<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Hi Jerry, List,<div><br></div><div><br><div><div>On 17 Mar 2017, at 22:29, Jerry LR Chandler wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class="">List, Bruno:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">(My response to theMarch 13 message are interwoven in a red font.)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190);"> While I appreciate the flow of concepts emerging from Bruno’s “poetry”, its guidance appears to exclude chemistry and biology.</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">We have something like:</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">Number(with + and *) => Number's dreams statistics => Physics => human biology</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190);">Thus, Bruno’s associations are not so clear to me. </div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">This provides evidence you have a sane mind :)</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190);">So, I will be a “spoil sport” and look toward a more “life-friendly” flow of both symbols and numbers with only a tad of poetry. </div><p class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190);"> </p><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 115, 18);">On Mar 3, 2017, at 11:51 AM, Bruno Marchal <<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:marchal@ulb.ac.be" class=""><span class="" style="color: rgb(0, 102, 190);">marchal@ulb.ac.be</span></a>> wrote:</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(105, 9, 0); min-height: 22px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 115, 18); min-height: 22px;"><span class="" style="color: rgb(0, 102, 190); font-size: 12px;">The tensions between the computational natures of discrete and the “continuous” numbers haunts any attempt to make mathematical sense out of scientific hypotheses. I am uncertain as to the logical implication of the “computationalist’s hypothesis" in this context.</span></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">If you are aware of the notion of first person indeterminacy, it is not so difficult to understand how the appearance of the continuum can be explained to be unavoidable in the digital-mechanist frame. The physical reality will emerge from a statistics on infinities of computations (including many with Oracles). Amazingly, in the digitalist frame, it is the digital which remains hard to understand a priori, but the mathematics of self-reference gives important clue.</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><font color="#ff2600" class="">In my view, this is philosophy not related to the logic of the physics of the atomic numbers. </font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><font color="#ff2600" class="">Each atomic number has an identity.</font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><font color="#ff2600" class="">That identity infers both mass and electricity and the corresponding set of predicates that respect the attributes of the individual form of matter.</font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><font color="#ff2600" class="">The computational logic of the chemical sciences is based on the coherence of the relations that couple these physical attributes into the metrology of chemical sciences. </font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><font color="#ff2600" class=""><font face="helvetica" class=""><span class="" style="font-size: 12px;">The success of chemical computations on the atomic numbers is based on compositions of atomic numbers (generating functions) and the metrology of the emergence molecules, cells, organisms, human individuals. </span></font></font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><font color="#ff2600" class=""><font face="helvetica" class=""><span class="" style="font-size: 12px;"><br class=""></span></font></font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal;"><font color="#ff2600" class=""><font face="helvetica" class=""><span class="" style="font-size: 12px;">Bruno: How do you relate your methods of calculations to your identity? Can you construct a clear narrative that states the necessary premisses? propositions? consequences? Causal pathways? </span></font></font></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>The premise is a weak form of Cartesian Mechanism. It is the assumption that I could accept a brain or body digital transplant. Precisely, it is the assumption that my consciousness is invariant for a functional digital susbtitution made at some level. That hypothesis is much weaker that the neurophilosophers hypothesis, because I put no bound on the substitution level: it can be the enire observable universe at the level of quarks and gluons. That hypothesis is used in evolution theory, and many think that Nature has already bet on computationalism in developing the genetic code. But I am not claiming that hypothesis to be true, only that it entails logically that the physical reality is an appearance in the relative state of the numbers engaged in (Turing) universal relations.</div><div><br></div><div>In fact, I do not assume that there is a primary physical universe, and I show that if we take the digital mechanist assumption, we *can't* assume it.</div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190); min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190);">Is the reference grounded in Curry’s combinatorial logic or otherwise? </div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">It does not. The reasoning is independent of any basic universal theory chosen. </div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><font color="#ff2600" class="">Both chemistry and biology are based on the chemical table of elements and the combinatorial compositions. </font></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I thought so too but I changed my mind when I discovered Gödel's proof of its incompleteness theorem, where I realized that there is an abstract (or more concrete according to the philosophical position we can have) biology independent of its physical implementation. That is what decides me to study mathematics instead of biology and chemistry.</div><div><br></div><div>I explain this with some details in my old paper "Amoeba, Planaria and Dreaming Machines" (in Bourgine Paul, Varela F.J. (eds), Artificial Life, Toward the Practice of Autonomous Systems, ECAI 91, MIT press, pp. 429-440),</div><div><br></div><div>or in my more recent papers:</div><div><br></div><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; ">The computationalist reformulation of the mind-body problem. Prog Biophys Mol Biol; 2013 Sep;113(1):127-40</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; ">The Universal Numbers. From Biology to Physics, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2015, Vol. 119, Issue 3, 368-381.</div></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 115, 18); min-height: 22px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 115, 18);">Provably so if we assume mechanism. Contrarily to a widely spread opinion: mechanism is not compatible with even quite weak form of materialism, or physicalism.</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190); min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190);">The connotations of the term “mechanism” varies widely from discipline to discipline.</div></div></div></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190);">The sense of “mechanism” in chemistry infers an electrical path among the discrete paths of illations that “glue” the parts into a whole. By sublation, this same sense is used in molecular biology and the biomedical sciences. </div></div></div></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190); min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190);">Bruno, could you expand on your usage in this context? </div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div>I always meant "mechanism" in the sense of the mathematical logicians who discovered the universal machine. It has been shown as being a purely arithmetical notion. You can define such machine in terms of 0 and its successors, together with addition and multiplication. Elementary arithmetic is "Turing universal", so whatever you can do with a computer is "already" realized in any model of a simple axiomatization of arithmetic.