Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[david.nyman]

I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
Hmm.......

Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
functional or computational rationale.  I'm going to make an attempt
to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
feedback specifically on this issue.  You will recall that this is at
the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
derived as an emergent from this.  Step 8 of the UDA addresses these
issues in a very particular way.

However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
computational notions based on physical entities and relations
conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
please).  So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).

The argument runs as follows.  To take what physics describes with
maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
extent.  God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
set of nomological-causal principles we possess.  Consequently, taking
these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals.  Any other
position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
realist.

Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
I'm merely articulating it.  It follows from the foregoing that
although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
reducible to their physical bases.  We also know that although we may
speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
realisation in the world.

To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
we place it under analysis -  is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
set of first person concepts which finds its way into the physical
account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions.  The
macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
illumination of pixels on screens, etc.  All of these, of course, can
- and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
'ultimates'.  At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
(don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
first person context.  But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
significance in terms of the physical account.  After all, what could
this possibly mean?  Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
changing their outcomes? Of course not.  How could they?  And why
would they need to?  Everything's going along just fine by itself by
purely physical means.

I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
don't exist in the world.  They're semantic formulations - ways of
speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
whit.  Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here.  Rather my
intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.

I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
account of mind (and body, as it happens).  To be absolutely explicit:
if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
physical account.  But for that to be the case, all other causal
relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
account.  But now, of course, this must include physics itself.

Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP.  But if you want to be a
physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts.  The
alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
incomplete, or else it is wrong.   But that's another story.

David

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Brent Meeker-2]

David Nyman wrote:
...
> Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP.  But if you want to be a
> physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
> explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
> Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
> in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts.  The
> alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
> incomplete, or else it is wrong.   But that's another story.

Is the physics account of life incomplete or wrong?  Do you consider "life" to have been
eliminated?

Brent

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[John Mikes]

David,

I thought you are facing the Scottish mountains for a relaxation and instead here is a long - enjoyable- tirade about ideas which I try to put below into a shorthand form by my vocabulary. But first a plea to Mrs. N:

'please, do keep David away from te computer for the time of the Scottish tourism, as he suggested it, to get him a good  mountaineering relaxation what we all would luv if we just can afford it....'

and now back to David:

 

"causal accounts" are model-based originating choices in a view reduced into the figment of a 'physical world' i.e. in a conventional science lingo, so ingeniously formed over the millennia. It is our perceived reality, with math, based on the most pervasive (dominating?) principle, called physics, all - in the ongoing "HUMAN" ways of our thinking.

 

Everything exists what we 'think of' in our MIND (nonexistent? no way, we think of that, too). There is nosuch thing as a  '3rd pers.explanation, it is a 1st pers. idea, interpreted by all the   "3rd persons" into their own (1st pers) "mindset"(?).

 

Ontology is today's explanation of today's epistemic inventory. 

A nice, reductionist philosophy. Not applicable for tomorrow's discoveries. A 'physical realist' is a conventional scientist within the given figments. This list tries to overstep such 'human' limitations - falling repeatedly back into the faithful application of it.

 

As Brent asked: "Is the physics account of life incomplete or wrong?  Do you consider "life" to have been eliminated?"

 

"eliminated" WHAT? I spent some braingrease to find out what many (some?) of us agree upon as 'life' - no success. YET it does exist even in Brent's mind (who is a very advanced thinking list-member). (Robert Rosen identified life as his 'M&R'  (Metabolism and Repair) based on his (mathematical) biology ways. I may extend the domain into 'ideation' and 'not-so-bio' domains, even into the stupidly named "in-animates").

 

Our millennia-evolved human (reductionistic - conventional) views are based on timely evolving observational skills what we call "physical" - worldview, science, explanatory base etc. So no wonder if everything is touching it. It is not 'more real' than anything we could sweat out for explaining the unexplainable.

It all undergoes (ontological etc.) changes as epistemy grows.

I don't want to touch here the chicken-egg topic of "numbers", yet this, too, is a HUMAN dilemma between Bruno and friends vs. David Bohm. And we are figments within the totality, not the original creators. We don't 'see' too far.

Somebody asked me: "How do we learn something that is aboslutely 'N E W' ? I had no answer. I tried: by playing with unrelated relationships - which is only manipulting the existent.

Even Star Trek relied on modified knowables as novelty, the absolute new is not available to us - unless already having been hinted in some corner of the totality as a 'findable' relation. The quality from quantity Leninian principle may give a clue to it, if a large enough background can be checked (cf. Bruno's words to get to anything by using enough many numbers for it). Still such cop-outs include my usual retort: applying the "somehow"

 

Finally: COMP and reality? not this embryonic binary algorithm based (physical) contraption, not even an advanced fantasy kind of similar deficiencies can approach what we cannot: the unfathomable 'reality' of them all. It is not a 'higher inventory', it (if there is such an 'it' - I did not say: exists) is beyond anything we can imagine humanly. We can speculate about reality's 'human' type aspects of partial hints we can humanly approach and make a pars pro toto dream of it - we are wrong for sure.

 

Have a healthy mountain-climb in Scottland

 

John M

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 5:39 PM, David Nyman <david.nyman@...> wrote:

I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
Hmm.......

Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
functional or computational rationale.  I'm going to make an attempt
to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
feedback specifically on this issue.  You will recall that this is at
the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
derived as an emergent from this.  Step 8 of the UDA addresses these
issues in a very particular way.

However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
computational notions based on physical entities and relations
conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
please).  So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).

The argument runs as follows.  To take what physics describes with
maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
extent.  God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
set of nomological-causal principles we possess.  Consequently, taking
these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals.  Any other
position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
realist.

Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
I'm merely articulating it.  It follows from the foregoing that
although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
reducible to their physical bases.  We also know that although we may
speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
realisation in the world.

To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
we place it under analysis -  is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
set of first person concepts which finds its way into the physical
account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions.  The
macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
illumination of pixels on screens, etc.  All of these, of course, can
- and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
'ultimates'.  At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
(don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
first person context.  But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
significance in terms of the physical account.  After all, what could
this possibly mean?  Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
changing their outcomes? Of course not.  How could they?  And why
would they need to?  Everything's going along just fine by itself by
purely physical means.

I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
don't exist in the world.  They're semantic formulations - ways of
speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
whit.  Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here.  Rather my
intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.

I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
account of mind (and body, as it happens).  To be absolutely explicit:
if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
physical account.  But for that to be the case, all other causal
relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
account.  But now, of course, this must include physics itself.

Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP.  But if you want to be a
physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts.  The
alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
incomplete, or else it is wrong.   But that's another story.

David

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[david.nyman]

2009/8/1 Brent Meeker <meekerdb@...>:

> Is the physics account of life incomplete or wrong?

I'm not claiming this.

> Do you consider "life" to have been
> eliminated?

No I dont.  In my piece I defined computation as an arbitrary - though
humanly useful - interpretative model imposed on, but not tied to,
specific physical events, since it can be instantiated in arbitrarily
many, and competely different, physical forms.  Life, by contrast, is
a higher-order description tied directly to, and supervening
one-for-one on, highly specific lower-order physical events, and
relying on this precise reducibility for its justification.

However, in a different sense, 'life' is indeed eliminable in a way
that the first-person is not.  Any higher order concept supervening on
physics (and which does not, in the physical narrative?) is eliminable
in this way.  IOW, the physical world goes its own sweet way without
our conceptual analyses.  Hence this is not a problem for life or any
merely humanly-imposed concept.  But the first-person narrative
UNIQUELY escapes this categorisation.

It's absolutely fundamental: no higher-order account of physical
events - such as life - requires or makes use of any explanatory
entity or principle other than those derived from third-person
observation.  Whereas the first-person narrative, by contrast - and
it's the greatest contrast imaginable - IS the observation.  IOW, it
does not present itself merely as a convenient humanly-concocted
conception devoid of ontological distinctiveness (although - and this
is at the heart of the confusion - it can be analogised about in this
way).  Rather, it IS the ontological situation in which we discover
our existence and in terms of which all other narratives are
instantiated.

The only way to dodge this blow without shilly-shallying or
obfuscation is to deny the exception.  To be satisfied that mind - the
first-person - is exhausted by what we can discern by means of
third-person observation - IOW physical events - re-formulated as a
higher-order account; and hence that it is, in the final analysis,
eliminable.  This conceptual inability of the current physical account
to make sense of the unique status of the first-person is why it has
to be either incomplete or wrong as a 'theory of everything'.

