Le 26-mai-05, à 00:24, Jonathan Colvin a écrit :
> I am also an arithmetical Platonist, but where we differ is our belief
> in
> the relevance of 1st person phenomena.
Relevant or not they exist. And are in need to be explained.
> I just don't see that they are
> relevant to anything other than "human discourse" (ie. "How are you
> feeling
> today? Bit of a pain in the Gulliver.")
That's not just human discourse. There is conscious life behind the
discourse. It is in need to be explained, or explained away, but
rigorously. I find much more easy to explain matter *away*. You posit a
physical universe, I don't.
> You appear to be trying to extend
> qualia into a category relevant to cosmology/science/Platonia, and it
> is
> this initial step that I don't follow (mixing together Popper's Worlds
> I and
> II).
It is not at all an initial step. My initial step is just the question:
what can a machine really prove about itself and hope, or bet, about
its consistent extension.
> I agree self awareness is important for anthropic observer selection
> phenomena,
I don't use anthropic observer selection, although some parts of what I
do can be recasted in such a setting. But since about two years, I am
used to avoid such talk in the list. That could be misleading when used
together with the comp hyp.
> but you appear to be positing a much more fundamental role for
> qualia.
Not at all. I accept them from empirical reasons. I expect any serious
TOE to explain them, and solve the problems raised by their existence.
I do not posit them. But I am glad to recover candidates for qualia in
the machine's discourses.
(Actually, in the machine's silences ...)
> Mais je dois admettre que je ne commence pas a comprendre votre
> theorie. [But I must admit I do not begin to understand your theory
> (litteral translation by BM)]
Thanks for your frankness. To be honest it is not really my theory. It
is the theory of any sound universal machine having enough
"introspective abilities", like Peano Arithmetic, or Zermelo-fraenkel
set theory, or any effective extension of them. Actually the theory is
sound (but no more complete) for a vast class of
"super-turing-machine). I call them Lobian machine. This is because
Solovay related them to an important theorem and formula obtained by
the Deutsch logican Lob (Loeb, L\"{o}b). It is an important extension
of Godel's second incompleteness theorem.
Well, to be sure in my thesis there are two parts. In the first part I
make the Universal Dovetailer Argument (UDA) which (along with
Olympia's stuff) just shows that if we accept the comp hyp in the
cognitive science, then the mind-body problem is partially but
necessarily reduced into the problem of the appearances of stable third
person discourses (including talk on what is observable (physics)).
This can be explained without technic.In the second part, giving the
startling consequences of the first part, I ask the opinion of a Lobian
machine. Giving that for them, comp is trivially true (by
construction), I can extract some physics from comp. Then I compare
with empirical physics. Comp is made refutable, but until now, what I
derive just confirm comp.
Hope this helps a little bit,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Fri May 27 2005 - 12:41:30 PDT