Le 19-mars-06, à 10:30, Russell Standish a écrit :
>
> This is the way I put the argument in my upcoming book. You can also
> read the Universal Dovetailer Argument in Bruno Marchal's SANE04
> paper.
>
> \item That a description logically capable of observing itself is
> enough to bootstrap itself into existence. Let me speak to this by
> means of an example: The C programming language is a popular
> language for computer applications. To convert a program written in
> C into machine instructions that can execute on the computer, one
> uses another program called a compiler. Many C compilers are
> available, but a popular compiler is the GNU C compiler, or gcc. Gcc
> is itself a C language program, you can download the program source
> code from http://www.gnu.org, and compile it yourself, if you
> already have a working C compiler. Once you have compiled gcc, you
> can then use gcc to compile itself. Thus gcc has bootstrapped itself
> onto your computer, and all references to any preexisting compiler
> forgotten.
>
> What I'm tryng to say here is that the description is a complete
> specification of a conscious being, when interpreted (observed) by
> the conscious being. There may have been an initial interpreter
> (conscious or not) to bootstrap the original conscious being. It
> matters not which interpreter it is --- any suitable one will do. If
> {\em computationalism} \S\ref{computationalism} is correct, any
> universal Turing machine will suffice. In fact since the 3rd person
> world has to be a timeless {\em ideal} structure, it is not
> necessary to actually run the initial interpreter. The logical
> possibility of a conscious observer being able to instantiate itself
> is sufficient in a timeless Plenitude of all possibilities. Thus we
> close the ontology of the bitstring Plenitude, and find an answer
> to Stephen Hawking's question ``What breathes fire into the
> equations''\cite[p. 174]{Hawking88}. Paraphrasing the words of
> Pierre-Simon Laplace to Napoleon Bonaparte, we have no need of a
> hypothesis of a concrete reality\cite{Marchal98}.
>
>
> I appreciate that some can never do this ontological closure, that for
> them there must always be a machine somewhere doing the running. This
> is reminiscient of those people for whom there must be a prime mover
> to start the universe off.
>
> I know that Bruno says he's eliminated the "extravagent hypothesis",
> but really I think he's shown that it is unnecessary, and can be pared
> away by Occam's razor, not that it is contradictory.
I am OK with this. Still, I have developed the Movie Graph Argument (cf
also Maudlin) with the specific purpose of not using Occam Razor, so
that the complete UDA (including the MGA) can be seen as a proof (in
theoretical cognitive science). Now the movie graph argument (and
especially Maudlin's equivalent Olympia argument) provide some non
trivial information putting some importance of the notion of
arithmetical counterfactual. That is nice because it could give some
shortcut to the quantum logic which can already be considered as a
logic of counterfactuals. And this is certainly interesting for those
who already accept the MWI of QM.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Mon Mar 20 2006 - 06:18:54 PST