David

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[david.nyman]

2009/8/1 John Mikes <jamikes@...>:

Hi John

Actually, I posted the diatribe just before setting off on the
seven-hour drive to the Scottish hills.  It's raining just at the
moment so I'm taking the opportunity to thank you for your post and
for your concern for my welfare, but this is positively the last
you'll hear from me till our return!

Best

David

> David,
> I thought you are facing the Scottish mountains for a relaxation and instead
> here is a long - enjoyable- tirade about ideas which I try to put below into
> a shorthand form by my vocabulary. But first a plea to Mrs. N:
> 'please, do keep David away from te computer for the time of the Scottish
> tourism, as he suggested it, to get him a good  mountaineering relaxation
> what we all would luv if we just can afford it....'
> and now back to David:
>
> "causal accounts" are model-based originating choices in a view reduced into
> the figment of a 'physical world' i.e. in a conventional science lingo, so
> ingeniously formed over the millennia. It is our perceived reality, with
> math, based on the most pervasive (dominating?) principle, called physics,
> all - in the ongoing "HUMAN" ways of our thinking.
>
> Everything exists what we 'think of' in our MIND (nonexistent? no way, we
> think of that, too). There is nosuch thing as a  '3rd pers.explanation, it
> is a 1st pers. idea, interpreted by all the   "3rd persons" into their own
> (1st pers) "mindset"(?).
>
> Ontology is today's explanation of today's epistemic inventory.
> A nice, reductionist philosophy. Not applicable for tomorrow's discoveries.
> A 'physical realist' is a conventional scientist within the given figments.
> This list tries to overstep such 'human' limitations - falling repeatedly
> back into the faithful application of it.
>
> As Brent asked: "Is the physics account of life incomplete or wrong?  Do you
> consider "life" to have been eliminated?"
>
> "eliminated" WHAT? I spent some braingrease to find out what many (some?) of
> us agree upon as 'life' - no success. YET it does exist even in Brent's mind
> (who is a very advanced thinking list-member). (Robert Rosen identified life
> as his 'M&R'  (Metabolism and Repair) based on his (mathematical) biology
> ways. I may extend the domain into 'ideation' and 'not-so-bio' domains, even
> into the stupidly named "in-animates").
>
> Our millennia-evolved human (reductionistic - conventional) views are based
> on timely evolving observational skills what we call "physical" - worldview,
> science, explanatory base etc. So no wonder if everything is touching it. It
> is not 'more real' than anything we could sweat out for explaining the
> unexplainable.
> It all undergoes (ontological etc.) changes as epistemy grows.
> I don't want to touch here the chicken-egg topic of "numbers", yet this,
> too, is a HUMAN dilemma between Bruno and friends vs. David Bohm. And we are
> figments within the totality, not the original creators. We don't 'see' too
> far.
> Somebody asked me: "How do we learn something that is aboslutely 'N E W' ? I
> had no answer. I tried: by playing with unrelated relationships - which is
> only manipulting the existent.
> Even Star Trek relied on modified knowables as novelty, the absolute new is
> not available to us - unless already having been hinted in some corner of
> the totality as a 'findable' relation. The quality from quantity Leninian
> principle may give a clue to it, if a large enough background can be checked
> (cf. Bruno's words to get to anything by using enough many numbers for it).
> Still such cop-outs include my usual retort: applying the "somehow"
>
> Finally: COMP and reality? not this embryonic binary algorithm based
> (physical) contraption, not even an advanced fantasy kind of similar
> deficiencies can approach what we cannot: the unfathomable 'reality' of them
> all. It is not a 'higher inventory', it (if there is such an 'it' - I did
> not say: exists) is beyond anything we can imagine humanly. We can speculate
> about reality's 'human' type aspects of partial hints we can humanly
> approach and make a pars pro toto dream of it - we are wrong for sure.
>
> Have a healthy mountain-climb in Scottland
>
> John M
>
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 5:39 PM, David Nyman <david.nyman@...> wrote:
>>
>> I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
>> and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
>> real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
>> Hmm.......
>>
>> Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
>> the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
>> functional or computational rationale.  I'm going to make an attempt
>> to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
>> feedback specifically on this issue.  You will recall that this is at
>> the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
>> computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
>> derived as an emergent from this.  Step 8 of the UDA addresses these
>> issues in a very particular way.
>>
>> However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
>> just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
>> computational notions based on physical entities and relations
>> conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
>> please).  So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
>> clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
>> experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
>> eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
>> further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
>> this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).
>>
>> The argument runs as follows.  To take what physics describes with
>> maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
>> take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
>> extent.  God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
>> these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
>> set of nomological-causal principles we possess.  Consequently, taking
>> these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
>> principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
>> least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
>> principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals.  Any other
>> position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
>> realist.
>>
>> Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
>> I'm merely articulating it.  It follows from the foregoing that
>> although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
>> historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
>> reducible to their physical bases.  We also know that although we may
>> speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
>> and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
>> retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
>> So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
>> physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
>> foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
>> shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
>> the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
>> realisation in the world.
>>
>> To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
>> we place it under analysis -  is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
>> set of first person concepts which finds its way into the physical
>> account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions.  The
>> macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
>> computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
>> illumination of pixels on screens, etc.  All of these, of course, can
>> - and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
>> 'ultimates'.  At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
>> this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
>> (don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
>> they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
>> first person context.  But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
>> concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
>> a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
>> significance in terms of the physical account.  After all, what could
>> this possibly mean?  Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
>> 'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
>> changing their outcomes? Of course not.  How could they?  And why
>> would they need to?  Everything's going along just fine by itself by
>> purely physical means.
>>
>> I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
>> computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
>> don't exist in the world.  They're semantic formulations - ways of
>> speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
>> and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
>> kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
>> eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
>> whit.  Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
>> account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
>> to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
>> 'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
>> another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
>> However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here.  Rather my
>> intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
>> physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
>> eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.
>>
>> I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
>> of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
>> account of mind (and body, as it happens).  To be absolutely explicit:
>> if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
>> fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
>> foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
>> physical account.  But for that to be the case, all other causal
>> relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
>> account.  But now, of course, this must include physics itself.
>>
>> Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP.  But if you want to be a
>> physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
>> explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
>> Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
>> in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts.  The
>> alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
>> incomplete, or else it is wrong.   But that's another story.
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>
>
> >
>

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Bruno Marchal]

John,

Is not the difference between human and non human a human illusion?

With Church Turing thesis we can suspect the existence of universal illusions.

Bruno

On 01 Aug 2009, at 21:52, John Mikes wrote:

David,

I thought you are facing the Scottish mountains for a relaxation and instead here is a long - enjoyable- tirade about ideas which I try to put below into a shorthand form by my vocabulary. But first a plea to Mrs. N:

'please, do keep David away from te computer for the time of the Scottish tourism, as he suggested it, to get him a good  mountaineering relaxation what we all would luv if we just can afford it....'

and now back to David:

 

"causal accounts" are model-based originating choices in a view reduced into the figment of a 'physical world' i.e. in a conventional science lingo, so ingeniously formed over the millennia. It is our perceived reality, with math, based on the most pervasive (dominating?) principle, called physics, all - in the ongoing "HUMAN" ways of our thinking.

 

Everything exists what we 'think of' in our MIND (nonexistent? no way, we think of that, too). There is nosuch thing as a  '3rd pers.explanation, it is a 1st pers. idea, interpreted by all the   "3rd persons" into their own (1st pers) "mindset"(?).

 

Ontology is today's explanation of today's epistemic inventory. 

A nice, reductionist philosophy. Not applicable for tomorrow's discoveries. A 'physical realist' is a conventional scientist within the given figments. This list tries to overstep such 'human' limitations - falling repeatedly back into the faithful application of it.

 

As Brent asked: "Is the physics account of life incomplete or wrong?  Do you consider "life" to have been eliminated?"

 

"eliminated" WHAT? I spent some braingrease to find out what many (some?) of us agree upon as 'life' - no success. YET it does exist even in Brent's mind (who is a very advanced thinking list-member). (Robert Rosen identified life as his 'M&R'  (Metabolism and Repair) based on his (mathematical) biology ways. I may extend the domain into 'ideation' and 'not-so-bio' domains, even into the stupidly named "in-animates").

 

Our millennia-evolved human (reductionistic - conventional) views are based on timely evolving observational skills what we call "physical" - worldview, science, explanatory base etc. So no wonder if everything is touching it. It is not 'more real' than anything we could sweat out for explaining the unexplainable.

It all undergoes (ontological etc.) changes as epistemy grows.

I don't want to touch here the chicken-egg topic of "numbers", yet this, too, is a HUMAN dilemma between Bruno and friends vs. David Bohm. And we are figments within the totality, not the original creators. We don't 'see' too far.

