[Fis] _ Interlude: emotional shock

[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Karl,


On 31 Mar 2016, at 17:30, Karl Javorszky wrote:

>
> In the present Interlude after the session chaired by Lou on  
> Symmetry and before the coming one, allow me to enlarge on something  
> Bruno raised.
>
> Bruno wrote:
>
>
> Then this confirms the "computationalist theory of everything",  
> which is given by any formalism, like Robinson Arithmetic (the rest  
> is given by the internal machine's phenomenology, like the one  
> deducible from incompleteness). Indeed, in that theory, the stable  
> (predictible) observable have to be given by a statistics on all  
> computation going through our actual state. This (retro-)predicts  
> that the physical obeys to some quantum logic, and it can be derived  
> from some intensional nuance on the Gödel self-referential  
> provability predicate (like beweisbar('p') & consistent('t')).
>
> In quantum mechanics without collapse of the wave during  
> observation, the axiom 3 is phenomenological, and with  
> computationalism in the cognitive science (the assumption that there  
> is a level of description of the brain such that my consciousness  
> would proceed through any such emulation of my brain or body at that  
> level or below) the whole "physical" is phenomenological.
> Physics becomes a statistics on our consistent sharable first person  
> (plural) experiences. With "our" referring to us = the universal  
> numbers knowing that they are universal (Peano Arithmetic, Zermelo  
> Fraenkel Set Theory, viewed as machine, are such numbers).
>
> An actuality is a possibility seen from inside, somehow, in this  
> context or theory (QM without collapse, or Computationalism).
>
> Personally, it seems that quantum mechanics, when we agree on the  
> internal phenomenological of actuality in the possibilities,  
> confirms the most startling, perhaps shocking, consequence of  
> computationalism (digital mechanism). Note that it does not make the  
> physical itself computable a priori.
>
> Of these thoughts, let us focus on the following:
> “…. when we agree on the internal phenomenological of actuality in  
> the possibilities, confirms the most startling, perhaps shocking,  
> consequence of computationalism (digital mechanism). …”
>
> Now how does “shocking” enter a discourse on quantum concepts and  
> the idea that there is knowledge and wisdom in them there natural  
> numbers?
>
>
>
> Obviously, and let us thank Bruno for having pointed it out, there  
> is an element of reticence, unwillingness, resistance and  
> protracted, unpleasant surprise in the thought that Life, and the  
> world in general may be much more mechanistic and trivial than  
> thought before.
>
>
>
> The person pre-shock believes in something, the person post-shock  
> knows that he has been robbed a dream. It is like a child has to  
> realise that Santa Claus is not a real person, and that little  
> babies do come about the way they come about.
>
> Many ideas have to be laid to rest during the process of  
> familiarising oneself to the idea that the glue that holds the world  
> together – and within it, our ideas about the world – is best  
> described by the well-known form of a+b=c as known from good old  
> elementary school.
>
>
>
> Discussing what forms and appearances the order can produce which  
> rules Nature, and within Nature, us and our thoughts, is  
> unfortunately equivalent to discussing, what kinds of order we can  
> look into and discover within a+b=c,  as this old, well-chewed bone  
> is the backbone of rational concepts.
>
>
>
> The disillusionment will be individually instrumented for each of  
> us, as Tolstoy had said about the unhappiness of families, each in  
> their own way. The resulting – remaining – denotation, after having  
> lost its connotations, will be made up of the simple grey, standard,  
> industrial units of abstraction, order as a running fight among, and  
> a compromise between b-a, a-2b, a+b, 2b-3a, and the like.
>
>
>
> Please accept my apologies for the shock the insight may cause that  
> we are indeed just an experiment in combinatorics, and probably the  
> elves, fairies, trolls and unicorns do not exist neither.
>


Thanks for this comment Karl. The biggest shock I was alluding, and  
which I get myself before I realized that it was confirmed by quantum  
mechanics (without collapse) is that not only nature or the material  
world does not exist per se, at least not ontologically, but only  
phenomenologically (through a notion of sharable first person  
experience) but in the fact that the usual mind-brain or consciousness- 
matter identity link is broken, and that "my" particular current  
experience is related to an infinity of relative brains- 
representations existing in arithmetic. Bryce DeWitt explains how  
shocking it was for him when he realized that at each instant he is  
multiplied/differentiated by 10^100+ copies, and with only the  
mechanist assumption that multiplication/differentiation is up into  
the infinite (aleph_zero or aleph_one).

That can also be used to show that the physical reality cannot be  
entirely computational, although it might remain as a computation *in*  
some random oracle (given freely by the first person indeterminacy on  
the infinitely many computations going through my state). Digital  
mechanism in the cognitive science refutes digital mechanism in physics.

Note also that everything is derived not just from, a + b = c, but we  
need also ab = c. We cannot derive ab= c, nor of course the existence  
of a computer (universal number or machine) from a + b = c and logic,  
we need also ab = c, and then we can prove the existence of all  
universal numbers (accepting Church-Turing thesis at the metalevel).

The advantage of this precision is that we can test computationalism  
by comparing the physics coming from the "many-world interpretation of  
arithmetic" with the physics inferred from measurement, and it fits up  
to now (we get a quantum logic for the universal machine observable).  
In case it does not fit, we get a tool for measuring experimentally  
the degree of non-computationalism, which can take the form of an  
inference of some very special oracles.

Note also how much I concur with Lou about the importance of the first  
and second type of fixed point (DD = F(DD), DD = F('DD')), which was  
what decided me to do math instead of biology, as such fixed point are  
directly usable in a number biology, or combinator, programs, ...  
biology. There is not one result in my work which is not proved using  
the first or second type of recursion. Most are implicit in Solovay's  
arithmetical completeness theorem of the self-reference modal logics G  
and G*, which are proved through a very ingenuous use of such fixed  
points. Now, both fixed points theorems are direct consequence of the  
laws of succession, addition and multiplication, or of elementary  
lambda calculus.

Somehow, and this can seems shocking for some people, we get an  
answer, perhaps a disappointing one, to the question "why there is  
something instead of nothing".

Indeed, the failure of logicism explains that we cannot derived 0, +  
and * (or the existence of a universal number/program) from anything  
less. But then once we assume addition and multiplication, we have to  
derive the psychological and physical appearances from them, or we do  
the reification error and use some Material Reality as a "god-of-the- 
gap".  That is sometimes shocking some people: the idea that physics  
is not the fundamental science, but that it is in principle a derived  
appearance coming from the fact that we cannot know which machine we  
are, nor which computations support us among the computations (all)  
realized (executed, in the mathematical sense of Church and Turing) in  
(a tiny part) of the arithmetical reality.

People knowing french can read "Conscience et Mécanisme(*)" for an  
explanation how much computationalism fits well the philosophy of  
Bateson and the idea that biology, psychology and theology (in part)  
are intensional (modal) variations of the fixed point construction. It  
is much in line  with what has been said in this discussion.

Some seems to believe that Mechanism is a reductionism, but this comes  
from a reductionist conception of Mechanism. After Gödel, we know that  
neither computer science nor arithmetic can be completely axiomatized,  
and the universal machine itself (once believing in enough induction  
axioms) can justify why it has a soul which is not amenable to any  
purely third person account (be it mechanical or not). The soul of the  
machine escapes the whole of mathematics, and even "God", in some sense.

Bruno

(*) http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/bxlthesis/consciencemecanisme.html

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