Re: Are we simulated by some massive computer?

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 15:09:45 +0200

Hi Stephen,

At 12:15 28/04/04 -0400, Stephen Paul King wrote:


> I struggle to find the right words to express the difficulty that I see.
>My problem is that your work ignores the computational complexity
>(NP-Completeness) of grading (defining measures) the relationships.

This is due to the fact that from a first person point of view any delay
will not been perceived. I do not pretend that complexity should always
been ignored, but to introduce it at the start would be ad hoc. If complexity
play a role it must be derived along with the measure on the comp histories.
In "Conscience & Mecanisme" I do make a case that Bennett notion of
depth could play a role in order to derive the "cosmological" aspect of
physics. Even prior a-la-Schmidhuber could play a role. But the
methodology I advocate although it could justify the prior if needed, cannot
rely on it at the start.


> I do not see how the mere a priori existence of solutions (Integers) and
>the relationships between them (also Integers), as a priori existing numbers
>is sufficient.

We will discuss that after I succeed in explaining how the whole things
work. All Right?



>BM:
> > The comp reason why the soul or the first person is never captured by any
> > complete third person description is akin to the reason truth and
>knowledge are
> > not arithmetizable (as opposed to provable and consistent).
> > Godel's theorem & Co. makes universal machine a highly non trivial type of
> > being.
>
>[SPK]
>
> Does not this statement, that "truth and knowledge are not
>arithmetizable", imply that the postulation of AR is insufficient?

No. And giving that Godel's incompleteness is true for much more
general things than machine, we can say not only that arithmetical
truth is not arithmetizable, but mathematical truth is not
mathematicalizable, physical truth is not physicalizable, and more
generally [whatever]-truth is not [whatver]izable.
So strictly speaking AR could be sufficient (the Pythagorean version
of my thesis). For reason of simplicity I do not use it.



>Let me
>state this in a different way. How does Digital Substitution ( "yes,
>Doctor" ) get coded into numbers without involving physical implementation?


But that's the point of the whole work. Now, if you have follow
a little bit the literature on the mind body problem you surely know
that nobody has succeed in explaining how a private mind can be attached
to anything third-person describable, be it physical or mathematical.
All what I say is that if we survive the digital brain substitution, then any
fundamental explanation of what matter *cannot* rely on anything
like Aristotelian substances or even to anything *primitively* physical.
With comp the mind-body problem is just two times more difficult in the
sense that we must explain not only the mind but also the matter, and
this from the mind. The UDA (alias the 1-8 reasoning) just show that:
comp *must* explain matter by a mind theory. Wait perhaps I say
more to Kory so that you can be made your objection more specific.

Best regards,

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Thu Apr 29 2004 - 09:10:01 PDT

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