Somebody asked me: "How do we learn something that is aboslutely 'N E W' ? I had no answer. I tried: by playing with unrelated relationships - which is only manipulting the existent.

Even Star Trek relied on modified knowables as novelty, the absolute new is not available to us - unless already having been hinted in some corner of the totality as a 'findable' relation. The quality from quantity Leninian principle may give a clue to it, if a large enough background can be checked (cf. Bruno's words to get to anything by using enough many numbers for it). Still such cop-outs include my usual retort: applying the "somehow"

 

Finally: COMP and reality? not this embryonic binary algorithm based (physical) contraption, not even an advanced fantasy kind of similar deficiencies can approach what we cannot: the unfathomable 'reality' of them all. It is not a 'higher inventory', it (if there is such an 'it' - I did not say: exists) is beyond anything we can imagine humanly. We can speculate about reality's 'human' type aspects of partial hints we can humanly approach and make a pars pro toto dream of it - we are wrong for sure.

 

Have a healthy mountain-climb in Scottland

 

John M

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 5:39 PM, David Nyman <david.nyman@...> wrote:

I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
Hmm.......

Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
functional or computational rationale.  I'm going to make an attempt
to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
feedback specifically on this issue.  You will recall that this is at
the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
derived as an emergent from this.  Step 8 of the UDA addresses these
issues in a very particular way.

However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
computational notions based on physical entities and relations
conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
please).  So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).

The argument runs as follows.  To take what physics describes with
maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
extent.  God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
set of nomological-causal principles we possess.  Consequently, taking
these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals.  Any other
position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
realist.

Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
I'm merely articulating it.  It follows from the foregoing that
although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
reducible to their physical bases.  We also know that although we may
speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
realisation in the world.

To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
we place it under analysis -  is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
set of first person concepts which finds its way into the physical
account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions.  The
macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
illumination of pixels on screens, etc.  All of these, of course, can
- and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
'ultimates'.  At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
(don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
first person context.  But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
significance in terms of the physical account.  After all, what could
this possibly mean?  Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
changing their outcomes? Of course not.  How could they?  And why
would they need to?  Everything's going along just fine by itself by
purely physical means.

I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
don't exist in the world.  They're semantic formulations - ways of
speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
whit.  Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here.  Rather my
intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.

I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
account of mind (and body, as it happens).  To be absolutely explicit:
if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
physical account.  But for that to be the case, all other causal
relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
account.  But now, of course, this must include physics itself.

Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP.  But if you want to be a
physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts.  The
alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
incomplete, or else it is wrong.   But that's another story.

David

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[thermo thermo]

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 7:43 AM, Bruno Marchal<marchal@...> wrote:
> John,
> Is not the difference between human and non human a human illusion?
> With Church Turing thesis we can suspect the existence of universal
> illusions.

Maybe illusions can be detected due to timing discrepancies between
the original version of something and the virtual one. I am doing an
analogy with the detection computer rootkits, which are programs that
try to control another program through concealment and virtualization.

I am assuming only local timing modification done by the universal
system programmer. If the system can be globally stopped, local
illusions inserted and the system continues, this detection methods
can't be applied...

Jose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F8013%2F4140976%2F04140987.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4140987&authDecision=-203

Alien vs. Quine
Graizer, V.; Naccache, D.
Security & Privacy, IEEE
Volume 5, Issue 2, March-April 2007 Page(s):26 - 31
Digital Object Identifier   10.1109/MSP.2007.28
Summary:Is it possible to prove that a computer is malware-free
without pulling out its hard disk? This article introduces a novel
hardware inspection technique based on the injection of carefully
crafted code and the analysis of its output and execution time. In
theory, the easiest way to exterminate malware is to reformat the disk
and then reinstall the operating system (OS) from a trusted
distribution GD. This procedure assumes we can force computers to boot
from trusted media, but most modern PCs have a flash BIOS, which means
that the code component in charge of booting is recorded on a
rewritable memory chip. Specific programs called flashers - or even
malware such as the CIH (Chernobyl) virus - have the ability to update
this chip. This article addresses this concern, namely, ascertaining
that malware doesn't re-flash the BIOS to derail disk-reformatting
attempts or simulate their successful completion

> Bruno
>
>
> On 01 Aug 2009, at 21:52, John Mikes wrote:
>
> David,
> I thought you are facing the Scottish mountains for a relaxation and instead
> here is a long - enjoyable- tirade about ideas which I try to put below into
> a shorthand form by my vocabulary. But first a plea to Mrs. N:
> 'please, do keep David away from te computer for the time of the Scottish
> tourism, as he suggested it, to get him a good  mountaineering relaxation
> what we all would luv if we just can afford it....'
> and now back to David:
>
> "causal accounts" are model-based originating choices in a view reduced into
> the figment of a 'physical world' i.e. in a conventional science lingo, so
> ingeniously formed over the millennia. It is our perceived reality, with
> math, based on the most pervasive (dominating?) principle, called physics,
> all - in the ongoing "HUMAN" ways of our thinking.
>
> Everything exists what we 'think of' in our MIND (nonexistent? no way, we
> think of that, too). There is nosuch thing as a  '3rd pers.explanation, it
> is a 1st pers. idea, interpreted by all the   "3rd persons" into their own
> (1st pers) "mindset"(?).
>
> Ontology is today's explanation of today's epistemic inventory.
> A nice, reductionist philosophy. Not applicable for tomorrow's discoveries.
> A 'physical realist' is a conventional scientist within the given figments.
> This list tries to overstep such 'human' limitations - falling repeatedly
> back into the faithful application of it.
>
> As Brent asked: "Is the physics account of life incomplete or wrong?  Do you
> consider "life" to have been eliminated?"
>
> "eliminated" WHAT? I spent some braingrease to find out what many (some?) of
> us agree upon as 'life' - no success. YET it does exist even in Brent's mind
> (who is a very advanced thinking list-member). (Robert Rosen identified life
> as his 'M&R'  (Metabolism and Repair) based on his (mathematical) biology
> ways. I may extend the domain into 'ideation' and 'not-so-bio' domains, even
> into the stupidly named "in-animates").
>
> Our millennia-evolved human (reductionistic - conventional) views are based
> on timely evolving observational skills what we call "physical" - worldview,
> science, explanatory base etc. So no wonder if everything is touching it. It
> is not 'more real' than anything we could sweat out for explaining the
> unexplainable.
> It all undergoes (ontological etc.) changes as epistemy grows.
> I don't want to touch here the chicken-egg topic of "numbers", yet this,
> too, is a HUMAN dilemma between Bruno and friends vs. David Bohm. And we are
> figments within the totality, not the original creators. We don't 'see' too
> far.
> Somebody asked me: "How do we learn something that is aboslutely 'N E W' ? I
> had no answer. I tried: by playing with unrelated relationships - which is
> only manipulting the existent.
> Even Star Trek relied on modified knowables as novelty, the absolute new is
> not available to us - unless already having been hinted in some corner of
> the totality as a 'findable' relation. The quality from quantity Leninian
> principle may give a clue to it, if a large enough background can be checked
> (cf. Bruno's words to get to anything by using enough many numbers for it).
> Still such cop-outs include my usual retort: applying the "somehow"
>
> Finally: COMP and reality? not this embryonic binary algorithm based
> (physical) contraption, not even an advanced fantasy kind of similar
> deficiencies can approach what we cannot: the unfathomable 'reality' of them
> all. It is not a 'higher inventory', it (if there is such an 'it' - I did
> not say: exists) is beyond anything we can imagine humanly. We can speculate
> about reality's 'human' type aspects of partial hints we can humanly
> approach and make a pars pro toto dream of it - we are wrong for sure.
>
> Have a healthy mountain-climb in Scottland
>
> John M
>
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 5:39 PM, David Nyman <david.nyman@...> wrote:
>>
>> I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
>> and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
>> real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
>> Hmm.......
>>
>> Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
>> the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
>> functional or computational rationale.  I'm going to make an attempt
>> to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
>> feedback specifically on this issue.  You will recall that this is at
>> the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
>> computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
>> derived as an emergent from this.  Step 8 of the UDA addresses these
>> issues in a very particular way.
>>
>> However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
>> just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
>> computational notions based on physical entities and relations
>> conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
>> please).  So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
>> clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
>> experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
>> eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
>> further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
>> this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).
>>
>> The argument runs as follows.  To take what physics describes with
>> maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
>> take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
>> extent.  God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
>> these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
>> set of nomological-causal principles we possess.  Consequently, taking
>> these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
>> principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
>> least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
>> principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals.  Any other
>> position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
>> realist.
>>
>> Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
>> I'm merely articulating it.  It follows from the foregoing that
>> although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
>> historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
>> reducible to their physical bases.  We also know that although we may
>> speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
>> and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
>> retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
>> So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
>> physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
>> foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
>> shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
>> the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
>> realisation in the world.
>>
>> To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
>> we place it under analysis -  is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
>> set of first person concepts which finds its way into the physical
>> account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions.  The
>> macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
>> computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
>> illumination of pixels on screens, etc.  All of these, of course, can
>> - and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
>> 'ultimates'.  At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
>> this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
>> (don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
>> they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
>> first person context.  But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
>> concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
>> a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
>> significance in terms of the physical account.  After all, what could
>> this possibly mean?  Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
>> 'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
>> changing their outcomes? Of course not.  How could they?  And why
>> would they need to?  Everything's going along just fine by itself by
>> purely physical means.
>>
>> I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
>> computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
>> don't exist in the world.  They're semantic formulations - ways of
>> speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
>> and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
>> kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
>> eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
>> whit.  Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
>> account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
>> to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
>> 'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
>> another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
>> However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here.  Rather my
>> intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
>> physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
>> eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.
>>
>> I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
>> of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
>> account of mind (and body, as it happens).  To be absolutely explicit:
>> if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
>> fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
>> foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
>> physical account.  But for that to be the case, all other causal
>> relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
>> account.  But now, of course, this must include physics itself.
>>
>> Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP.  But if you want to be a
>> physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
>> explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
>> Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
>> in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts.  The
>> alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
>> incomplete, or else it is wrong.   But that's another story.
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
>
>
> >
>

