On treeness of Oak1, and other things

[FedUpWithFaith]

That really describes the essence of philosophical discourse I see on most forums - and in many philosophy books too.

Sorry, what does? your post before this one?

No, yours just before mine:

Oh we all already know I am a moron, thats been established for a long time. He just likes to make sure I dont forget

It was meant as a joke. I find most philosophical arguments to be more a dick waving contest than a genuine search for truth. And I'm just as guilty as everyone else, maybe moreso. I love the game of argument - even more if i have an actual passion for the subject as I do here. But who really ever changes minds in these debates? I've changed some and had mine changed. But it's very rare. Rather, we conduct in such folly because we're egoists.

[Little Idiot]

That really describes the essence of philosophical discourse I see on most forums - and in many philosophy books too.

Sorry, what does? your post before this one?

No, yours just before mine:

Oh we all already know I am a moron, thats been established for a long time. He just likes to make sure I dont forget

It was meant as a joke. I find most philosophical arguments to be more a dick waving contest than a genuine search for truth. And I'm just as guilty as everyone else, maybe moreso. I love the game of argument - even more if i have an actual passion for the subject as I do here. But who really ever changes minds in these debates? I've changed some and had mine changed. But it's very rare. Rather, we conduct in such folly because we're egoists.

Sorry I missed the connection to my own post, which was a quip and didnt seem like the essence of philosophical discourse.

But your right about the dick waving vs searching for truth. Unfortunatly.

Thats why I commented when you refered to a loyalty to truth - with the current scientific mind set and science's own inability to reach certainty (only closer aproximations) it is rare to see anyone declare such an unfashionable loyalty.

[Little Idiot]

It may be that I am dead-to-the-world-tired, but I did look up self-refence and found this which had me giggling.

[FedUpWithFaith]

Would you say geometry is information?

Yes, so i was perplexed why you equated some aspect of the physical with the geometric. It is possible to interpret it otherwise .But in any case, its abstraction.

When you get to 'data processing' is where "it's all data" gets problematic. "Data processing", or processes in general, are interactions between physical objects. "Data processing" requires a "data processor". A computer program requires a computer. Why is that not dualism?

At the level you think about computers, I see your problem. I'm not denying that the brain is a computer. It is the substrate for computation in the physical world, which I'm not denying exists, only that it has a deeper origin than matter, energy, and fields. However, I do deny that brain=mind. In the physical world mind is computer processing taking place on a computing substrate, which in our case happens to be a brain. I personally don't believe that brains are the only substrate that can support human-like consciousness, cognition, etc. That's probably a different discussion for a different thread. Am also biased by my background as a neuro- and AI scientist.

But is a computing substrate really required at the most basic level of information processing? Everything in modal realism and digital physics hinges on that question. If the answer is "yes", the whole shebang collapses. However, in very simplistic terms, I view the physical universe as something that emerged from "Computing Space". This is a rather virtual cellular automata soup of logic, mathematics, and rule operators that give rise to every possible computational and geometric ensemble (see Tegmark for the Ultimate Ensemble). From this ensemble, every COMPUTABLE universe arises in some dimension. Tegmark actually proved that this was the most parsimonious solution to the multiverse question. That doesn't make it true of course. But for me, many elements of science and philosophy are converging on it being true, from the probable quantitization of time and space, resolution of Zeno's Paradox, degeneration of separate ontological schools, the empirical nature of mathematics (Chaitin's great discoveries) and many other things I could drone on forever about.

[SpeedOfSound]

when I talk of information this is what I mean. Imagine that you had a matrix, say 16x16. If one element was next to another and they differed in value then that is information. All that is needed is one property. Imagine a 1 or a 0 but do not imagine matter and space.

Now take my 2D matrix and forget about boundaries. Consider it a splotch of a sheet in the middle of a sheet we don't know about or care about. Could be infinite but whatever.

Now forget about 2D but consider that for adding dimensions we only need to replace our zero and one with a vector of some dimension. We have collapsed a higher dimensional space into a 2D space.

Now consider that it could be of infinite dimensionality. Or not. Next consider that the matrix need not be orthogonal. It does not need to be some unit cell space. The points may not matter at all, just the information change in traversing them. So we can conceive of just information and we can conceive it in as few dimensions as we like if we are willing to use the method of collapse. If we collapse it to 4D space time we have something kind of familiar. We haven't gotten rid of the extra dimensional information, we are just not going to visualize it.

