On 09 Feb 2014, at 02:47, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 7 February 2014 07:47, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
Well, I *could* be a zombie and still say that, unless you consider
the idea of zombies contradictory (which maybe it is).
I bet you are not a zombie. But you seem to illustrate my point, if
epiphenomenalism is true, despite you are not a zombie, you could
be one,
and that is a step toward the elimination of the person.
I know I'm not a zombie, but you don't know that.
OK.
I don't know how you
would bet on it either, since you could not prove it in order to get
your payout!
I meant "I hope".The hope-payout is very big: as it means that I am
not losing my time discussing with a zombie.
The most you can know is that if a certain substitution
is made in by brain then *if* I am conscious I will continue to be
conscious.
I can't know that either. If you are conscious, you might well become
a zombie after the substitution, if comp is false for example. I
cannot know for sure that comp is true. I can know it in the
Theatetus' way, but this means only that I believe in comp, and that
God knows that it is true.
<snip>
not because it is exercising a particular strategy
except in a manner of speaking. But the substantive point I want to
make is that there is no downward causation,
I don't think there is any causation at all. Causation is a modal
notion,
and as to be treated indexically to, and with comp, in a way
related to the
many computations in arithmetic.
for if there were we
would observe magical events. If you accept that then I agree with
you, any apparent disagreement is really just semantics.
We must still discuss if this is very semantics. Some higher level
laws can
be quite autonomous relatively to lower level laws, and some downard
causation, even if reductible in theory to particles or numbers,
remains
meaningful at his own level.
Downward causation would involve, for example, a neuron spontaneously
firing when all the biochemical parameters show that it should not.
That would be something miraculous. It has never been observed, or we
would know there is something very wrong with science.
Imagine that I am a coffee addict, so that when, in Helsinki, they
propose to copy me, and reconstitute me in a number of cities (an
hundred one, say), I ask "please don't reconstitute me in the cities
which they have no coffee".
Let us assume that my wish will be exacted, and that I can know that
in advance. In that case P(coffee) = 1.
I do see this as a sort of downward causation, despite no
deterministic laws are involved.
Or imagine that I have to present a show, where I will prove to the
audience that I can distort a metallic bar without touching it. To do
my trick I put an absolute quantum bomb in the room, and as long as
the metallic bar does not distort itself, I trigger the atomic bomb.
"Absolute" means that the probability of surviving the explosion is
null, both for me and the audience. The, like with the coffee
situation, I select the reality, by quantum suicide, in which the
metal bar distort itself (well actually I will select only those where
I believe this, but let us abstract from this here). That would also
be a sort of action of my mind (with the goal to distort the metallic
bar), on matter, without contradicting arithmetic or physics.
That is a far stretched example, but it suggests that choosing is a
sort of suicide, where you "kill" the continuations you want to avoid,
and we cannot decide in advance if such self-selection have not
already be done, making consciousness selecting certain type of
realities, from our points of view.
In particular, if I decide to do a cup of coffee, from my perspective,
there will be a downward causation. Even if in truth it does not
exist, at the level where I am living, saying that it does not exist
would be identifying a proof and a truth, and makes me inconsistent.
In arithmetic, there is no causation at all, and physics is a first
person plural constructs of the average universal machines, so that
the whole causation notion is "epiphenomenal" on truth. It does not
make it illusory at the provability or effective level where I live
(G, Z, X). Like I just said to Brent, I begin to think that the
argument against free-will, or again a role for consciousness, confuse
G and G* (provability and truth, or Z and Z*).
Uses of Gödel's theorem against mechanism (Lucas, Penrose) make often
a confusion between G and S4Grz, or between body and soul (or 3p and
1p). It is interesting (imo) that argument against free will might be
a confusion of some points of view too, notably of confusing
provability and truth, or a logic x and its true extension x* (which I
often called "blasphem", as it consists in taking God's view, and
applying on Earth: that makes a machine inconsistent).
I am not yet sure if this really works.
Bruno
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Stathis Papaioannou
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