[Fis] FIS discussions. Other Info Conundrums

Fri Nov 1 10:17:19 CET 2019

Hi Ramon,

> On 29 Oct 2019, at 15:12, GUEVARA ERRA RAMON MARIANO <guevara.erra en gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Bruno 
> 
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 2:22 PM Bruno Marchal <marchal en ulb.ac.be <mailto:marchal en ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
> Hi Ramon,
> 
> 
>> On 25 Oct 2019, at 18:34, GUEVARA ERRA RAMON MARIANO <guevara.erra en gmail.com <mailto:guevara.erra en gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Pedro, I like your hypercommunication paradox. Indeed, it would be interesting to quantify how much information we can deal with, but it is clear that nowadays is too much. Some websites even advice to cut on it. I see very young people are sometimes unable to focus on anything. It's also problematic for the brain to have a very uninformative background. As an example out of many, it was reported by polar explorers that traveling in the Artic in winter was a very difficult experience because of the lack of landmarks. Some even report on some sort of blindness because of the snow when there are no salient aspects of the landscape. Apparently, similar effects can be obtained during meditation by repetition of certain phrases. Some sort of emptiness. Jose can perhaps say more both on meditation and Artic traveling. 
>> 
>> Bruno, thank you for your theory about good parents. I am tempted to use it with my own children. What would happen if the child allways behave badly?
> 
> I guess this is exceptional, but I heard, and saw crying in a café, an old woman who was terrified by its grand-son, describing him as “always behaving badly, very badly!”. I asked the age of that boy, and she told me that he was 2,5 years old. She told me he tried already to kill his younger sister (some month old) twice, but that the kid was mean with everyone, even his parents, and this well before her sister was born. 
> 
> Could a kid be inherently bad? Does really the theory apply? Some kids get the right number of “yes" and “no”, but acts like if they were hearing only “yes” or “only no”. 
> I would say that such a kid requires some “professional” helps, by some shaman or doctor around. 
> 
> I agree with you that kid needs some help. 
> 
> 
> 
>> According to this model we should anyway say YES sometimes (and NO to well behaved children). Extremely interesting dynamical system !
> 
> My theory was very general, only pointing to an idea close to what you were saying, but in the human science, or even the whole of biological science,  theories have exceptions.
> 
> In fact I could explain that this is the only rule without exception! All universal machine “rich enough” (something I can make precise technically if interested) can refute all theories made about them.
> 
> The universal machine is a universal dissident. In a good environment, they will be able to refute themselves all the times, and that’s how they can progress and learn almost everything. They are born with a conflict between universality-liberty and security, and they needs a bit of both. They are never fully satisfied!
> 
> So your point is that the only universal true is that there is not universal true? (in the sense that all trues have exceptions). Sorry if I am not refined about this, I am not a logician. 
> I guess a universal machine is a universal Turing machine....? (again, I am not a logician)

You guess right. The universal machine is the machine discovery by Turing when he defined the (non necessarily) universal machine.

If you enumerate all Turing machines computing functions (from N to N) with one variable: 

M_1, M_2, M_3, M_4, …,

it can be shown that it exists a machine M_u , with two arguments, such that M_u(x, y) = M_x(y), i.e. the machine M_u can imitate all machines M_x. “u” is the computer, x the program and y the data. Their existence can be proved in elementary arithmetic (making it Turing Universal itself).

Now, such machines are provably incomplete. Somehow, completeness with respect to computability (typical of the universal machine) entails incompleteness of their provability ability with respect to the truth. But they can can modify themselves and climb transfinite hierarchies of complexity, and see more and more about the arithmetical truth, but never completely in any provable way.

> 
> 
> 
>> It reminds me of a magical number Gell - Mann mentioned in its book "The quark and the jaguar". If I remember well, during the bombing of Germany in WWII the Royal Air Force sent sometimes planes without bombs. They were bluffing. That created problems to the German anti-aircfaft warfare. They didn't know when to react. According to Gell - Mann, the optimal bluffing strategy was to use fake bombers ones every seventh on average. Apprently there are animals using a similar strategy. A type of monkey have sentinels watching for leopards and eagles. If they cheat, however, they can get the food of their escaping colleagues. They do that once in a while, apprently with probability 1/7 !  If they do more than other monkeys stop reacting to real danger. 
> 
> Interesting! Yes, cheating is part of Nature, and even part of Arithmetic. Numbers can cheat so well that sometimes I want to rename “digital mechanism” or “computationalism” by “prestidigitalism”: the art of using digits to make others believing things! (Grin). 
> 
> In the sociological sense that decorating a theory with a mathematical flavor it will be accepted more easily? 

Unfortunately in my experience the contrary is true. Mathematicians run away when they see words like “reality” or “consciousness”, and philosophers run away when they see mathematical symbols, so nobody is happy.
Yet, when you remind that the discovery of computer and computer science has been made by mathematician interested in foundational important philosophical issues, important as there were many paradoxes in the general theories, you can conceive the importance of mathematics. 
In fact I was interested in biology, especially self-reproduction of amoebas, and was lucky to live the discovery of the DNA and the genetic of regulation in bacteria, which is where I understood the informal notion of computation. I was going to study biology, but I have been lucky to discover a little book on Gödel’s theorem, where I discovered that all the things which fascinated me in biology were already operative in the number relations. This raises the idea that numbers, or any Turing-complete theories, could explain the *appearance* of the physical reality by a statistic of machine’s “dreams” in arithmetic. I discover somehow the “many-histories” quantum mechanics (QM without wave reduction) just from this internal interpretation of arithmetic available to the numbers. Later I discovered that the universal machines are aware of all nuances brought by the neoplatonist theologian, and that the machine’s “canonical theology” (all truth about the machine) is very close to the insight of the neopythagoreans and the neoplatonist, from Pythagorus (-500) to Damascius (about +500).