Now in this splotch of the 4D sheet there are patterns of information that would represent the physical laws with causality as pure information. There is no guarantee that this is anything other than a local pattern. The rest of the sheet could have entirely different laws or be seriously random.

Now if this sheet was infinite then all possible patterns would be possible.

One of them is us and our back yard.


Now that is a naive idea of physics from someone who refuses to properly learn it and has forgotten 99.9% of what he almost knew about linear algebra.

If none of that makes any sense then Good. It's probably more likley to have a grain of truth in it.

But the takeaway here is that is what I mean by information. I do not mean readers and observers or meaning of information. It's just a bucket of shit splattered on a sheet.

New idea!!! God created the universe by throwing a Bucket of Bullshit on a sheet and that is why us humans are so good at it.

[SpeedOfSound]

Before everything goes to hell I want to point out that brains are bio machines that glean patterns from information. This is no idle speculation like my 'physics' above. This is how the fucking things really work. They have done so since the first bit of cortex popped out of some pre-reptilian ass.

I gag when I hear brain and computing in the same sentence. It's a recent habit but it has become quite ingrained as reflex.

[FedUpWithFaith]

when I talk of information this is what I mean. Imagine that you had a matrix, say 16x16. If one element was next to another and they differed in value then that is information. All that is needed is one property. Imagine a 1 or a 0 but do not imagine matter and space.

Now take my 2D matrix and forget about boundaries. Consider it a splotch of a sheet in the middle of a sheet we don't know about or care about. Could be infinite but whatever.

Now forget about 2D but consider that for adding dimensions we only need to replace our zero and one with a vector of some dimension. We have collapsed a higher dimensional space into a 2D space.

Now consider that it could be of infinite dimensionality. Or not. Next consider that the matrix need not be orthogonal. It does not need to be some unit cell space. The points may not matter at all, just the information change in traversing them. So we can conceive of just information and we can conceive it in as few dimensions as we like if we are willing to use the method of collapse. If we collapse it to 4D space time we have something kind of familiar. We haven't gotten rid of the extra dimensional information, we are just not going to visualize it.

Now in this splotch of the 4D sheet there are patterns of information that would represent the physical laws with causality as pure information. There is no guarantee that this is anything other than a local pattern. The rest of the sheet could have entirely different laws or be seriously random.

Now if this sheet was infinite then all possible patterns would be possible.

One of them is us and our back yard.

Yes, where possible = computable. There are things (patterns?) that are mathematically conceivable but not computable. There is some decent theory to suggest they can't become universes unless hypercomputers are possible. This is an area of intense debate.

You've actually quite successfully postulated a form of cellular automata. Even though you eschewed cells, everything you said is degenerate to them. Alternatively, if you hate cells, cellular automata can be formulated in form and function by other means than cells, especially if you take a quantum computational stance like Seth Lloyd. All you need are interactable data representations and operators. This is effectively executed in your scheme via vectors (actually better as tensors) And it may very be close to what gave rise to our universe, perhaps among others. However, i doubt it. I think there are far more powerful general cases possible in many more dimensions. You should read Tegmark perhaps followed by Zuse, Schmidhuber, and possibly Lloyd. However, it's possible our science may never be able to resolve this. It may be forever unknowable, the effective noumena underlying everything. if you were stuck in the Matrix and couldn't get out, do you think it would be, by nature, possible to elucidate the programs that governed it? I doubt it, unless the designer wanted to leave you lots of clues.

New idea!!! God created the universe by throwing a Bucket of Bullshit on a sheet and that is why us humans are so good at it.