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[John Mikes]

Bruno,

let me continue as 'enfent terrible':

 

Isn't the Church Thesis - and whatever WE suspect by it - also  human illusions?

 

(Watch out: the next question will concern 'numbers'!)

 

John M

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 6:43 AM, Bruno Marchal <marchal@...> wrote:

John,

Is not the difference between human and non human a human illusion?

With Church Turing thesis we can suspect the existence of universal illusions.

Bruno

On 01 Aug 2009, at 21:52, John Mikes wrote:

David,

I thought you are facing the Scottish mountains for a relaxation and instead here is a long - enjoyable- tirade about ideas which I try to put below into a shorthand form by my vocabulary. But first a plea to Mrs. N:

'please, do keep David away from te computer for the time of the Scottish tourism, as he suggested it, to get him a good  mountaineering relaxation what we all would luv if we just can afford it....'

and now back to David:

 

"causal accounts" are model-based originating choices in a view reduced into the figment of a 'physical world' i.e. in a conventional science lingo, so ingeniously formed over the millennia. It is our perceived reality, with math, based on the most pervasive (dominating?) principle, called physics, all - in the ongoing "HUMAN" ways of our thinking.

 

Everything exists what we 'think of' in our MIND (nonexistent? no way, we think of that, too). There is nosuch thing as a  '3rd pers.explanation, it is a 1st pers. idea, interpreted by all the   "3rd persons" into their own (1st pers) "mindset"(?).

 

Ontology is today's explanation of today's epistemic inventory. 

A nice, reductionist philosophy. Not applicable for tomorrow's discoveries. A 'physical realist' is a conventional scientist within the given figments. This list tries to overstep such 'human' limitations - falling repeatedly back into the faithful application of it.

 

As Brent asked: "Is the physics account of life incomplete or wrong?  Do you consider "life" to have been eliminated?"

 

"eliminated" WHAT? I spent some braingrease to find out what many (some?) of us agree upon as 'life' - no success. YET it does exist even in Brent's mind (who is a very advanced thinking list-member). (Robert Rosen identified life as his 'M&R'  (Metabolism and Repair) based on his (mathematical) biology ways. I may extend the domain into 'ideation' and 'not-so-bio' domains, even into the stupidly named "in-animates").

 

Our millennia-evolved human (reductionistic - conventional) views are based on timely evolving observational skills what we call "physical" - worldview, science, explanatory base etc. So no wonder if everything is touching it. It is not 'more real' than anything we could sweat out for explaining the unexplainable.

It all undergoes (ontological etc.) changes as epistemy grows.

I don't want to touch here the chicken-egg topic of "numbers", yet this, too, is a HUMAN dilemma between Bruno and friends vs. David Bohm. And we are figments within the totality, not the original creators. We don't 'see' too far.

Somebody asked me: "How do we learn something that is aboslutely 'N E W' ? I had no answer. I tried: by playing with unrelated relationships - which is only manipulting the existent.

Even Star Trek relied on modified knowables as novelty, the absolute new is not available to us - unless already having been hinted in some corner of the totality as a 'findable' relation. The quality from quantity Leninian principle may give a clue to it, if a large enough background can be checked (cf. Bruno's words to get to anything by using enough many numbers for it). Still such cop-outs include my usual retort: applying the "somehow"

 

Finally: COMP and reality? not this embryonic binary algorithm based (physical) contraption, not even an advanced fantasy kind of similar deficiencies can approach what we cannot: the unfathomable 'reality' of them all. It is not a 'higher inventory', it (if there is such an 'it' - I did not say: exists) is beyond anything we can imagine humanly. We can speculate about reality's 'human' type aspects of partial hints we can humanly approach and make a pars pro toto dream of it - we are wrong for sure.

 

Have a healthy mountain-climb in Scottland

 

John M

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 5:39 PM, David Nyman <david.nyman@...> wrote:

I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
Hmm.......

Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
functional or computational rationale.  I'm going to make an attempt
to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
feedback specifically on this issue.  You will recall that this is at
the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
derived as an emergent from this.  Step 8 of the UDA addresses these
issues in a very particular way.

However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
computational notions based on physical entities and relations
conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
please).  So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).

The argument runs as follows.  To take what physics describes with
maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
extent.  God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
set of nomological-causal principles we possess.  Consequently, taking
these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals.  Any other
position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
realist.

Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
I'm merely articulating it.  It follows from the foregoing that
although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
reducible to their physical bases.  We also know that although we may
speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
realisation in the world.

To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
we place it under analysis -  is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
set of first person concepts which finds its way into the physical
account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions.  The
macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
illumination of pixels on screens, etc.  All of these, of course, can
- and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
'ultimates'.  At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
(don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
first person context.  But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
significance in terms of the physical account.  After all, what could
this possibly mean?  Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
changing their outcomes? Of course not.  How could they?  And why
would they need to?  Everything's going along just fine by itself by
purely physical means.

I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
don't exist in the world.  They're semantic formulations - ways of
speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
whit.  Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here.  Rather my
intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.

I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
account of mind (and body, as it happens).  To be absolutely explicit:
if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
physical account.  But for that to be the case, all other causal
relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
account.  But now, of course, this must include physics itself.

Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP.  But if you want to be a
physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts.  The
alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
incomplete, or else it is wrong.   But that's another story.

David

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Flammarion]

On 31 July, 22:39, David Nyman <david.ny...@...> wrote:

> I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
> and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
> real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
> Hmm.......
>
> Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
> the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
> functional or computational rationale.  I'm going to make an attempt
> to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
> feedback specifically on this issue.  You will recall that this is at
> the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
> computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
> derived as an emergent from this.  Step 8 of the UDA addresses these
> issues in a very particular way.
>
> However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
> just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
> computational notions based on physical entities and relations
> conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
> please).  So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
> clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
> experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
> eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
> further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
> this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).
>
> The argument runs as follows.  To take what physics describes with
> maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
> take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
> extent.  God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
> these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
> set of nomological-causal principles we possess.  Consequently, taking
> these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
> principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
> least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
> principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals.  Any other
> position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
> realist.
>
> Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
> I'm merely articulating it.  It follows from the foregoing that
> although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
> historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
> reducible to their physical bases.  We also know that although we may
> speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
> and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
> retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
> So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
> physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
> foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
> shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
> the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
> realisation in the world.
>
> To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
> we place it under analysis -  is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
> set of first person concepts

In what sense "first person"? Surely not in the sense that qualia are
supposed to be mysteriously and incommunicably first-person.

Presumably in the sense that something is only a computer
when regarded as such, (like certain pieces of paper being money).
But that is quite contentious. It is not enough to say "under
analysis",
one must actually analyse

> which finds its way into the physical
> account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions.  The
> macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
> computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
> illumination of pixels on screens, etc.  All of these, of course, can
> - and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
> 'ultimates'.  At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
> this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
> (don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
> they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
> first person context.  But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
> concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
> a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
> significance in terms of the physical account.  After all, what could
> this possibly mean?  Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
> 'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
> changing their outcomes? Of course not.  How could they?  And why
> would they need to?  Everything's going along just fine by itself by
> purely physical means.
>
> I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
> computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
> don't exist in the world.

