<regrettable snip>
Hi Bruno,
The misinterpretations compounded and intermingled so much I decided to cut to the meat of it.. I suspect that this dialogue will end in the usual way. Being ignored....The well worn path of COMP and all the things it says, the idea that a multiverse explains something: these are entrenched and have been for so long that someone like me who turns up with something that does not even need these basic premises is unlikely to be understood.
However... I can but try. I'll skip all the peripheral issues.
Re: 1st person
Arguments derived from your definition do not validate your definition as that applicable to the natural world unless they make predictions of the natural world. Yes you can say I have proved this and that, attained perspective this and that, concluded this and that. But in the end? Your assumption can invalidate the entire process, interesting though it may be.
Re: 'Naturalism'
I find the whole milieu of challenging the idea that the natural world is what we are part of and inside simply a lot of linguistic sophistry with no useful outcome. Ultimately it all comes down to the meaning of words. I find an assumption of COMP far more tenuous than an assumption of a natural world. What ever the appearance of it, whatever the mechanism behind it, whatever it is made of: I prefer to work on the assumption that it is there and to be explored and tested and understood. I will NOT assume that any collection of rearranged matter (brain or ink on paper) does any more then tell a story _about_ it. That is what COMP is doing: assuming that the telling of an elaborate story somehow makes the story as real as the story teller. One can take that position and make assertions that sound OK within the bounds of the assumptions but lose all usefulness beyond the bounds of the assumptions. I do not wish to do this.
...
Please NOT start with dead end philosophical diversions about 'existence'. This is a serious issue with health implications, not a computer game. Please convince the thousands of medical practitioners who are quite convinced they are dealing with real stuff, as are their patients. They are fun discussions but of no use.
...
Re: Dovetailer
As soon as you put any symbolic machine behaving 'as if' you have lost the first person(see below for proof). No variable in a computer program is ever reified. All that ever happens is that storage is allocated and the processor play acts 'as if' it were the abstraction in question. More than that: If you have a single serial proof machine there is no coherence between different parts of the proof (as coherent as the proof itself). If you introduce more and more parallel execution all that can be done is that a third person observer can see the relativity of the parallel proofs. That is all. This is not first person! The dovetailer may actually observe that connectivity between the parallel proofs. So what? There is no reality here. More play-acting. Look at a cellular automata. Very strict virtual relationships exist between cells not explicitly connected. But in spite of this there can be no implicit 'observation' of one cell by other cells based on the explicit rules. Th!
ere is no awareness of the other cells beyond the immediate explicit algorithms by _definition_. There can be no sensation in a simulation.
Re: Bye Bye COMP
The virtual theorems are gone. You have no 'reified' virtual theorems in the UD by definition of the UD. QED.
Re: Virtual Theorems to Sensations
In the universe-as-a-calculus Bruno is a Proof. Colin is a proof. In particular our brains are proofs too. The subjective qualities of being Bruno and Colin are generated by (supervenient on) the existence and action of brain material and nothing more than brain material. This is the one and only theorem that has failed all attempts at refutation. Measurements are made throughout the body. The experiential qualities are generated in the brain to appear as if they come from the periphery. Vision appears to come from the eyes, etc.
I hold that brain material makes use of these new Godellian unproveable truths. Remember. If Bruno and Colin are 'truths' in the universe-as-a-calculus, then 'truths' are 'matter' in the universe. Virtual truths are virtual matter. Equally true and as vigorously defined, but about what Bruno and Colin are NOT. Brain matter can, when viewed from this perspective, simply be contriving to make a story from what it is NOT by manipulating what IS (brain matter). When you look at brain operation this way, subjective experience is precisely identical and as natural as any other particle interaction in the universe (details further down). The whole problem changes from one of "what is it?" to "why is it only the visibility provided by brain material that we inherit, not visibility from our arms or teeth of eyes?" This is an entirely different and much simpler question.
To help understand this: Consider the humble basketball. Another truth of the natural world. Equally as true and as real is the rest of the universe that is, in effect, an UN-basketball! Unless the rest of the universe cooperates perfectly to be an UN-basketball, there can be no basketball. Formulating mathematical generalisations about the constituents and behaviour of the basketball says absolutely NOTHING about the rest of the universe....
