My final ramblings.....
> From: Bruno Marchal [mailto:marchal.domain.name.hidden]
>
> Moi
> > Reality vs perception of reality? I vote we work really hard on the
> > latter and drop all ascription in relation to the former. A
> > significant dose of humility indeed.
>
> Bruno
> I don't think "objective reality" can be perceived (only subjective
> reality can be perceived). Nevertheless, "objective reality" is an
> ideal we should always tend to. I agree very much with your intuition
> of the importance of humility, but then you talk as if someone has
> given a convincing argument of the existence of a natural world. You
> should give the reference :). With the comp assumption, in particular,
> there is no "natural world", just a web of numbers' dream (to be
> short). Matter emerges from the fact that numbers' dreams overlap in
> some non trivial way.
> Of course there could be, perhaps, a natural world (and comp is false,
> thus). I respect that belief very much, but it is a highly non trivial
> assumption. I can understand the recent irritation of Brent Meeker,
> because, although your critics of the current average science practice
> seems to me well-founded, you are not clear on your assumptions and you
> seem to fall in the very trap you describe so well.
> Actually, with comp, many things you say seem coherent if you
> substitute "natural world" by "arithmetical truth". Remember that Godel
> has shown there is no way to build a complete "model" of it. With Godel
> we have reasons to believe we are very ignorant, and with comp (+
> godel) we have justifiable reasons to believe it is necessary like
> that. You should appreciate Godel's and Lob's theorem because it
> justifies the humility you defend so well. Lob's formula is often
> interpreted as a modesty formula.
>
> Bruno
>
I have studied in detail the whole Leibniz -> cantor -> Hilbert -> Russel/Whitehead -> Godel -> Turing -> Chaitin trail. It's a favourite and Godel's work as depicted by Nagel/Newman (with the Hofstadter intro)....
Nagel E, Newman JR, Hofstadter DR. 2002. Gödel's proof. New York: New York University Press. xxiii, 129 , p.
....is one of my favourite books of all time along with Godel Escher Bach.
Hofstadter DR. 1980. Gödel, Escher, Bach : an eternal golden braid. Harmondsworth: Penguin. xxi, 777 p.
Nagel seems to be a very very smart guy and is a gifted wordsmith. His stuff on science and tautologies (IMHO) is wonderful and he is the most observant... he really looks at the natural world...not at his own navel. As in
Nagel E. 1974. What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review(Oct):435-450.
In relation to Godel I can offer a quote from
Hintikka J. 2000. On Gödel. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.
“...It may be true in some sense that the human mind operates in a way different from the modus operandi of a Turing machine, and even that Gödel’s theorem shows this difference. However, the arguments offered in the literature are for the most part highly unsatisfactory. For one thing, what is it that humans are supposed to know but machines not? Presumably the existence of a true but unprovable arithmetical proposition.
Jakko Hintikka
‘On Gödel’ (Hintikka, 2000)
Chapter X “Turing Machines or Gödel Machines?”. Page 68
This is exactly what I have found. A new form of unprovable truth I have called a 'virtual theorem'. I am writing this stuff up at the moment. It's next of the list in the model.... layer 0 of the model is the fundamentals like the mathematical basis....The mathematical basis for the phenomenality model is, as I have said previously something that you can understand when you formulate 'a' reality as a calculus of noise. In my case the calculus I called 'entropy calculus'. And indeed if you consider it as a naturally occurring mathematics then we are indeed simply part of a mathematics. You and I are a running proof-in-progress in that mathematics.
Ultimately I see people like Cahill actually finding noise statistics like the G and u0, e0 and other physical constants.
The deeper implications and potentialities of that situation are not my goal. There may me more than one calculus happening at the same time. We may be 'in the matrix'.
http://consc.net/papers/matrix.html
As a monism of noise I am only interested in understanding the entire structure to the point of understanding phenomenality so I can build my chipset to make machines that have a phenomenal life and a form of general intelligence based on it like us. Someone else can work out the rest.
The idea of a simulated (computational) basis for life within this universe is simply not meaningful in term so fthe proposed model. That is, in the sense that we consider manipulation of symbols with meanings ascribed by humans any symbolic manipulation throws away the virtual theorems. There can be no phenomenal life. This can be intuited from a very simple thought experiment: Ask yourself "what is it like to be a Turing Machine?" The answer, no matter how staggeringly complex the symbols on the tape, is it is like being a tape and tape reader with a perforated tape in it. Put the same thing in silicon... what's it like? It's like being a hot rock. Whatever that is... :-) Put it in a quantum computer... what's it like? Like being ..dunno.. a cryogenically cold rock?
The model suggests that 'computation' literally is the natural world, in the context of an entropy calculus. To make entropy calculus simply use the above nagel reference as a cookbook. Start with a gigantic number of very simple reversible events and let it evolve as a massive cellular automata. We emerge.