It doens't remotely. Just because something (eg a horse)
isn't a *fundamental* constituent of the world doesn't make it
non-existent in the sense that unicorn is.

> They're semantic formulations - ways of
> speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
> and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
> kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
> eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
> whit.  Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
> account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
> to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
> 'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
> another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
> However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here.  Rather my
> intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
> physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
> eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.
>
> I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
> of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
> account of mind (and body, as it happens).  To be absolutely explicit:
> if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
> fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
> foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
> physical account.  But for that to be the case, all other causal
> relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
> account.  But now, of course, this must include physics itself.

What must include physics itself?

> Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP.  But if you want to be a
> physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
> explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.

I don't see how that follows at all.

> Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
> in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts.  The
> alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
> incomplete, or else it is wrong.   But that's another story.
>
> David
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Colin Hales-2]

Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed refutation of computationalism.
It's going through peer review at the moment.

The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The distinction should fail.

I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. Call this situation X.

If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal arguments against COMP.

FACT: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form  an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie. Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal (non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted.
===================
COMP fails when:
a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) scientist <Sa> and expect <Sa> to be able to carry out authentic original science on the a-priori unknown....identically to humans. To do this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do this.... your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be indistinguishable.

b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that <Sa> be able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.

c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.

BECAUSE:  (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.

(b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very idea of <Sa> ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. The formal system is 100% deterministic, unable to violate rules. When it encounters a liar it will be unable to resolve what falsehood is being presented. It requires all falsehoods to be a-priori known. Impossible. How can a formal system encounter a world in which COMP is actually false? If it could, COMP would be FALSE! If COMP is true then it can't. Humans are informal....ergo we have some part of the natural world capable of behaving informally....=> GOTCHA!

This argument is has very 'Godellian' structure. That was accidental.

When you say 'physics is fundamental'. I don't actually known what that means.

What I can tell you is that to construct an authentic ARTIFICIAL SCIENTIST (not a simulation, but an 'inorganic' scientist), you have to replicate the real physics of cognition, not 'compute a model' of the cognition or a 'compute a model of the physics underlying cognition'. Then an artificial scientist is a scioentist in the same sense that artificial light is light.

R.I.P. COMP

=> Strong AI (a computer can be a mind) is false.
=> Weak AI (A computer model of cognition can never be actual cognition) is true.

It's nice to finally have at least one tiny little place (X) where the seeds of clarity can be found.

Cheers
colin hales




1Z wrote:

On 31 July, 22:39, David Nyman david.ny...@... wrote:
  

I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
Hmm.......

Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
functional or computational rationale.  I'm going to make an attempt
to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
feedback specifically on this issue.  You will recall that this is at
the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
derived as an emergent from this.  Step 8 of the UDA addresses these
issues in a very particular way.

However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
computational notions based on physical entities and relations
conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
please).  So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).

The argument runs as follows.  To take what physics describes with
maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
extent.  God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
set of nomological-causal principles we possess.  Consequently, taking
these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals.  Any other
position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
realist.

Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
I'm merely articulating it.  It follows from the foregoing that
although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
reducible to their physical bases.  We also know that although we may
speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
realisation in the world.

To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
we place it under analysis -  is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
set of first person concepts
    

In what sense "first person"? Surely not in the sense that qualia are
supposed to be mysteriously and incommunicably first-person.

Presumably in the sense that something is only a computer
when regarded as such, (like certain pieces of paper being money).
But that is quite contentious. It is not enough to say "under
analysis",
one must actually analyse

  

which finds its way into the physical
account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions.  The
macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
illumination of pixels on screens, etc.  All of these, of course, can
- and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
'ultimates'.  At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
(don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
first person context.  But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
significance in terms of the physical account.  After all, what could
this possibly mean?  Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
changing their outcomes? Of course not.  How could they?  And why
would they need to?  Everything's going along just fine by itself by
purely physical means.

I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
don't exist in the world.
    

It doens't remotely. Just because something (eg a horse)
isn't a *fundamental* constituent of the world doesn't make it
non-existent in the sense that unicorn is.

  

 They're semantic formulations - ways of
speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
whit.  Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here.  Rather my
intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.

I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
account of mind (and body, as it happens).  To be absolutely explicit:
if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
physical account.  But for that to be the case, all other causal
relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
account.  But now, of course, this must include physics itself.
    

What must include physics itself?

  

Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP.  But if you want to be a
physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
    

I don't see how that follows at all.

  

Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts.  The
alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
incomplete, or else it is wrong.   But that's another story.

David
    

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Brent Meeker-2]

Colin Hales wrote:

> Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed
> refutation of computationalism.
> It's going through peer review at the moment.
>
> The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of
> 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being
> carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I
> drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL
> COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is
> that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The
> distinction should fail.
>
> I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company.
> Call this situation X.
>
> If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I
> also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get
> their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal
> arguments against COMP.
>
> *FACT*: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal
> nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form  
> an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The
> quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a
> hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie.
> Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently)
> violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of
> nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe
> the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how
> humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal
> (non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and
> mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held
> contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted.
> ===================
> COMP fails when:
> a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer)
> scientist <Sa> and expect <Sa> to be able to carry out authentic
> original science on the a-priori unknown....identically to humans. To do
> this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do
> this.... your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a
> suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If
> COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be
> indistinguishable.
>
> b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that <Sa> be
> able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>
> c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>
> BECAUSE:  (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
> THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
> THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
> THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.
>
> (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very
> idea of <Sa> ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is
> impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed,
> formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to
> construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human
> scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms.

I don't see it.  I can write a simple computer program that constructs statements which
are a subset of those produced by humans (or any other system).  Bruno's UD produces *all*
such statements.  So where's the contradiction?

>The
> formal system is 100% deterministic, unable to violate rules. When it
> encounters a liar it will be unable to resolve what falsehood is being
> presented.

What does it mean to "resolve what falsehood is being presented"?

>It requires all falsehoods to be a-priori known. Impossible.
> How can a formal system encounter a world in which COMP is actually
> false? If it could, COMP would be FALSE! If COMP is true then it can't.
> Humans are informal....ergo we have some part of the natural world
> capable of behaving informally....=> GOTCHA!
>
> This argument is has very 'Godellian' structure. That was accidental.
>
> When you say 'physics is fundamental'. I don't actually known what that
> means.
>
> What I can tell you is that to construct an authentic ARTIFICIAL
> SCIENTIST (not a simulation, but an 'inorganic' scientist), you have to
> *replicate the real physics of cognition, *not 'compute a model' of the
> cognition or a 'compute a model of the physics underlying cognition'.
> Then an artificial scientist is a scioentist in the same sense that
> artificial light is light.

But what is the "real physics of cognition"?  Apprently you don't think it is neurons
firing, since you refer to an 'inorganic' scientist.

And artificial light is made of photons the same as sunlight or any other light.