</div><div><br></div><div>I can explain more, but of course, this is not obvious nor well known, apart by logicians and theoretical computer scientist. <br><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">Mechanism, as I use it, is the hypothesis that a level of digital substitution exist…</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><font color="#ff2600" class="">The events and processes of the chemical sciences are based on the atomic numbers.</font></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><blockquote type="cite"><div class="" style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div class=""><div class=""><div class="" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; "><font color="#ff2600" class="">The “digits” of the atomic numbers are NOT substitutable for one another. </font></div></div></div></div></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>This means that you assume atoms. I do not. If they exists as appearances, we have to justify them from a statistic on computations realized in arithmetic. up to now, only the quantum propositional formalism has been derived.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#ff2600"><br></font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190);">How do the senses of “computationism" and “mechanism” refer to the material world, if at all?</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">The notion of computation is born in pure mathematics,</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><font color="#ff2600" class="">Historically, it was just the opposite - computations gave rise to (im)pure mathematics?</font></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Babbage guessed it before the logicians, that is right. But then, independently of Babbage, the logicians isolated the concept when working on the paradox of set theory.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><font color="#ff2600" class=""><br class=""></font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><font color="#ff2600" class=""> The "universal dovetailer argument" ---that you can found here for example:</font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190);"><span class="" style="text-decoration: underline;"><a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html" class="">http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html</a></span></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">explains how the appearance of the material world has to emerge from all relative computations. </div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><font color="#ff2600" class="">This explanation is not extensible to chemistry and biology because of the perplexity of Coulomb’s Law. </font></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>You might elaborate on this. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 115, 18);">God created the natural numbers, and saw that it was good.</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190); min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 102, 190);">Would it be more accurate to that “"God" created the internal creativity of the atomic numbers."</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">I was just saying, albeit poetically indeed, that the "theory of everything", (still in the frame of the digital mechanist hypothesis), can't assume more than classical logic + the following axioms:</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-family: arial;">0 ≠ (x + 1)</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-family: arial;">((x + 1) = (y + 1)) -> x = y</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-family: arial;">x = 0 v Ey(x = y + 1)</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">Together with (just below):</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 115, 18); min-height: 22px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 115, 18);">Then she said: add yourself, and saw that is was good.</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">x + 0 = x</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">x + (y + 1) = (x + y) + 1</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">And:</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 115, 18); min-height: 22px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; color: rgb(0, 115, 18);">Then she said: multiply yourself.</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">x * 0 = 0</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">x * (y + 1) = (x * y) + x</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica;">And nothing else.</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><font color="#ff2600" class=""><font face="helvetica" class=""><span class="" style="font-size: 17px;">These sorts of “computations” are not possible with atomic numbers because the atomic have a tri-partite semantic meaning. “zero” is not defined. “1” is hydrogen. Physical conservation laws negate the possibility of multiplication of 6*8 = 48 (Carbon related to oxygen as carbon monoxide.) </span></font></font></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>You seem to assume some physical reality. I do not. I prefer to be theologically neutral and not commit an ontological commitment. Physical conservation laws is explained by the disappearance of irreversibility in the basic quantum formalism (not the one inferred from observation, but the one implied by the mathematics of number self-reference).</div><div><br></div><div>With Digital Mechanism, even if a primary physical universe exists, you need to confer to it some magical, or infinite, power to be able to select a "physical computation" from all computations realized in elementary arithmetic.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class="" style="margin: 0px; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><font color="#ff2600" class=""><font face="helvetica" class=""><span class="" style="font-size: 17px;"><br class=""></span></font></font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><font color="#ff2600" class=""><br class=""></font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><font color="#ff2600" class="">I think these counter-arguments are sufficient to justify my assertion that the logic of the atomic numbers differs from your views of numerical logic and your interpretation of computationalism from chemical and biological computations, including brain dynamics.</font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><font color="#ff2600" class=""><br class=""></font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><font color="#ff2600" class="">The pragmatism of the chemical sciences is the basis of its success in biology, evolution, and indeed, consciousness. This pragmatic perspective respects the physical law of conservation of electrical particles. </font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><font color="#ff2600" class=""><br class=""></font></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; font-family: helvetica; min-height: 14px;"><font color="#ff2600" class="">So, our world views are radically different from one another. </font></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>No problem. Just say "no" to the surgeon who would propose to you an artificial digital brain. </div><div><br></div><div>My point is logical: contrary to a widespread belief, mechanism and (weak) materialism are logically incompatible. </div><div><br></div><div>If you are right, then the brain is an actual infinite, substantial and analog object, and we can't be emulated by any computer, physical or not. My point is that digital mechanism is testable, and quantum mechanics (without collapse) confirms (≠ proves, of course) it spectacularly: the evidence is that the physical do emerge from the interference of many computations.</div><div>(By weak materialism I mean the assumption that there is some primary physical reality). </div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div><br></div><div>Bruno</div><div><br></div></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; font-size: 12px; "><div><a href="http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/">http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/</a></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></div></body></html>