On 05 Feb 2014, at 19:49, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2014 12:39:47 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 05 Feb 2014, at 14:28, Craig Weinberg wrote:
<snip>
Why would I share an elementary belief that I understand to be false?
Nobody ask you this. On the contrary, the idea is to start from what
we can agree on.
Given the complexity of the problem we talk about, we might even ask
if we agree on the logical rules.
Yes, we should.
Ah? OK.
I begin from the assumption that logical rules are abstracted from
comparisons across sensory experiences, and therefore have no
independent existence of their own or casual effect.
That is not assumption. It might be part of a theory about the
relations between minds and logic.
What I meant by agreeing on logical rules was agreeing that if we
prove in our theory some proposition A and if we prove in that theory
some proposition B, we allow saying that we have prove the new
proposition asserting that A and B.
This is often written in some way, like A, B / (A & B), or
A B
(A & B)
An important rule is the modus ponens, for example; A, A -> B / B
So my question is what does need to be explained in the axioms of
arithmetic that I have given? For most people a first order logic
axiom like
0 ≠ s(x) (for all x) is simpler to understand that any statement
involving terms like "sense" or "aesthetic".
It's not simpler for me, or someone who doesn't know the language of
mathematical notation.
It is conceptually simpler. I could have written instead:
"0 is not equal to the successor of any number".
What are "not" and "equal" and "successor" if not aesthetic
qualities in our imagination?
They are simple 3p concept shared by all scientists.
"aesthetic qualities in our imagination" refers to 1p.
it might be that they live through us in the form of "aesthetic
qualities in our imagination". That is even plausible with comp, and
we can talk about that in some possible thread. nevertheless, the
meaning of "aesthetic qualities in our imagination" is far more
complex that the meaning of "not", "equal" and "successor", when
applied to natural numbers.
Or write a longer sentence. It is intuitively trivial with the
intended standard intuitive notion of numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, ...
Whatever you are thinking is intuitively trivial is probably exactly
where I am saying that everything meaningful to consciousness must be.
You talk again like the universal soul (S4Grz). Yes, from its point of
view, consciousness is trivial. Indeed. But that's a "fact of
reality", not a theory capable of explaining that fact.
If only I could find a way to motivate you to do the "hard work".
I have to figure out what is meant by s(x), which distracts me from
the question of whether s(x) is actually fictional and derived from
a whole history of philosophical formulation.
You confuse the intended notion with the relation between the humans
and that notion. We can always come back on this, but you should
appeal to such side notion only when you think that it invalidate
the reasoning. If not you do what we call in french "un procès
d'intention", that is, you attribute to your opponents statements
that he never did.
I wasn't trying to say anything intentional, but the framing of the
question in mathematical terms automatically buries the roots of
mathematics itself,
Not necessarily. And the way I proceed in the UDA guaranties that we
don't lost the first person, as the questions are all addressed to
her. Then the same is done in AUDA, except we need some help from the
3p (sharable notion) self of the machine to define the first person
(in the Theaetetus' way).
which is what I am saying is already sense and consciousness (not
human of course).
You are correct on this, for the 1p view. That is, crazily enough, a
theorem in arithmetic.
But that truth is not communicable by the machine itself, it can even,
in some sense, become false if asserted.
Once you know how to read the language, the sense making that it
took to get there, such as all of the childhood wiring of tactile
and visual metaphors crafted by patient teachers, are elided into
the sub-personal awareness.
We do that all the time. Again, if you are willing to argue, you
must invoke the elision only if it invalidates the argument.
It does invalidate the argument. I'm explaining why it might seem to
you, and to many people, that mathematical abstractions could be
primitive. I'm saying that mathematical thoughts emerge from much
simpler feelings and expectations which are perceptual and tangible
rather than conceptual.
Unfortunately that is refuted.
All you can do is to find some other universal Turing system who
primitive will look like being simpler than addition and
multiplication, but you cannot explain the natural numbers with
anything less than a Turing complete system.
So if your theory *explains* the laws of addition and multiplication,
it has to be a Turing complete system, or more. Not less.
With the bulk of the iceberg of sense making metaphor safely under
water, yes the tip seems much simpler than talking about something
for which a formal language has yet to exist.