Funny you should mention this. Actually, my acceptance of digital physics put a big dent in my strong atheism and my arguments similar to Dawkin's "physical evolution necessary for consciousness" argument. Once you accept the possibility that higher level computation can emerge from from low level cellular automata without physical substrate, it sets the door ajar a little to the possibility that more than just a physical universe emerged from the soup. Could a god? I doubt it and obviously see no evidence for it. But it does add some spice to the Bible's "In the beginning there was the Word, and the word was God". A "Word" is also an actionable form of information in computer processing lingo"

[SpeedOfSound]

Funny you should mention this. Actually, my acceptance of digital physics put a big dent in my strong atheism and my arguments similar to Dawkin's "physical evolution necessary for consciousness" argument. Once you accept the possibility that higher level computation can emerge from from low level cellular automata without physical substrate, it sets the door ajar a little to the possibility that more than just a physical universe emerged from the soup. Could a god? I doubt it and obviously see no evidence for it. But it does add some spice to the Bible's "In the beginning there was the Word, and the word was God". A "Word" is also an actionable form of information in computer processing lingo"

I was referring to tensors on RDF but no one seemed to know what I was talking about so I started to think that maybe I didn't know what I was talking about.

When I tried to wrap my mind around the purely informational aspect of the universe I found myself uttering 'god'. But it is such a dirty pedestrian and provincial word. My mind does intuitively reject any model of an ontological basis for the universe that is anthropic ( centric+morphic in my coinage).

Any universal ontology that has anything to do with silly apes or their silly little meat-brains is not one I can be a part of. I'm happy just to be one of it's many strange figments.

[FedUpWithFaith]

Before everything goes to hell I want to point out that brains are bio machines that glean patterns from information. This is no idle speculation like my 'physics' above. This is how the fucking things really work. They have done so since the first bit of cortex popped out of some pre-reptilian ass.

I gag when I hear brain and computing in the same sentence. It's a recent habit but it has become quite ingrained as reflex.

You shouldn't gag, unless you are a Penrose fan and believe there is something special about the brain that enables it, and only it, to enable cognition, consciousness, etc.

For me, the secret is in the software, not the hardware. MS Word or the prograsm running this forum can pretty much do the same thing on different types of computers. It's the nature of the information processing that is the fundamental essence of being for those products though their essence also subsumes some minimum level of degenerate processing capability too.

The brain is special in this sense only because it offers no clear distinction between computational substrate and processing in many, if not most cases. The brain hardware has much of the programming, so to speak, embedded in it, rather than acting like a machine running a program. But a machine it is and in principle, I see no reason why the the nature of the program can't be teased from the hardware to be run, at least in simulation, on some other form of computer. In essence, we do that today running neural network simulations that are used even commercially to recognize faces, handwriting, and make accurate forecasts of many types. I know, I've made most of my living from that.

[FedUpWithFaith]

Funny you should mention this. Actually, my acceptance of digital physics put a big dent in my strong atheism and my arguments similar to Dawkin's "physical evolution necessary for consciousness" argument. Once you accept the possibility that higher level computation can emerge from from low level cellular automata without physical substrate, it sets the door ajar a little to the possibility that more than just a physical universe emerged from the soup. Could a god? I doubt it and obviously see no evidence for it. But it does add some spice to the Bible's "In the beginning there was the Word, and the word was God". A "Word" is also an actionable form of information in computer processing lingo"

I was referring to tensors on RDF but no one seemed to know what I was talking about so I started to think that maybe I didn't know what I was talking about.

When I tried to wrap my mind around the purely informational aspect of the universe I found myself uttering 'god'. But it is such a dirty pedestrian and provincial word. My mind does intuitively reject any model of an ontological basis for the universe that is anthropic ( centric+morphic in my coinage).

Any universal ontology that has anything to do with silly apes or their silly little meat-brains is not one I can be a part of. I'm happy just to be one of it's many strange figments.

Agreed. It's provincial nonsense at its most heinous.

[SpeedOfSound]

Before everything goes to hell I want to point out that brains are bio machines that glean patterns from information. This is no idle speculation like my 'physics' above. This is how the fucking things really work. They have done so since the first bit of cortex popped out of some pre-reptilian ass.

I gag when I hear brain and computing in the same sentence. It's a recent habit but it has become quite ingrained as reflex.

You shouldn't gag, unless you are a Penrose fan and believe there is something special about the brain that enables it, and only it, to enable cognition, consciousness, etc.

For me, the secret is in the software, not the hardware. MS Word or the prograsm running this forum can pretty much do the same thing on different types of computers. It's the nature of the information processing that is the fundamental essence of being for those products though their essence also subsumes some minimum level of degenerate processing capability too.

