Re: subjective reality

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 16:38:29 +0200

Le 11-août-05, à 00:55, Lee Corbin a écrit :

> Okay, but two questions:
>
> 1. by "comp" do you mean the "computationalist hypothesis" as
> apparently
> used by philosophers? Is "comp" just an abbreviation for that?


Strictly speaking: yes. It happens now that many people implicitly
conceive comp in the materialist framework, and I take it as a result
that this does not work. So I (re)define comp, to be sure, in term of
the conjonction of the "yes" doctor, arithmetical realism, and Church's
thesis.


>
> 2. By "Turing-emulable" do you mean that we can be imitated by a
> physical Turing machine (or, what amounts to the same thing),
> by a computer? Or, instead, are you going to the Pure Platonism,
> with no separate existence of a physical reality required?


It is part of the argument that if you are Turing emulable, then a
"physical Turing machine" is part of what emerges from the relation
between numbers. This is not so easy to understand, it needs all the
UDA (Universal Doevetailer Argument) including either some form of
OCCAM and the assesment that a non trivial part of physics has been
derived, or, for the "pure proof" without OCCAM, it needs the "movie
graph" argument, which is what Maudlin rediscovered with his Olympia
and Klara. We will certainly come back on this.


>
>> Comp is precisely the conjunction of Church
>> Thesis, of some amount of belief in arithmetic, + the act of faith
>> saying "yes" to *some* digitalist surgeon.
>
> And this is the same as saying yes to being uploaded, say, into
> a computer?

Yes.

> (I will, for the sake of other readers, even extend
> this by stipulating a computer that provides a fully Earth like virtual
> reality and which allows multiple mobile sensors on the Earth's
> surface so that folks can both feel at home, and also not lose
> contact with the actual world.)

Good idea :)

Kind regards,

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Fri Aug 12 2005 - 10:40:59 PDT

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