I discovered formal language in biology. As far as Nature exists, it
exploits arguably the formal and the multiplicable all the times. A
formal system, fundamentally, is just a system defined by its form.
I'm explaining why it seems simpler to talk about math (an
established formal language developed over thousands of years by
billions of people) than it is to talk about aesthetic phenomena
(which has no formal language except for the ad hoc one that I am
trying to give it). I would say that Nature only exploits the
formal, as part of Nature, we exploit the informal as well.
We exploit the informal, sure. But we communicate today, informally,
but in a way such that on complex technical matter, we can avoid the
confusion, and translate the relevant parts in accepted formal ways.
Now, in cognitive science, like in the foundation of math, we have
discovered the role of the informal, and with comp+Theaetetus we have
a done a tour-de-force; we listen to the machine, and she offers us a
formal theory of informal provability! (S4Grz).
The axiom here says 0 is not a successor of any natural number. A
FAQ is "is not 0 the successor of -1 ?", and the anwer is that we
just accept "0 ≠ s(x)" to eliminate the negative numbers, in which
we are not interested because we want a very simple Turing universal
base. We could use all integers, as they are also Turing universal
with addition and multiplication, but we have chosen the natural
numbers.
Beyond that type of explanation, at this stage, asking for more is
obfuscation.
It would be obfuscation if we were asking about computation or math,
but I'm only interested in the relationship of consciousness to
physics and information.
Then *you* should stay mute about comp. You can't say that comp is
false and computer science irrelevant for sense and consciousness,
and make negative statement like my sun is law (who get an artficial
brain) is a zombie, without us asking to justify your point, without
appealing on "real", "true", "feel", "obvious", etc.
I don't use 'zombie', your sun in law is a doll or puppet.
That is a 1004 precision in the insult.
I don't understand why I'm supposed to stay mute about comp.
Nobody asks you to stay mute. Simply don't pretend to have a
refutation of comp if you don't have one.
It sounds like 'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." to
me.
It is the contrary. It is more "pay attention to the 1p person behind
the machine clothes.
If I find, through the success of the sense-primitive model, that
comp is an impostor, why should I keep it a secret?
Of course.
Why shouldn't I help explain the difference between a doll and a
person?
Because the difference is straw man.
You are the one confusing the doll (the machine body) and the person
(a person supported locally by a special type of computation executed
by the machine's body).
UDA can certainly inspires attempt in that direction, as it seems to
imply an inflation of continuations, much larger a priori than the
apparently well defined local continuation we observe.
But you insist that your first axiom is that comp is false.
Not just comp, all forms of functionalism, mechanism, materialism,
structured realism, logical positivism, but also solipsism, idealism
(to some degree), dualism, etc. I don't know that its an axiom, it's
more of a consequence of the sense primitive rather than a form/
information primitive.
OK. But you betray that you axiom is Not-comp. If you take it as
axiom, it is because you find it obvious, and thus non justifiable.
Now, in "my" theory, which I just copy from arithmetic, you are right
"non-comp" is close to obvious from the 1p machine's view, if only
because the 1-I has no "name" (definite description, unlike the local
machine's body).
You can't invoke your 1p feeling to propose a 3p communicable theory.
You can, and should, use them to find your 3p proposition, but you
can't use them.
Consciousness is obvious, yes, but that very fact is not publicly
obvious at all, and non-consciousness, for anything else but you, is
still less obvious.
And I agree with the *feeling*, if only because *that* feeling, I
think, is understandable. Indeed, the more you grasp comp, the less
it is believable. That is, modulo some definitions, a theorem in comp.
You can't ask us to start from such a strong negative statement. It
leads to p-zombie, and well, may daughter thinks differently, and I
do not see how you could contradict her.
It doesn't lead to p-zombie, because dolls can never be totally
mistaken for non-dolls
Then you introduce something magical, or some use of actual
infinities. You mentioned our long history, but that, of course only
lower the level. To say no to all doctors, you need actual infinities.
Again, the 1p is related to those infinities indeed, but the comp
point is that at some level of description, such relations can be
preserved.
- not by everyone forever.
Well, with my apple-new-brain 3024, I have a guaranty for 600 years.
Now can I ask you to start from the strong negative statement?
Of course not. A statement as strong as non-comp needs to be
justified, and "obvious" is not an answer.