In the end, however, my experience has been that Ockham (Occam?) 's Razor really works. What I find is the essence of simplicity... at all places when it seemed like I had to invent some 'feature' or principle to explain something... in the end it vapourised and became a result of a natural implicit context. Like in entropy calculus... implicit signs, implicit rules of inference, transformation etc... To be in a natural computational substrate is to be us... at least that is what the whole thing points to. A staggerring pile of primitive axioms.
So, Bruno, I suppose I'm right with you in regards the relationship between computation and the natural world. They are one and the same, just not computation in the style we culturally imbue at school and via the workings of our technology. I tend not to think of numbers, however... merely quantity... the word 'number' has the smell of the indirection of a symbolic representation of quantity.
I'm also quite at ease with the idea of an infinite number of abstract domains we can explore symbolically. The fact that only one of them is apparently actually implemented (which is what you say when you refer to the one we are in and why you name it 'the natural world'. I say natural because it can spontaneously arise for good reasons) is simply an enforced conclusion of a cognitive agent within it. This is where the anthropic principle seems to be a valuable way of looking at things.
I'm fairly sure I have sniffed out all the loose ends in this. I have a mathematical basis, a 2 sided epistemology model situating us within that mathematics. The resulting model shows us that the human brain makes fantastically good use of simple properties of the natural world. In particular it makes use of the very deepest structure of the natural world to construct a macroscale phenomenality.
Which brings me to another note to leave you with for the moment. I have said it before and I commend you ponder it deeply... In the organisational hierarchy of structured noise
Humanity, Human, Organ(brain), Cell, Molecule, Atom, Atomic Particle, Subatomic Particle, a, b, c, d, e, f, g, ...........<X>
Zoom in on the structure with a mental magnifying glass....There's no such thing as a proton... it's 3 quarks playing tag. Then look at the quarks. DOH...no such 'thing', but merely some new substructure. When you stare at any'thing', you are not staring at any'thing' at all. You look at a pile of <X> and only <X> with a really nifty qualia paint job. And when you bust it up you get 'bits' of the same <X> in different configurations with yet another qualia paint job....and so on..... YOU are made of <X>, staring at <X> from within a massive organised structure of <X>.
Take away any one layer and all layers above are simply not there any more. Inheritance rules (entropy calculus has a set theoretic treatment)
In the model if you BE a human you have to be ALL of the hierarchy! In a monism of structured noise ALL is only made of ONE... and that one thing is <X>...including space and matter...everything is made of the one 'thing'...and , according to Heraclitus.. that thing is not a 'thing' at all..it's merely an event. Prigogine would say drop 'being' and consder 'becoming'. Its ontological appearance is some'thing' we get by talking about it when you are made of it. In Cahill's case he chose that primitive 'event' and called it a GEBIT. It doesn’t really matter what the nature of the fundamental (indeed if there really is a limiting fundamental at all...this is something for people smarter than me to work out) event is.... you end up looking like us in what we see around us.
That's the story told by a model of the natural world as an entropy calculus of noise including situated cognitive agents made of it trying to understand it from within and inclusive of the phenomenality needed to construct any knowledge model at all.
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BTW Yesterday I did a mirror metaphor. Not quite adequate... so I'll give you the next layer of the metaphor.
1) Your brain does not make a mirror. It makes everything BUT the mirror or better 'not-mirror'. Think about it.
2) It's not a mirror... it's actually more like a periscope. 'Be' the periscope. If you are a sailor think of 'apparent wind'. It's how phenomenality appears to come from your body or 'out there' when it's actually generated by cellular activity. It's why your visual field appears to be sourced from your eyes when in fact it gets generated up the back of your head in the occipital lobes.
3) The mirror is not a 2D surface. It's a very messy 3D surface and it's not 'reflecting' light, but all manner of 'phenomenal' elements (quale) used to make haptic, visual, olfactory, gustatory, aural perceptual fields.
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I have deposited this structure here, now, so that the extremely elevated IQ of this list may be the first to chew through it and take it or whatever it turns into, including its demise....into the future. prove it wrong (with empirical evidence) and you have helped me to my goal just as much.
Phenomenality is becoming banal to me. The real challenge is political/cultural... a pile of darlings have to be... upgraded somewhat. I posit with a huge pile of evidence that science is a psychologically sick puppy and the disease is inherited from 150 years ago (ish) and is only a problem in the one area of the science of phenomenality. That science, upon scrutiny, seems to open a door to another 50% of scientific endeavour.
The cure is simply to recognize it!...To consider phenomenality as having primacy in our view of the natural world. The practical upshot is the 2 sided epistemology model of explanation/description. This is the essential message of the whole thing. We can't get at phenomenality without absorbing this idea and getting used to it.
The details will emerge in the literature... or not... as the case may be! (I'll be a philosopher yet!)
I gotta get back to the coal face.
Cheers
Colin Hales.
Received on Thu Aug 04 2005 - 21:30:09 PDT