Le 11-juil.-05, à 19:37, daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden a écrit :
>
> Actually this particular quote seems to present consciousness as the
> ontological counterpart to the epistemological "fundamental
> psychology", just as matter is considered the ontological counterpart
> to epistemological "fundamental physics".
> So "psychology" is our way of thinking about consciousness, just as
> "physics" is our way of thinking about matter.
OK
> So the statement "...physics is...reducible to psychology" is
> basically saying "our way of thinking about matter is reducible to our
> way of thinking about consciousness", or "physics is reducible to our
> way of thinking about consciousness".
No No. I mean by (correct) physics the (correct) laws predicting or
even explaining our most probable history, and this by remaining
invariant through that history. Today it is believed that it is Quantum
Mechanic (under the form of Standard Model, String Theory or Loop
gravity) A priori it could be completely independent of our way of
thinking about anything. And I believe it is so. And with comp it is so
because the laws of physics are given by a type of statistics on
("turing machine", i.e. mathematical) computations, which are as
independent of ourselves as the elementary arithmetical truth can be.
This influences "our way of thinking" as much as our ways of thinking
will filters possible first person realities.
I f you want I am a Platonist even about Physics. It is just that I
don't believe (playing the game of believing or assuming comp) that
Physics describes a primitive reality. With comp the laws of physics
and the physical world's emerges from a purely mathematical statistics
bearing on a notion of "first person" computation. And this notion can
be made purely mathematical. And so the comp hyp is made entirely
testable. And then I have tested it and comp succeeds the first main
test in the sense it predicts a non boolean statistics having some
quantum features (including the most important one giving rise to some
arithmetical interpretation of quantum logic).
Bell's inequality Violation? many evidence for, but still open problem
Laws of physics are completely reversible? idem
Quantum cloning? idem
Quantum computing? idem.
Most of those questions can easily been "asked to a self-observing
Lobian machine", and it can be proved that for those question the
machine knows and can communicate the answer, but currently they are
non-tractable. Normally one of those logic must be intractable and
``quantum speedable" (the one which *is* physics, in a sense).
I reduce physics not so much on consciousness, but on theoretical
computer science.
What can machine proves and guess about their
(first-person-UD-accessible) consistent extensions. I could argue that
consciousness is a sort of bet there is a "model" of oneself, a world.
(Note that logicians use the word "Model" in an opposite sense of the
physicist's usage. Logicians use the term "model" in the same sense as
the painters: "model" is for (intended) "realities" we always describe
or capture partially by our theories (painting). it is better to use
the word "world" probably, or even just observer-moment?)
>
> Tom>> 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?
>
> Bruno>> 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.
>
> Tom: I guess I'll have to ponder this more. In general I am
> uncomfortable with having terms like "physics" and
> "psychology/consciousness" defined (redefined?) later on in an
> argument rather than at the beginning.
That is a little bit curious because in SANE I *exceptionally* do give
the "new" definitions at the beginning. And this asks me a specially
hard effort. My initial goal was just to help people to understand by
themselves that the "mind-body problem" is NOT YET solved. I did say
"universal dovetailer paradox" instead of "universal dovetailer
argument". Same for the movie graph. I just ask questions in succession
and if you say yes at each steps you get the conclusion. Like always in
logic, making a paradox precise makes you get a theorem.
> In such a setting, I find it very difficult (impossible?) to get a
> grasp of what your hypotheses are.
It is the hypothesis that we are machines. It is as old as machines. It
is discussed in the "question of Milinda" which relates some shock
waves between India and Greece on fundamental question after Plato. It
is discussed in Plato, ..., Descartes (at least for animals!), Hobbes
(after understanding a proof in geometry), La Mettrie who will
aggravate the confusion between materialism and mechanism, etc.
Leibnitz is close also.
But after Godel and Turing, and Post, the meaning of the word "machine"
*has* changed.
And "my hypothesis" is the same as Post, Turing and is well described
in the book of Webb for example (ref in my thesis). It is a "digital"
version of Mechanism. And it is just the hypothesis that there exists a
level of description of myself such that "I survive" a digital
substitution at that level.
(It is NOT the hypothesis that there is a universe and that the
universe is a computational object! Actually comp makes this
impossible).
It can be argued that Quantum Mechanics implies comp, and my theorem is
that assuming comp you can and must deduce Quantum mechanics (or the
"correct physics") from it.
Now I am not sure what exactly you don't grasp in the hypotheses. To
make comp precise, and to avoid unecessary objections I make it clear
that I bet also on the elementary arithmetical truth (1+1 = 2,
no-biggest -primes, Fermat theorem, etc.), and Church thesis (which is
not trivial!).
> In parallel, I guess I have another question: It seems that in the
> UDA you artificially limit all of physics to be the solution to one
> particular thought experiment. This seems narrow to me.
But all *theorems* are particular thought experiments.
And *this* thought experiment explains how "all physics" is related to
the only clear notion of "everything" I ever met, which is the
collection of partial computable function, which is closed for the most
transcendental operation ever discovered by mathematician:
Cantor-KLeene-Godel diagonalization.
And that theorem (or that reasoning if you prefer) shows comp is
testable. (And a non trivial test has been made).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Tue Jul 12 2005 - 13:41:01 PDT