Hi All,
I have put "Conscience & Mecanisme" in my web page, along
with other stuffs. (And some others will arrive). It could be of some
interest to you.
"Conscience et Mecanisme" is the 1995 Brussels thesis (which
has neither been defended, ... nor attacked ....).
Beside the "Introduction", "Recapitulation" etc., there are mainly
9 sections (from 1.1 to 3.3). The first seven are the theory of
consciousness derived from the computationalist hypothesis.
The last two give the application of that theory of consciousness
for isolating an arithmetical formulation of the mind body problem.
It contains the physico/psycho-reversal.
Basically the Lille's PhD thesis is just a concise presentation
of the section 3.2 and 3.3 of Brussels thesis.
This is possible by the trick consisting in *defining* machine's
psychology/theology by the self-referentially correct Loebian
machine's discourse (but that is what *is* explained in detail
in the first seven sections of C&M).
To 'consolate' those who doesn't read french I have made accessible
my older "Mechanism, and Personal Identity", and "Amoeba, Planaria,
and Dreaming Machine". So old that the modal box did not survive!
That is, a modal formula like <>[]p -> -[][]p is transformed
into <>,p -> -,,p in AP&DM, and into <>,,p -> -,, ,,p in M&PI.
That is the box [] is transformed into one comma in AP&DM, and
two commas in M&PI. Sorry.
This makes things a little less readable, but as logical symbol, it does
not change anything if you read the paper from the beginning.
Note that all "symbols" in C&M have survived (but then there are typo
errors, ....).
I will also put "Le secret de l'amibe" on the web page. It is the story of
the thesis, and a lot of readers of preliminary version told me it helps
a lot for understanding the work. I have finished it in 2001, and it should
have been published since, but I'm still waiting (without any explanations).
I have also been kindly proposed for an invited talk at the international
SANE'2004 in Amsterdam.
http://www.nluug.nl/events/sane2004/CfP-2004.html
Title: The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations.
Abstract: I first sum up a non constructive argument showing that the
mechanist hypothesis in the cognitive science gives
enough constraints to decide what a "physical reality"
can possibly consist in.
Then I explain how computer science together with logic
make it possible to extract a constructive version of the
argument by interviewing a Modest (Loebian) Universal Machine.
Reversing von Neumann probabilistic interpretation of
quantum logic on those provided by the Loebian Machine
provides a kind of explanation of how both sharable physical
laws and un-sharable physical knowledge arise from number
theoretical relations.
Bruno
Received on Fri Feb 20 2004 - 09:00:50 PST