Le 06-févr.-06, à 22:32, daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden a écrit :
>
> So Bruno says that:
> a) "I am a machine."
> b) "...no man can grasp all aspect of man"
To be sure, and clear, note that I have never said "I am a machine",
nor "man is a machine".
All what I say is that: "IF I am a machine THEN physics emerges from
machine's psychology or theology". Both ontologically and
epistemologically.
Now, I have made some progress, and strictly speaking, I can replace
the comp hyp by the much more general "lobian" hyp. This entails that
machines and a very large class of non-machine shares the same physical
laws.
Of course my argument remains simpler to present with the comp hyp, and
I still can refer to it for that reason.
b) become no machine, no angels, nor Gods can grasp all aspect of
itself.
Even the Plato's and Plotin's big ONE can't, but it is not because it
lacks something, in that case, it is more because it does not lack
anything so that somehow it is far above the very idea of grasping.
See Boolos 1993 (precise ref in my Lille thesis) for an explicit
description of an "angel" (by which I mean any loebian entity which is
not turing emulable, but still follows the G/G* logic).
>
> Tom says that to philosophize is one aspect of humanness that is more
> than a machine (i.e. simply following a set of instructions).
The idea of following a set of instructions is level dependent. I agree
it is basically inhuman.
Now machine can observe themselves (in more than one sense) and this in
general leads to unpredictable behavior.
With or without the quantum hyp. it can be said that man or nature
follows simple set of instruction like following the (linear and
computable) solutions of the Schroedinger Eq.
>
> Jef and Brent say that we are machines who (that?) philosophize.
Well, if we are machines, we must admit we are philosophizing a liitle
bit :)
>
> Brent says that realizing we are machines is the beginning of (or
> another step in) the death of human hubris (arrogance).
I agree, but loebianity is almost the most general characterization of
humilty and modesty.
For the modalist: humility = Dt -> DBf, Modesty = B(Bp->p)->Bp". I will
come back on this, when I will come back on the arithmetical
interpretation of Plotinus' hypostases.
>
> I thought that Bruno maintains that humility is on the side of
> realizing that we cannot totally understand ourselves.
No loebian entity can fully understand it-selves, and that gives to
them many (really many) alternative exploration paths, which can
recombine or not.
>
> Pascal, "Reason can begin again when we recognize what we cannot know."
Yes and no. Some have used that formula with the meaning that you can
reason, but only starting from such or such "sacred book on
revelations". In particular I am not sure in which sense pascal did use
it.
>
> Could we try to make sense of this, given that we believe in sense?
I hope this help a little bit. I hope I can make it clearer, perhaps by
finding a way to explain Godel's theorem and incompleteness phenomena,
and how they are related to G and G*, and the discoveries of "mystical
machines" (which are just machines which look deep inside themselves,
in the Godel-Lob sense of self-reference).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Wed Feb 08 2006 - 11:06:07 PST