> Or in a more concrete way, that digital machines use numbers and they can make us beleive things?...or perhaps I am missing the point.

A universal machine cannot distinguished between being run by this or that Turing-universal machinery. So with the assumption of mechanism, it is easier to explain to a conscious entity “living” in the arithmetical reality, the illusion of a material reality, than to explain from physics something like an illusion of consciousness (which is already a nonsense, as you need consciousness to genuinely have an illusion).

>  
> 
> The appearance of a physical universe is their magical chef-d’oeuvre, I could argue. But it is of course slightly more than that, and even the numbers can’t make another number really disappearing.
> 
> I see here that you refer to something more concrete, like virtual reality for example.....? 

You can call that a virtual reality. With the assumption of digital mechanism, you can assume any universal machinery at the start, and physics is explained by a statistical sum on all the histories going through our actual (indexical) states. Note that this makes the physical reality NOT Turing emulable, and the same applies to consciousness, which has to borrow non representable notion of truth. That is used to explain the difference between qualia and quanta. The “quanta” part is testable, and up to now, quantum physics confirms the admittedly strange nature of reality that digital mechanism (an assumption in cognitive science, not in physics) imposes.

I am aware that what I say run against 1500 years of “materialist brainwashing”. I am also aware that my contribution concerns fundamental issues, without much direct applications other than coming back to modesty and reason in foundational issues. My goal is just to understand what is happening, why matter, why consciousness, why does it hurt, etc.

The relation with information should be obvious, as with mechanism, there is only number/information at play, the physical reality is an emergent partially sharable local set of informations. But from my perspective, Turing’s theory of computation (Turing, Church, Post, Kleene, Gödel, etc.) is more important than the more quantitative theory by Shannon, Wiener, … although that plays some role there too, especially under the rise of the quantum notion of information from the machine internal first person view in arithmetic.

Best,

Bruno

> 
> Best,
> 
> Bruno
> 
> 
>> 
>> 
>> Ramon
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 4:47 PM Karl Javorszky <karl.javorszky en gmail.com <mailto:karl.javorszky en gmail.com>> wrote:
>> If we had a catechism of zaragoza, it would be getting new lines
>> 
>> 1. There are two interacting logical systems
>> 2. Information being the description of what is not here (in logical system A), it's being here (in logical system B) used to make us run in circles
>> 3. Symbols always present carry no information 
>> 4. Symbols that refer not to states of the world are useless or worse
>> 5. Useful are symbols that refer to changes in the world 
>> 6. Optimal useful are symbols that can be of two states (then up to 50% of all alternatives can be pointed out as remaining alternatives: maximal information content)
>> 7. Useful yes practical not. A stone mason's chisel is useful when wanting to carve hieroglyphs, but impractical if it can only chisel 0,1.
>> 8. The elementar symbols 0,1 can not be related among each other, because they lack properties that establish relationships. 
>> 9. What we look for are relationships among facts represented by symbols. 
>> 10. Because we agree that there are right and wrong ways to raise children, by depicting relationships among facts . This in a consistent way, so that they can understand, is the right way.
>> 11. We of course assume that there are indeed relationships among facts (to be taught to the children), we only have issues with the language. 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> jose luis perez velazquez <jlpvjlpv en gmail.com <mailto:jlpvjlpv en gmail.com>> schrieb am Fr., 25. Okt. 2019 16:13:
>> Indeed, "It takes energy/information to rise well the kids", and for that matter, to do anything, for, as Ramon already pointed out a few days ago, Landauer's, and possibly others' , works showed that changes in information are accompanied by changes in energy... which perhaps are giving us a clue as to how to proceed to resolve the "information conundrum" 
>> 
>> 
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>> On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 3:04 PM Bruno Marchal <marchal en ulb.ac.be <mailto:marchal en ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
>> Hi Jose,
>> 
>> 
>> > On 24 Oct 2019, at 16:52, jose luis perez velazquez <jlpvjlpv en gmail.com <mailto:jlpvjlpv en gmail.com>> wrote:
>> > 
>> >  Hola.  I cannot help but commenting that, regarding your point 3- The hypercommunication paradox, it is reminiscent of what we see in the nervous system, too much communication (in our case we study synchrony) is bad, too little is equally bad, healthy communication requires medium values... Ramon and I expounded this topic in the last January's New year lecture, if you may recall. I always enjoy when same phenomenon may emerge  in very different levels, in this case  from neurons to "civilised” societies
>> 
>> This reminds me a theory I made about good and bad parents.
>> 
>> Bad parents are those who say always “No” to their kids, or always “Yes”.
>> 
>> Good parents are those giving a reasonable amount of (senseful) “yes” and “no”.
>> 
>> I did not relate this with information content, but here too, things go well when the kids get a reasonable amount of mixed “yes” and “no” (high information content).
>> 
>> To be sure there are also the ultra-bad (perverse) parents, which gives a reasonable amount of “yes” and “no”, but in a perverse way making “yes” and “no” losing their content. That case is more rare, of course.
>> 
>> It takes energy/information to rise well the kids, but, fortunately perhaps, it takes also energy/information for destroying them. Note that only in the case of good and ultra-bad parent does the *content* of information plays a role.
>> 
>> Best,
>> 
>> Bruno Marchal
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> > 
>> >   Au revoir
>> > 
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