to the eleven question, then *with
the use of occam razor* we should 'cast away the hardware'. Indeed hardware
must appears in the average discourse of the consistent machine with comp.
(If not, we would eventually refute comp).
Without occam razor, I have proposed a more direct argumentation (the graph
movie argument), showing in a direct (but admittedly not so easy) way
that postulating matter or hardware makes it impossible to attach
the first person experiences to its physical possible transformation.
So, with comp, with or without Occam, postulating matter reintroduces
the matter problem (what is matter?) and the relation between matter
and mind problem.
That move reintroduces also the problem of linking just computation
(even just the
3-person view of computation) and material transformation: the problem which
is known in this list as the Mallah implementation problem.

Having said this, I must say that I don't understand how do you go from
"ANY virtual reconstitution and computational stories going true" to
"it necessarily has a real (physical) interpretation"
Perhaps you could elaborate. ("true" applied to proposition, not to
computation:
I interpret your "going true" by belongs (in some sense) to the trace
of the UD.

Perhaps I should ask you what do you mean by "physical".

Bruno
Received on Fri Jul 26 2002 - 03:48:54 PDT

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