Brent

>
> R.I.P. COMP
>
> => Strong AI (a computer can be a mind) is false.
> => Weak AI (A computer model of cognition can never be actual cognition)
> is true.
>
> It's nice to finally have at least one tiny little place (X) where the
> seeds of clarity can be found.
>
> Cheers
> colin hales
>
>
>
>
> 1Z wrote:
>>
>> On 31 July, 22:39, David Nyman <david.ny...@...> wrote:
>>  
>>> I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
>>> and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
>>> real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
>>> Hmm.......
>>>
>>> Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
>>> the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
>>> functional or computational rationale.  I'm going to make an attempt
>>> to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
>>> feedback specifically on this issue.  You will recall that this is at
>>> the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
>>> computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
>>> derived as an emergent from this.  Step 8 of the UDA addresses these
>>> issues in a very particular way.
>>>
>>> However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
>>> just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
>>> computational notions based on physical entities and relations
>>> conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
>>> please).  So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
>>> clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
>>> experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
>>> eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
>>> further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
>>> this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).
>>>
>>> The argument runs as follows.  To take what physics describes with
>>> maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
>>> take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
>>> extent.  God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
>>> these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
>>> set of nomological-causal principles we possess.  Consequently, taking
>>> these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
>>> principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
>>> least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
>>> principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals.  Any other
>>> position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
>>> realist.
>>>
>>> Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
>>> I'm merely articulating it.  It follows from the foregoing that
>>> although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
>>> historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
>>> reducible to their physical bases.  We also know that although we may
>>> speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
>>> and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
>>> retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
>>> So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
>>> physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
>>> foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
>>> shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
>>> the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
>>> realisation in the world.
>>>
>>> To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
>>> we place it under analysis -  is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
>>> set of first person concepts
>>>    
>>
>> In what sense "first person"? Surely not in the sense that qualia are
>> supposed to be mysteriously and incommunicably first-person.
>>
>> Presumably in the sense that something is only a computer
>> when regarded as such, (like certain pieces of paper being money).
>> But that is quite contentious. It is not enough to say "under
>> analysis",
>> one must actually analyse
>>
>>  
>>> which finds its way into the physical
>>> account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions.  The
>>> macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
>>> computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
>>> illumination of pixels on screens, etc.  All of these, of course, can
>>> - and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
>>> 'ultimates'.  At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
>>> this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
>>> (don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
>>> they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
>>> first person context.  But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
>>> concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
>>> a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
>>> significance in terms of the physical account.  After all, what could
>>> this possibly mean?  Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
>>> 'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
>>> changing their outcomes? Of course not.  How could they?  And why
>>> would they need to?  Everything's going along just fine by itself by
>>> purely physical means.
>>>
>>> I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
>>> computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
>>> don't exist in the world.
>>>    
>>
>> It doens't remotely. Just because something (eg a horse)
>> isn't a *fundamental* constituent of the world doesn't make it
>> non-existent in the sense that unicorn is.
>>
>>  
>>>  They're semantic formulations - ways of
>>> speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
>>> and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
>>> kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
>>> eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
>>> whit.  Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
>>> account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
>>> to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
>>> 'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
>>> another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
>>> However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here.  Rather my
>>> intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
>>> physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
>>> eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.
>>>
>>> I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
>>> of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
>>> account of mind (and body, as it happens).  To be absolutely explicit:
>>> if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
>>> fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
>>> foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
>>> physical account.  But for that to be the case, all other causal
>>> relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
>>> account.  But now, of course, this must include physics itself.
>>>    
>>
>> What must include physics itself?
>>
>>  
>>> Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP.  But if you want to be a
>>> physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
>>> explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
>>>    
>>
>> I don't see how that follows at all.
>>
>>  
>>> Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
>>> in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts.  The
>>> alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
>>> incomplete, or else it is wrong.   But that's another story.
>>>
>>> David
>>>    
>>
>>  
>
> >

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Quentin Anciaux-2]

Hi,

it seems you start with the assumptions that an AI can't do science as
humans... to conclude just that.

Regards,
Quentin

2009/8/6 Colin Hales <c.hales@...>:

> Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed refutation
> of computationalism.
> It's going through peer review at the moment.
>
> The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of
> 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being carried
> out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I drew an
> artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL COMPUTATION
> (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is that if COMP is
> true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The distinction should
> fail.
>
> I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. Call
> this situation X.
>
> If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I also
> found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get their
> truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal arguments against
> COMP.
>
> FACT: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal nature.
> That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form  an
> fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The
> quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a
> hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie. Humans
> can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) violate any
> law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of nature in the
> process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe the unknown
> natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how humans exemplify
> an informal system. All over the world are quite normal (non-pathologically
> affected) humans with the same sensory systems and mental capacities. Yet
> all manner of ignorance and fervently held contradictory belief systems are
> ‘rationally’ adopted.
> ===================
> COMP fails when:
> a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) scientist
> <Sa> and expect <Sa> to be able to carry out authentic original science on
> the a-priori unknown....identically to humans. To do this you use a
> human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do this.... your
> computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a suitable robotic form
> and then expect it to do science like humans. If COMP is true then the human
> scientist and the robot scientist should be indistinguishable.
>
> b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that <Sa> be
> able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>
> c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>
> BECAUSE:  (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
> THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
> THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
> THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.
>
> (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very idea
> of <Sa> ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is impossible.
> This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, formal set of
> rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to construct
> statements that are the product of an informal system (a human scientist).
> The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. The formal system is 100%
> deterministic, unable to violate rules. When it encounters a liar it will be
> unable to resolve what falsehood is being presented. It requires all
> falsehoods to be a-priori known. Impossible. How can a formal system
> encounter a world in which COMP is actually false? If it could, COMP would
> be FALSE! If COMP is true then it can't. Humans are informal....ergo we have
> some part of the natural world capable of behaving informally....=> GOTCHA!
>
> This argument is has very 'Godellian' structure. That was accidental.
>
> When you say 'physics is fundamental'. I don't actually known what that
> means.
>
> What I can tell you is that to construct an authentic ARTIFICIAL SCIENTIST
> (not a simulation, but an 'inorganic' scientist), you have to replicate the
> real physics of cognition, not 'compute a model' of the cognition or a
> 'compute a model of the physics underlying cognition'. Then an artificial
> scientist is a scioentist in the same sense that artificial light is light.
>
> R.I.P. COMP
>
> => Strong AI (a computer can be a mind) is false.
> => Weak AI (A computer model of cognition can never be actual cognition) is
> true.
>
> It's nice to finally have at least one tiny little place (X) where the seeds
> of clarity can be found.
>
> Cheers
> colin hales
>
>
>
>
> 1Z wrote:
>
> On 31 July, 22:39, David Nyman <david.ny...@...> wrote:
>
>
> I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
> and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
> real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
> Hmm.......
>
> Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
> the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
> functional or computational rationale.  I'm going to make an attempt
> to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
> feedback specifically on this issue.  You will recall that this is at
> the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
> computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
> derived as an emergent from this.  Step 8 of the UDA addresses these
> issues in a very particular way.
>
> However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
> just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
> computational notions based on physical entities and relations
> conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
> please).  So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
> clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
> experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
> eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
> further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
> this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).
>
> The argument runs as follows.  To take what physics describes with
> maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
> take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
> extent.  God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
> these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
> set of nomological-causal principles we possess.  Consequently, taking
> these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
> principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
> least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
> principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals.  Any other
> position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
> realist.
>
> Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
> I'm merely articulating it.  It follows from the foregoing that
> although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
> historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
> reducible to their physical bases.  We also know that although we may
> speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
> and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
> retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
> So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
> physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
> foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
> shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
> the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
> realisation in the world.
>
> To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
> we place it under analysis -  is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
> set of first person concepts
>
>
> In what sense "first person"? Surely not in the sense that qualia are
> supposed to be mysteriously and incommunicably first-person.
>
> Presumably in the sense that something is only a computer
> when regarded as such, (like certain pieces of paper being money).
> But that is quite contentious. It is not enough to say "under
> analysis",
> one must actually analyse
>
>
>
> which finds its way into the physical
> account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions.  The
> macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
> computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
> illumination of pixels on screens, etc.  All of these, of course, can
> - and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
> 'ultimates'.  At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
> this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
> (don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
> they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
> first person context.  But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
> concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
> a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
> significance in terms of the physical account.  After all, what could
> this possibly mean?  Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
> 'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
> changing their outcomes? Of course not.  How could they?  And why
> would they need to?  Everything's going along just fine by itself by
> purely physical means.
>
> I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
> computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
> don't exist in the world.
>
>
> It doens't remotely. Just because something (eg a horse)
> isn't a *fundamental* constituent of the world doesn't make it
> non-existent in the sense that unicorn is.
>
>
>
>  They're semantic formulations - ways of
> speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
> and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
> kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
> eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
> whit.  Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
> account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
> to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
> 'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
> another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
> However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here.  Rather my
> intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
> physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
> eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.
>
> I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
> of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
> account of mind (and body, as it happens).  To be absolutely explicit:
> if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
> fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
> foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
> physical account.  But for that to be the case, all other causal
> relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
> account.  But now, of course, this must include physics itself.
>
>
> What must include physics itself?
>
>
>
> Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP.  But if you want to be a
> physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
> explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
>
>
> I don't see how that follows at all.
>
>
>
> Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
> in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts.  The
> alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
> incomplete, or else it is wrong.   But that's another story.
>
> David
>
>
>
>
> >
>

--
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Bruno Marchal]

On 06 Aug 2009, at 04:37, Colin Hales wrote:

Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed refutation of computationalism.
It's going through peer review at the moment.

The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The distinction should fail.

Why? COMP entails that physics cannot be described by a computation, but by an infinite sum of infinite histories. If you were correct, there would be no possible white rabbit. You are confusing comp (I am a machine) and constructive physics (the universe is a machine).

I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. Call this situation X.

If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal arguments against COMP.

