Le 22-déc.-05, à 23:51, daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden a écrit :
> What I will say is of course obvious from third-person
> hind-sight, but it helps me to guard against delusion to
> point out the limitedness of email list dialogue when it comes
> to accomplishing anything "significant". I think that the significance
> is in becoming better at expressing ourselves.
Especially on a delicate subject.
> So, Bruno, I've been
> bewildered for a while at why you are going to all this trouble to
> help lowly list participants like me in learning the rudiments of modal
> logic.
Two bad news:
1) People on this list are one century in advance compared to what the
average scientist can talk about in this time of overspecialisation and
ivory towers.
2) I am probably *two* centuries in advance :) Look, I am asking to
people to listen to the machines, but people does not yet listen to
people.
At least the "lowly list participants" seems to share some genuine
interest in deep and hard fundamental questions.
> Yes, I know English, and I could perhaps help with basic English
> usage. But when it comes to insider questions like "machine
> psychology",
> aren't there English-speaking philosophers out there that already know
> what you're trying to get at?
Those who can grasp enough see me as an outsider competitor, the others
are not serious.
Very few people knows really simultaneously quantum mechanics,
mathematical logic, and "philosophy of mind".
> You seem to be implying that there
> are not. This is surprising. What is this "path which can hardly be
> avoided" you talk about?
Listening to the machines. Listening to what a vast class of machines
can already correctly prove and correctly guess about themselves.
> The word "theology" is made from the root "theo", God, and this in my
> country is loaded with the historical baggage of puritanical (<-hint
> to what my country is) "whatever went wrong when I was growing up".
> We use theology/religion as the scapegoat for "whatever went wrong
> when I was growing up". Some readers' blood pressure is already
> starting to rise. So we put on our "scientist" hat so we can
> "objectively" step aside from "whatever went wrong when I was growing
> up" that I don't want to deal with any more, as purely subjective,
> lumping it all into the "religious" pot, or at least the "ignore" pot,
> until it comes out on our medical bill. Yes, some of us out of
> necessity deal with some of it through the psychological label (or
> even "mystical" in a therapeutic sense), until we reach our personal
> saturation point, and then lump the rest of it into the
> "religious"/"ignore" pot.
I will think of that. I think the problem is not with theology, but
with religious institutions. But then OK, I guess this should be better
taken into account.
>
> So I would say that both "theology" and "psychology" will not do if
> you are talking to the general audience.
Gosh! I thought it would work *only* with some general audience. In
academia I already know that most scientist are allergic to word like
"theology" (but in my poor country, also in front of word like mind,
person, thought, consciousness, and actually even "quantum" sometimes).
> (Just to toss something out there, how about "machine introspection"?)
> Of course, depending on who your audience is, even the words
> "machine" and "physics" are problematic. The term "physics" is
> particularly problematic because it is interpreted in the reductionist
> sense, which may or may know include the mind.
Apparently many words are problematic here. Mathematicians should know
the choice of word does not "really" matter. But most understand this
only in their very specialised field.
>
> Now here is where I will ask some questions, and then it will be clear
> that I am missing the point because I am still an outsider when it
> comes to this self-referential self-enlightened machine stuff.
We all are, really.
> Why are you afraid of "eliminating the person"?
Look at history. All philosophies which eliminates the person lead to
politics which eliminates the person, either in some bloody way of in
some bureaucratic way ...
But the "scientific" reason not to eliminate the person, is that it
would be a "scientific" error, as the machines can already explain by
using the logic of self-reference and the definition of the knower by
Theaetetus.
> I know you define personal identity through logic ("double-diagonal"
> stuff etc.) But it sounds like you say, contrary to the reductionist
> view, that there is something essential to the person that cannot be
> completely described from the bottom-up, at least that there is
> something to a person that is "forever incomplete".
Yes, as Judson Webb(*) already understood clearly, Godel's theorem is
a vaccine against almost all form of reductionism.
> Again, this is something contrary to the prevailing reductionist view,
> strengthened by simplistic popular desire, and a desire by some on
> this list, to have a COMPLETE explanation for everything.
Sorry for them, but this is as impossible as finding a period in the
decimal expansion of the square root of two. The lobian machines are
already a bit more wise than that ...
Thanks to you and Stathis for your kind answers I will meditate upon.
The question is really "how to call the logic G* \ G"? (The logic of
what is true about machines but that machines cannot prove, but can
still guess). Mmhhh....
Wish you the best,
Bruno
(*) Webb, 1980
Webb, J. C. (1980). Mechanism, Mentalism and Metamathematics: An essay
on Finitism. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland.
Webb, 1983
Webb, J. C. (1983). Gödel's theorems and church's thesis: a prologue
to mechanism. In Cohen, R. S. and Wartofsky, M. W., editors, Language,
logic, and method, pages 309-353. D.Reidel Publishing Company,
Dordrecht, Holland.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Fri Dec 23 2005 - 10:00:28 PST