I am hoping that this may be sinking in. It takes a lot of getting used to, I know. A bit like me getting used to COMP :-)
OK. Next step.
Destroy matter. Where does it go? It goes from being part of Bruno or Colin to being part of NOT Bruno and NOT Colin. Destroy matter in a coordinated way and what do you get? A picture painted with the brush of that destruction. Sounds fanciful? Not really. A charged neuron is a macro-atom with equal status to any other atom, just a whopping great atomic number. Discharge a neuron and you destroy an atom. Discharge it in a coordinated way and well...kind of obvious isn't it....but I'll spell it out....If you destroy matter in a way that it behaves as if it has been impacted by a particle X you get a subjective experience of Xness, or perhaps the Fourier transform of same so that it can team up with other neurons to collectively assemble Xness from the component virtual particles. It does not matter. The principle is what is important: virtual particles can be REIFIED by brain matter. To a third person the brain material involved will just look like it does. To a physicist: t!
hat brain matter looks like a blizzard of virtual electromagnetic solitons impacting ORTHOGONALLY to the membrane.
By attaching (through the act of destruction) to the pre-existing virtual theorems the brain material can make virtual particles. It can pretend to be hit by an electromagnetic soliton the shape of a sock for of custard if it wants! Anything goes.
Anyone doubting that this is real... the electric fields involved are HUGE. The environment of the membrane is a wonderfully programmable electric field destroyer/cell discharger. The fields would break down air if recreated in your living room. =SPARKS. >10^6 volts/meter. This is a prodigious virtual particle generator par excellence.
I have already explained at some length quite recently why these virtual particles only have to be LIKE the observed phenomena. Systematic error are quite acceptable. This is the reality of it in brain matter.
There are a whole pile of anatomical predictions made about brain matter: size and shape of soma and peripheral vs central, regional shapes of the brain, ion channel types and densities and certain synaptic connections are predicted: all of these I seem to be finding. It predicts pathological states and regulatory behaviour. But more than that I have plans to build an artifical qualia generator as a proof of principle.
That is why I believe COMP is a dead end. You can recursively insert UD inside UD until the end of eternity and it will never generate virtual matter. The very first entry of a symbolic representation throws them away: you only get them with truly parallel REAL WORLD.
So for that matter, I suppose some form of realism is proven as rather compelling model of reality...meaning all arguments about 'existence' and other diversions could be revised too, not just COMP.
Notice that QM and Multiverses have not been part of this argument at all. The whole discourse is not wrong. It's just not talking about reality at all .ie. its merely irrelevant. The whole concept of observation is completely screwed up in QM of any flavour. So until COMP or MULTIVERSES, QM says anything that usefully characterises brain material... I suggest that the discourse undergo a bit of self review. A lot of energy has been spent down dead end paths. Do we still want to be there? Or do we want to solve the problem of subjective experience for real?
I don’t want to hear COMP predicts this or QM says that... these are irrelevances. What I want to hear is COMP says subjective experience is like this because..... and therefore brain material will be found like _this_. That will lend some credence to it.
It is somewhat ironic that I started out after a whole career of COMP-headedness and have completely reversed my ideas. BTW there is a computational aspect to the brain...the 'connectionist view'. It acts dendrite-soma-axon and is orthogonal to and co-exists with the phenomenal attributes of cellular activity. For the same reason all computationalists are missing 50% of the story: their computers throw away all the subjective experiences with the connectionism bathwater. The virtual particles are an entirely separate route for back-propagation in support of tuning and regulation that they haven't even begun to use.
I'm not saying anything more on the matter. You could all just resume business as usual and ignore the above. Indeed I have come to expect it. Of course I could be wrong... but at least I have a working model with consistency with brain material and an empirical plan. I am sure I'm very close to the answer and that refuting it will be as clarifying as confirming it.
And I reassert yesterday's claim of priority as discoverer of all of this. These Godellian unprovable truths: a side affect of parallelism, are just as real as the Chaitin set of unreachable numbers. Indeed that are sort of orthogonal to Chaitin's set, forming a more complete picture of unprovable truths.
Dennett and the Churchlands please leave the building. Is John Searle in the audience?
Cheers
Colin Hales
Received on Mon Aug 29 2005 - 23:55:16 PDT
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