FACT: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form  an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie.

A lie presuppose the intention of communicating the false. 

Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal (non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted.
===================
COMP fails when:
a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) scientist <Sa> and expect <Sa> to be able to carry out authentic original science on the a-priori unknown....identically to humans. To do this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do this.... your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be indistinguishable.

b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that <Sa> be able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.

c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.

BECAUSE:  (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.

(b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very idea of <Sa> ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. The formal system is 100% deterministic, unable to violate rules. When it encounters a liar it will be unable to resolve what falsehood is being presented. It requires all falsehoods to be a-priori known. Impossible. How can a formal system encounter a world in which COMP is actually false? If it could, COMP would be FALSE! If COMP is true then it can't. Humans are informal....ergo we have some part of the natural world capable of behaving informally....=> GOTCHA!

This argument is has very 'Godellian' structure. That was accidental.

When you say 'physics is fundamental'. I don't actually known what that means.

What I can tell you is that to construct an authentic ARTIFICIAL SCIENTIST (not a simulation, but an 'inorganic' scientist), you have to replicate the real physics of cognition, not 'compute a model' of the cognition or a 'compute a model of the physics underlying cognition'. Then an artificial scientist is a scioentist in the same sense that artificial light is light.

R.I.P. COMP

=> Strong AI (a computer can be a mind) is false.
=> Weak AI (A computer model of cognition can never be actual cognition) is true.

It's nice to finally have at least one tiny little place (X) where the seeds of clarity can be found.

The formal belief of ideal machine Bp leads already to the informal and non nameable first person, described by Bp & p, which cannot be described formally by the machine itself. 

If you want to show comp false, you should show that it predicts more non computational phenomena than the one observed. Comp would already be false in case Newton classical physics was "proved" correct, or if Quantum mechanics was deterministic and/or boolean.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[russell standish-2]

On Thu, Aug 06, 2009 at 12:37:38PM +1000, Colin Hales wrote:

>
> (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very
> idea of <Sa> ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is
> impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed,
> formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to
> construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human
> scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. The
> formal system is 100% deterministic, unable to violate rules. When it
> encounters a liar it will be unable to resolve what falsehood is being
> presented. It requires all falsehoods to be a-priori known. Impossible.
> How can a formal system encounter a world in which COMP is actually
> false? If it could, COMP would be FALSE! If COMP is true then it can't.
> Humans are informal....ergo we have some part of the natural world
> capable of behaving informally....=> GOTCHA!
>
> This argument is has very 'Godellian' structure. That was accidental.
>

I think all you have established with this is that the robotic
scientist can never know it is a robot. Therefore it can doubt
COMP. But this result is already a known theorem - which is why Bruno
says we can only bet on COMP.

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish                  Phone [phone] (mobile)
Mathematics                        
UNSW SYDNEY 2052                 hpcoder@...
Australia                                http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Flammarion]

On 6 Aug, 03:37, Colin Hales <c.ha...@...> wrote:

> (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very
> idea of <Sa> ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is
> impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed,
> formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to
> construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human
> scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. The
> formal system is 100% deterministic, unable to violate rules. When it
> encounters a liar it will be unable to resolve what falsehood is being
> presented. It requires all falsehoods to be a-priori known. Impossible.
> How can a formal system encounter a world in which COMP is actually
> false? If it could, COMP would be FALSE! If COMP is true then it can't.
> Humans are informal....ergo we have some part of the natural world
> capable of behaving informally....=> GOTCHA!
>

Nope. Fuzziness (fuzzy logic) and inconsistently (paraconsistent
logic)
can be modeled formally.

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Colin Hales-2]

Brent Meeker wrote:

Colin Hales wrote:
  

Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed 
refutation of computationalism.
It's going through peer review at the moment.

The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 
'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being 
carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I 
drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL 
COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is 
that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The 
distinction should fail.

I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. 
Call this situation X.

If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I 
also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get 
their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal 
arguments against COMP.

*FACT*: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal 
nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form  
an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The 
quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a 
hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie. 
Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) 
violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of 
nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe 
the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how 
humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal 
(non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and 
mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held 
contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted.
===================
COMP fails when:
a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) 
scientist <Sa> and expect <Sa> to be able to carry out authentic 
original science on the a-priori unknown....identically to humans. To do 
this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do 
this.... your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a 
suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If 
COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be 
indistinguishable.

b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that <Sa> be 
able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.

c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.

BECAUSE:  (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.

(b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very 
idea of <Sa> ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is 
impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, 
formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to 
construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human 
scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. 
    

I don't see it.  I can write a simple computer program that constructs statements which 
are a subset of those produced by humans (or any other system).  Bruno's UD produces *all* 
such statements.  So where's the contradiction?

  

Yes you can generate all such statements.  But then what/so what?

Please re-read the scenario....This situation is very very specific:

1) Embodied situated robot scientist <Sa> is doing science on the 'natural world'.

2) As a COMP artificial scientist <Sa>, you are software. A formal system ts computes you.

3) All you ever do is categorise patterns and cross-correlate patterns in massive streams of numbers that arrive from your 'robot scientist suit'.

4) <Sa> is a SCIENTIST. The entirety of the existence of <Sa> involves dealing with streams of numbers that are the result of an encounter with the radically unknown, which <Sa> is trying to find a 'universal abstraction' for = 'a law of nature'.

5) There is no 'out there in an environment' for <Sa>. There is only an abstraction (a category called) "out there". You cannot project any kind of human 'experience' into <Sa>. REASON: If COMP is true, then computation (of abstract symbol manipulation of formal ts) is all COMP <Sa> needs to be a scientist. <Sa> can only be imagined as operating 'in the dark'.(I spent a whole section on ensuring this spurious projection does not occur in the reader of my paper!)

6) ts has been assumed possible by assuming COMP is true.

7) The paper is a reductio ad absurdum proof that COMP is false.

8) The contradiction that I use is that the human and the COMP scientist are different (when if COMP is true they should be the same). The difference is that a human can postulate COMP is true and be WRONG. The COMP-Sa cannot do this....because it can never know when it is wrong! Humans are an INFORMAL system. Informal systems can break rules.

Broken rules do NOT come labeled as broken.
Faked authentic rules do not come labeled as forgeries.

<Sa> cannot cope with either. The aberrant behaviour of <Sa> is not that it can't in-principle deal with it. It's that there is not way of <sa> knowing that it is a possibility. If you try and 'fix it' by pre-programming what all forgeries or broken rule look like....well you can see that is just plain never gonna work.

Get it?

cheers
colin





--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Rex Allen]

If computationalism is true, and computation is the source of
conscious experience, then shouldn't we expect that what is
ontologically real is the simplest possible universe that can develop
and support physical systems that are Turing equivalent?

Does our universe look like such a universe?

If our universe doesn't look like such a universe, then wouldn't it be
reasonable to assume that ours is not the "real" universe, and that a
simpler reality underlies it?

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Brent Meeker-2]

Colin Hales wrote:

>
>
> Brent Meeker wrote:
>> Colin Hales wrote:
>>  
>>> Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed
>>> refutation of computationalism.
>>> It's going through peer review at the moment.
>>>
>>> The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of
>>> 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being
>>> carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I
>>> drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL
>>> COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is
>>> that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The
>>> distinction should fail.
>>>
>>> I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company.
>>> Call this situation X.
>>>
>>> If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I
>>> also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get
>>> their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal
>>> arguments against COMP.
>>>
>>> *FACT*: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal
>>> nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form  
>>> an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The
>>> quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a
>>> hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie.
>>> Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently)
>>> violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of
>>> nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe
>>> the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how
>>> humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal
>>> (non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and
>>> mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held
>>> contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted.
>>> ===================
>>> COMP fails when:
>>> a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer)
>>> scientist <Sa> and expect <Sa> to be able to carry out authentic
>>> original science on the a-priori unknown....identically to humans. To do
>>> this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do
>>> this.... your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a
>>> suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If
>>> COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be
>>> indistinguishable.
>>>
>>> b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that <Sa> be
>>> able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>>>
>>> c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>>>
>>> BECAUSE:  (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
>>> THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
>>> THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
>>> THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.
>>>
>>> (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very
>>> idea of <Sa> ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is
>>> impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed,
>>> formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to
>>> construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human
>>> scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms.
>>>    
>>
>> I don't see it.  I can write a simple computer program that constructs statements which
>> are a subset of those produced by humans (or any other system).  Bruno's UD produces *all*
>> such statements.  So where's the contradiction?
>>
>>  
> Yes you can generate all such statements.  /But then what*/*so what?
> /*
> *Please re-read the scenario....This situation is very very specific:
>
> 1) Embodied situated robot scientist <Sa> is doing science on the
> 'natural world'.
>
> 2) As a COMP artificial scientist <Sa>, you are software. A formal
> system *ts* computes you.
>
> 3) All you ever do is categorise patterns and cross-correlate patterns
> in massive streams of numbers that arrive from your '/robot scientist
> suit/'.
>
> 4) <Sa> is a SCIENTIST. The entirety of the existence of <Sa> involves
> dealing with streams of numbers that are the result of an encounter with
> the radically unknown, which <Sa> is trying to find a 'universal
> abstraction' for = 'a law of nature'.
>
> 5) There is no 'out there in an environment' for <Sa>. There is only an
> abstraction (a category called) "out there". You cannot project any kind
> of human 'experience' into <Sa>. REASON: If COMP is true, then
> computation (of abstract symbol manipulation of formal *ts*) is all COMP
> <Sa> needs to be a scientist. <Sa> can only be imagined as operating 'in
> the dark'.(I spent a whole section on ensuring this spurious projection
> does not occur in the reader of my paper!)
>
> 6) *ts* has been assumed possible by assuming COMP is true.
>
> 7) The paper is a reductio ad absurdum proof that COMP is false.
>
> 8) The contradiction that I use is that the human and the COMP scientist
> are different (when if COMP is true they should be the same). The
> difference is that a human can postulate COMP is true and be WRONG. _The
> COMP-Sa cannot do this_....because it can never know when it is wrong!
> Humans are an INFORMAL system. Informal systems can break rules.
>
> Broken rules do NOT come labeled as broken.
> Faked authentic rules do not come labeled as forgeries.
>
> <Sa> cannot cope with either. The aberrant behaviour of <Sa> is not that
> it can't in-principle deal with it. _It's that there is not way of <sa>
> knowing that it is a possibility_. If you try and 'fix it' by
> pre-programming what all forgeries or broken rule look like....well you
> can see that is just plain never gonna work.
>
> Get it?

Nope.  It's just an assertion that informal systems can do something formal systems can't
- which as lawyers say is a fact not in evidence.

Brent

>
> cheers
> colin
>
>
>
>
>
> >


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Colin Hales-2]

Rex Allen wrote:

If computationalism is true, and computation is the source of
conscious experience, then shouldn't we expect that what is
ontologically real is the simplest possible universe that can develop
and support physical systems that are Turing equivalent?

Does our universe look like such a universe?

If our universe doesn't look like such a universe, then wouldn't it be
reasonable to assume that ours is not the "real" universe, and that a
simpler reality underlies it?


  

Perhaps we have our wires crossed. The definition of computationalism you have is not what is in the literature.
This is the distillation I have formulated from the literature (in my paper):

COMP

This is the shorthand for computationalism as distilled from the various sources cited above. The working definition here: “The operational/functional equivalence (identity, indistinguishability at the level of the model) of (a) a sufficiently embodied, computationally processed, sufficiently detailed symbolic/formal description/model of a natural thing X and (b) the described natural thing X”.

The refs...Beer, Pylyshyn, Putnam, Horst and many others.

This definition of COMP therefore has nothing explicitly to do with claiming consciousness.

However, if COMP is true, then if you compute some kind of model of cognition, then you may expect that model to be equivalent to a mind. An attribution of experience, however, is completely spurious. If COMP (as defined above) is true, then all you need is abstract symbol manipulation of the Turing machine kind to get equivalence. You can remain completely mute/agnostic on the existence of experience in the COMP entity. This is the origin of the of the catch phrase "cognition is computation".

You may be confusing COMP with 'strong AI', which says that a COMP model of cognition is actual cognition (a mind, from which you might infer consciousness). Constrast this with "weak AI" which says that a COMP model of cognition is not an instance of cognition.

Refuting COMP the way I have means "strong AI" is false, "weak AI" is true.
Refuting COMP the way I have means your idea of 'Turing Equivalence" is meaningless/impossible.

The very best I can say of COMP is that it is trivially true in the sense that you can 'compute' a mind if you already know everything (and I mean everything, everywhere) .... in which case the mind operates akin to a flight simulator.....you compute the brain and the entire environment. Totally pointless .... and inconsistent with the logic of being ignorant of the universe in the sense that scientists are ignorant. You do not know the environment, hence you can't compute it.

Amazing how many different views you can get of this stuff.

cheers
colin



--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

[Colin Hales-2]

Brent Meeker wrote:

Colin Hales wrote:
  

Brent Meeker wrote:
    

Colin Hales wrote:
  
      

Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed 
refutation of computationalism.
It's going through peer review at the moment.

The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 
'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being 
carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I 
drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL 
COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is 
that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The 
distinction should fail.

I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. 
Call this situation X.

If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I 
also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get 
their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal 
arguments against COMP.

*FACT*: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal 
nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form  
an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The 
quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a 
hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie. 
Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) 
violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of 
nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe 
the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how 
humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal 
(non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and 
mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held 
contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted.
===================
COMP fails when:
a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) 
scientist <Sa> and expect <Sa> to be able to carry out authentic 
original science on the a-priori unknown....identically to humans. To do 
this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do 
this.... your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a 
suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If 
COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be 
indistinguishable.

b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that <Sa> be 
able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.

c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.

BECAUSE:  (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.

(b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very 
idea of <Sa> ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is 
impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, 
formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to 
construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human 
scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. 
    
        

I don't see it.  I can write a simple computer program that constructs statements which 
are a subset of those produced by humans (or any other system).  Bruno's UD produces *all* 
such statements.  So where's the contradiction?

  
      

Yes you can generate all such statements.  /But then what*/*so what?
/*
*Please re-read the scenario....This situation is very very specific:

1) Embodied situated robot scientist <Sa> is doing science on the 
'natural world'.

2) As a COMP artificial scientist <Sa>, you are software. A formal 
system *ts* computes you.

3) All you ever do is categorise patterns and cross-correlate patterns 
in massive streams of numbers that arrive from your '/robot scientist 
suit/'.

4) <Sa> is a SCIENTIST. The entirety of the existence of <Sa> involves 
dealing with streams of numbers that are the result of an encounter with 
the radically unknown, which <Sa> is trying to find a 'universal 
abstraction' for = 'a law of nature'.

5) There is no 'out there in an environment' for <Sa>. There is only an 
abstraction (a category called) "out there". You cannot project any kind 
of human 'experience' into <Sa>. REASON: If COMP is true, then 
computation (of abstract symbol manipulation of formal *ts*) is all COMP 
<Sa> needs to be a scientist. <Sa> can only be imagined as operating 'in 
the dark'.(I spent a whole section on ensuring this spurious projection 
does not occur in the reader of my paper!)

6) *ts* has been assumed possible by assuming COMP is true.

7) The paper is a reductio ad absurdum proof that COMP is false.

8) The contradiction that I use is that the human and the COMP scientist 
are different (when if COMP is true they should be the same). The 
difference is that a human can postulate COMP is true and be WRONG. _The 
COMP-Sa cannot do this_....because it can never know when it is wrong! 
Humans are an INFORMAL system. Informal systems can break rules.

Broken rules do NOT come labeled as broken.
Faked authentic rules do not come labeled as forgeries.

<Sa> cannot cope with either. The aberrant behaviour of <Sa> is not that 
it can't in-principle deal with it. _It's that there is not way of <sa> 
knowing that it is a possibility_. If you try and 'fix it' by 
pre-programming what all forgeries or broken rule look like....well you 
can see that is just plain never gonna work.

Get it?
    

Nope.  It's just an assertion that informal systems can do something formal systems can't 
- which as lawyers say is a fact not in evidence.

Brent

  

Eh?
I wrote a whole para in my original post labelled FACT.

What planet do you live on?

On the planet I live on It is not hard to see how humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal (non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted. That very same brain material, with a bit of added evidential rigor, becomes a scientist.
Scientists are rationally WRONG in completely free, correctable ways that a formal system cannot match. The formal system can be equally wrong....but it CANNOT correct itself like a human. When you try and get a formal (Turing) machine to behave as per (specifically) a human scientist you fail for that reason.

1) You have a planet load of evidence of an informal system (human scientists)
2) You have COMP being true critically dependent on a formal system being able to do what humans do.
3) It can't do 1 very specific thing... be WRONG in the way a human can (in the specific fashion cited)

I didn't "assert", I "measured".

"fact not in evidence" be damned! Open your eyes.

Colin




--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscribe@...
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---