Re: UDA, Am I missing something?

From: <daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 14:09:46 -0400

>> 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. 
 
> Bruno: 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.

Tom: See my last comment below.


>> Tom: In such a setting, I find it very difficult (impossible?) to
get a > grasp of what your hypotheses are. 

> Bruno: It is the hypothesis that we are machines...
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!).

Tom: My exception to your hypotheses was supposedly independent of
Church's thesis or arithmetic realism, but the objection was regarding
your definition of physics, which seems too narrow to me. But now I am
pondering your rebuttal of this exception, and I'm realising that there
is some background that I need to become more familiar with. It's just
that at first reading, I got a gut feeling that you unknowingly limited
physics a priori, thus leading to the conclusion that physics is
limited in that way.

 
>> Tom: 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. 
 
> Bruno: 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. 

Tom: Have you considered translating the UDA into mathematics?

Tom
Received on Tue Jul 12 2005 - 14:34:08 PDT