Re: UDA, Am I missing something?

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2005 12:08:52 +0200

Le 09-juil.-05, à 08:56, Daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden a écrit :

> As such, I appreciate your willingness to have a discourse on the
> assumptions in the UDA.

Thanks. And to "derive" conclusions is a way to discuss hypotheses. I
have always been willing to discover that comp is contradictory. Until
now I have only find out that comp is weird, but not so much more than
QM.


> Instead of "conscious brain" I should have said "consciousness".  The
> yes-doctor hypothesis in comp tells me that you are assuming the
> existence of consciousness. 


Yes. Under the form of a minimal amount of what is called (in
philosophy of mind/cognitive science) "grandmother or folk psychology".
Now (to cut the air a little bit) "assuming" does not seem right to me.
I just hope people can understand in a mundane way question like "will
I survive the operation in the hospital" etc.
Also I don't like expression like "a conscious brain" or a "conscious
program". It is "Searles' error". Only a person can be conscious. No
doubt the brain plays some role but a brain is not conscious, nor a
program, nor a string.


> Also, is not the "psychology" that you are reducing physics to
> "consciousness" (or an equivalent approximation)?


I don't understand the sentence.


> Is not your use of the word "discourse", even though it is a
> "correct-by-definition discourse", and also your use of the words
> "observable" and "verifiable", meant to portray something that can be
> observed by, imagined by, and encoded into our consciousness?  So is
> not your assumption that we can fit this "fundamental/perfect physics"
> into our consciousness?


Yes if by "our" you refer to the lobian machines. But if you mean by it
"human" then it is a big anthropomorphism. Also I avoid the term
"consciousness". Eventually consciousness will be linked to
automatic (unconscious!) inference of self-consistency from some 1
person point of view.


>
> >> So if A=“physical reality” and B=“consciousness”, then the
> assumption is A=B.
>
> > This is much too vague. You identify physics and discourse. But I
> said "correct discourse" and this includes the semantics (meaning) of
> the discourse.
>
> (Actually I should have said that the assumption seems to be that A is
> a subset of B.)  


That's better.



> Are you saying that "correct-by-definition discourse" refers to a
> discourse that does not necessarily fit into our consciousness? 

A priori, at the first steps of the UDA. We just cannot know.


> If so, then why call it "discourse"?

Because it can be presented by strings of symbols. Like any papers
written by a physicist. It can refer to things which a priori could
well not "fit in our consciousness". we cannot know before proceeding
from assumptions.


> I am not assuming that our consciousness is necessarily physical, but
> again I still don't see why you use the term "discourse" if it does
> not refer to something that can be grasped by our consciousness.  Why
> not just say "correct physics" or "the way things really are,
> independent of our consciousness"?  But then, if you did that,
> wouldn't you lose any chance of coming to the conclusion of the UDA?


No problem at all. Also consciousness is vaster than all possible
discourse (provably so for loebian machine).


> I've read the UDA but not the second part of the SANE paper where you
> interview the machine.  Is not the result from the UDA needed to start
> the second half?  I am wary of being persuaded by an argument further
> down the line where the UDA is assumed.  It would seem that I should
> be able to understand the assumptions/axioms of the UDA first.


I think so. I would even encourage you to be sure of a step before
going to the next step.
Only (some) mathematicians understand more easily the "interview" than
the UD Argument. But it is formal understanding without motivation
then. And the "real" proof is the UDA. The interview just shows that by
interviewing the machine on the UD we can get non trivial information
on the measure problem.


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Mon Jul 11 2005 - 06:22:22 PDT

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