On the contrary, I show that comp is testable, and if you are so sure
that comp is false, I give you a concrete tool to make your point:
show that nature violates Z1* and X1*, or S4Grz1.
To be sure this would only refute comp + the classical theory of
knowledge, but then we can proceed, as we have learned something.
Bruno
and then we find that sense can only be self-explanatory. Nothing
else can be self explanatory because explanation itself can't be
anything other than a way of making sense.
I think that is Craig's fuel, and no comp fuel, to take sense has
fundamental. Epiphenomenalism has also that air of "let us not try to
understand".
I think that if you aren't seeing that sense is fundamental, it is
because you have stopped questioning it when you get to a
comfortable level of objective-seeming simplicity.
Sense is without doubt fundamental, and is indeed the base of the
UDA (with sense/consciousness assumed to be invariant for the
digital transplant). Then the math of comp makes it possible to
pursue the interrogation, not avoid it.
If you are agreeing that sense is fundamental then are you agreeing
that arithmetic truth is derived from sense?
No. Sense is fundamental, if only because only it pull us toward
truth, justice, etc. But with comp, somehow, it participates also in
the building of space, time, energies, realities, etc.
So you think that truth can exist even if it makes no sense?
But sense is not primitive, it arises itself from the existing
solutions of diophantine polynomials. (A tiny part of arithmetical
truth).
That's surreal that you can even say that. It's like saying that
water is not primitive, it comes from chocolate milk. How could a
diophantine polynomial exist if it doesn't have any sense to it? You
must think that by sense I am talking about some kind of system that
animals use to navigate their modal mazes. The sense that I mean is
absolutely primitive. It allows the maze, the navigation, the
animals, the 'system', the 'some' and 'kind'...all of them are
ripples and echoes of primordial sense.
In comp terms, the reason that I disallow the digital transplant is
that I suspect that the capacity for sensory enrichment is nested-
logarithmic, and that there are thresholds in which that logarithm
diagonalizes, if that makes sense.
I have a large mind and I can make sense of this, but computability
is close for diagonalization, and anyway, if this is only something
that you *suspect*, you can't use it to invalidate a reasoning,
especially at step 0 (the stated assumptions).
If someone is going to potentially kill themselves to become a
digital person, then we must consider invalidating the reasoning on
suspicion.
A biological organism, lets say a frog, represents a particular
history of sensory experience. If we assume fundamental sense, then
the forgetting that we experience in our momentary consciousness,
and the loss of history in death, is not fundamental. It is retained
on the Absolute level, so that what is expressed to us by the frog's
living body (hopping, croaking, etc, not just anatomically
amphibian, but personality, character, metaphor) is not only a what
but also a who that recapitulates the entire history of the
individual frog, all frogs, amphibians, living organisms, etc. The
frog image that we are aesthetically acquainted with is the very tip
of a tall spire of history that our public facing senses render as
collapsed into an externalized presence. We can do this because both
we and the frog, at the bottom of our spires, share the same base of
common sense.
No problem, but then you should be happy with the idea that after
Gödel the mathematicians have to extend that same base of common
sense to all universal numbers.
The family is bigger than we thought.
I don't think that numbers are part of the family at all, except as
a reflection. They are the common sense that any given 2D plane of a
spire has about the 2D relations of other spire-circles in a plane.
Number literacy is a language generated by sense imitating and
extrapolating insensitivity.
The problem with digital substitution is that it just takes the
collapsed rendering and simulates it in our experience, so that the
spire of history which connects it to our experience and the
Totality of experience is missing entirely, replaced by an
impersonal set of modal strategies to navigate the un-inspired, flat
terrain which fills the space between spires.
That would be the case if a 3p machine could think, but no 3p things
can think. Only 1p person think. You beg the question by a sort of
decision of not attributing an 1p person to a machine, but the math
shows evidence for a person.
There is no evidence of a person though. What would be evidence of a
person?
Math can only show a silhouette that seems to invite personhood, but
that is only a blind spot within math where the mathematician belongs.
We get it freely when we apply Theaetus' definition on Gödel
provability, which indeed capture a recursive definition of the
belief in arithmetic/compute
What does that have to do with a person necessarily?
Craig
...
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