Hi ghibbsa,
On 20 Feb 2014, at 16:19, [email protected] wrote:
On Thursday, February 20, 2014 2:59:50 PM UTC, [email protected] wrote:
Hi Bruno,
You've said somewhere in this thread that by logic comp cannot be
incomplete because it's a religious position.
Hmm... OK.
No doubt you have your reasons for seeing things this way. But, it
doesn't change anything, that you have declared a link in your world
view, religious.
It is a believe in a technological form of reincarnation, and then
related to a form of immortality, with some natural Pythagorean
neoplatonist interpretation. It is a religion, with its canonical
theology. OK.
This means also that you have the right to say "no" to the doctor, a
bit like Jehovah Witness (as we call them here) can (or not, in some
country) refuse a sanguine transfusion for their kids.
If it's religious, it's religious. You can't have science, science,
science, religious, science, science....
That just makes everything equal to, religious.
That is a vast subject, but I think we can handle all questions with
the "scientific attitude", which consists in putting clear cards on
the table, and clear means of verification, testing, etc. Even
theology. It is just a bad contingencies that theology has not yet
come back to non confessional academies.
When you said it, the other guy was trying on his intuition that
something is partial or incomplete in comp, and if that's the case,
it's a legitimate position to want more evidence before saying yes
to the doctor.
Yes, but comp predicts that the soul of the machine will ask for an
infinity of evidence, and the honest doctor must say, "I don't know,
it is your choice".
In fact such a skeptic appears in the proof of Solovay theorem. There
is guy there asking for a proof that he will not access a cul-de-sac
world, before buying its accessibility ticket. All follows from the
fact that he will just never buy the ticket.
And I am not here to defend comp, or even allude that it might be
true. I don't know. i just display the consequences.
That's a reasonable scientific position if he can say what evidence
he wants, and that can be shown to be realistic and resolvable in
real time scales by scientific progress.
The problem is that there are no evidence at all for non-comp either.
I got the comp intuition by reading book of molecular biology,
biochemistry, long before reading Gödel.
He doesn't have to show where your logic is wrong. It'd be good if
he could but he doesn't have to. Not if he can say a standard that
is a reasonable scientific expectation for the claims you are making.
He has the right to say "no". We can give tuns of evidences, be we
must warn him that those evidences are not proof. We must encourage
him to not brag that he knows that comp is true, in case he uses
classical teleportation every day, because, even for him, that is not
a proof (although a string 1p evidence).
So here's a standard that is reasonable. Show us proto-consciousness
in a computer. Show an instance of emergence in a computer system,
Show an instance of true evolution in a computer.
I think that I describe this, but not at the level you want, but at
the level where the physical laws themselves evolve.
I show that all Löbian numbers have a rich science and a rich
theology. They are conscious, but so different from us, that you have
to do some work to trigger the empathy.
Also, answer: Let's say, in 20 years a whole new computational
paradigm emerges, that totally transforms the hardware and softare
paradigm, including totally new technology for hardware based on
totally new principles.
Let's say that emerges from breakthrough science in brain studies. I
Now. Would the reality of that new paradigm be saying no to the
doctor?
Or, is it impossible that this can ever happen? Is it impossible
that the brain and the mysteries of Evolution, have nothing more to
tell us, despite us knowing very little about its secrets in
empirical terms?
In front of a theory you can always speculate on a different theory. I
am not sure if I see the point.
It looks like you still attribute me some faith in something. I do,
but not publicly. I just show the consequence of an hypothesis.
You can speculate that Church's thesis is wrong, or that we are non
Turing emulable entities, but it is up to you to be a little more
constructive.
The result can be seen as a non go theorem: you cannot have both
materialism and computationalism, but comp provides the means to be
tested; so why not look at it.
Bruno - these are scientific concerns, and scientific standards.
Religion - no problem. If you believe it and you have faith that's
all well and good.
I never say so. I am a scientist. I just say that if you believe in
comp, then there is that reversal Plato/Aristotle, and that it has
testable physical consequences.
I often debunk invalid arguments against comp, but that does not mean,
at all, that I believe in comp.
But it isn't scientific to actually throw that at other people.
I did not. But in scientific theology, it is good to point that some
formula can be assumed, and other formula can be derived from
assumption. Comp needs faith is true, independently of the fact that
you have or not that faith.
If you want people to say yes to the doctor on those terms, then
let's make it a ceremony to remember. We'll hire a church for the
day, and you can throw some comp blessed water on our foreheads and
shove a bit of bread in our mouths, and some converts will come from
the back chanting with what looks like tea cosey on a silver
platter, and choirs will start o sing like angels and the echo of
the organs will fill the cavernous space, and the digital brain
symbolized by an apple mac will be revealed and we'll go dancing
down the street throwing flowers.
Why not? If that can help to realize the act needs faith?
The real question will be "the right of torture" and what can people
do with doppelgangers.
Nothing is simple here.
If you want to do that I'm in for it. So long as there's a cushy
desk job waiting for me in the ministery of the comp interior.
This will finish by taxing your brain components. Oh, eventually they
will tax the use of the modus ponens.
p.s. The way you are going on you are just killing your own good
work. Look at history. Guys that come along with work that makes big
claims that go on to be true. Pretty much without exception, either
they are bringing the major falsifiable predictions, or breakthrough
technology. Or, we have reel forward in time, to a future that bring
that breakthrough moment, and the paradigm shifts, and that ancestor
work by that original is recognized and given the status it
deserves, as the key breakthrough theory without which the future
breakthrough evidence and technology would not have been possible.
That could be Bruno, in either role. You might still bring those
breakthrough paradigm busting predictions. Or, you might enable
others to do so, either in your lifetime or maybe after you are
gone. That's the way it has always been, in the best most enduringly
influential science.
I am not interested in Bruno Marchal.
I like just to share my contemplation of arithmetic with the comp
views, because it is beautiful.
But if you introduce lots quasi-religious babble, or if your
vocabularly even gives that impression, you are diminishing the
prospect for future researchers to pick up your ideas.
It is just a matter of being honest, and also, I have tried that
strategy, of hiding the quasi-religious, and it made things worse.
Give time to the humans.
It's not about prejudice. It's about individuals who want to make a
good career and get a breakthrough.
I have been f. up in the large by "academicians". I have been able to
continue that work for my own inquiry. Not one papers published was
not ordered, with the needed of "strike in the ass". To do a career
has never been my goal. That kind of job has became a full time public
relation job, and a funding research job, which leaves no time to
serious and independent research. I do a career, yet, but it is not my
goal, which is more teaching and doing research.
I do have problem with *some* academicians, but it has nothing to do
with my work. Nothing.
Why should they look twice at something made so murky?
Mathematicians are used to not take any vocabulary choice too much
seriously. The theology associated to the machine is a well defined
structured set of propositions. In the comp context, to admit it is a
theology, is an admission of modesty and is the least honest move to
do. This is all what is illustrated with comp, and with the logic of
self-reference: the machine apprehension of the gap between provable
and truth.
They've got a hundred other possibles on the table, and don't have
forever to make their mind up. It's an unclean process in practice.
That's reality. Science doesn't escape that. So you need to keep the
vocabularly clean...unless you think you can do it all by yourself.
My way is to use the most common terms used in the disciplines
crossed, with they more standard meaning, and then to make precise the
relations between the theories. logic provides the tools for doing
that in a clean way.
It is impossible to satisfy everybody, on vocabulary issues, and I try
to focus on the point. That is already complex enough.
Bruno
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