The brain is special in this sense only because it offers no clear distinction between computational substrate and processing in many, if not most cases. The brain hardware has much of the programming, so to speak, embedded in it, rather than acting like a machine running a program. But a machine it is and in principle, I see no reason why the the nature of the program can't be teased from the hardware to be run, at least in simulation, on some other form of computer. In essence, we do that today running neural network simulations that are used even commercially to recognize faces, handwriting, and make accurate forecasts of many types. I know, I've made most of my living from that.

I agree with that. It's just that our current computers are so damned clock like and serial.

[GrahamH]

"It's all mental" requires a mind.

yes

"It's all data/information" requires a reader (so you say) (and a writer?).

No, only a representation and an interaction or transposition mechanism.

What is a 'transposition mechanism? Is it 'data', or is 'data' a property of the 'mechanism?

"It's all physical" may not require anything extra

May? If the physical is a concrete thing, not a virtual thing or abstraction, it still begs the question of the concrete coming from nothing and possibly much more.

I s see no option but to accept that something just is. If there is something then my suppose it 'came from nothing'. How could nothing be?

In the Platonic sense, or better in Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, the universe/multiverse comes from pure abstract math and logic. And I see no problems with having to wonder how they came into existence. 1+1=2 is eternal. The reason mathematics so seemingly miraculously can be used to model everything in the universe is because math is where it came from in the first place and the universe keeps recapitualiing Universal Turing macines in our DNA, our minds, and in our computers from mechanical gear jobs to silicon ones.

How could a universe 'come from pure abstract math'? What sense does that make? I could agree that mathematics is a language describing the relational nature of things. I don't see any necessity to suppose that those relations pre-existed the things, or that things 'came from' math.

if 'physical' is 'geometric'.

what exactly do you mean by this? You're starting to sound like t'Hooft whose holographic hypothesis ties the mathematics of black holes with pure geometric information processing. We keep pushing the envelope back further and further.

I simply mean that matter/energy in spacetime inherently has shape. It is localised and that means there is pattern, which might be called 'information' in some contexts.

"It's all physical" doesn't have a separate 'observer' if the nature of 'physical' is interaction (observation might be a particular interaction). Do they all reduce to a common concept?

Yes, I believe they do and its self-referentialism, be it the origin of consciousness as in Hofstadter's "Strange Loops" or the self-referential nature of sub atomic particles. We, meaning our individual consciousnesses, are the only "things in itself" we directly experience. We're the strange loop.

Are 'we the strange loop', is the strange loop a process of the mechanism. In the latter case 'we' are also 'the mechanism', without which there could be no loops.

We can't experience the strange loop of a string or whatever its precursor may be. We can only infer its existence. In that sense, I believe our consciousness is the only noumena we can know and we can't even communicate information about our own qualia to each other, except by lossy analogy.

I seriously doubt that consciousness is noumenal.

The self-referential being of other things is epistemically inaccessible to us and must be.

By definition a self-reference can only reference itself. Whether it is 'a self' that references 'itself' is debatable. It could well be one part of the mechanism referencing some aspect of the mechanism, rather than any genuine self-reference.

[GrahamH]

Would you say geometry is information?

Yes, so i was perplexed why you equated some aspect of the physical with the geometric. It is possible to interpret it otherwise .But in any case, its abstraction.

Hopefully I have clarified that for you. The physical has shape. The abstraction of that property of the physical is what we call geometry.

When you get to 'data processing' is where "it's all data" gets problematic. "Data processing", or processes in general, are interactions between physical objects. "Data processing" requires a "data processor". A computer program requires a computer. Why is that not dualism?

At the level you think about computers, I see your problem. I'm not denying that the brain is a computer. It is the substrate for computation in the physical world, which I'm not denying exists, only that it has a deeper origin than matter, energy, and fields. However, I do deny that brain=mind. In the physical world mind is computer processing taking place on a computing substrate, which in our case happens to be a brain. I personally don't believe that brains are the only substrate that can support human-like consciousness, cognition, etc. That's probably a different discussion for a different thread. Am also biased by my background as a neuro- and AI scientist.

But is a computing substrate really required at the most basic level of information processing? Everything in modal realism and digital physics hinges on that question. If the answer is "yes", the whole shebang collapses. However, in very simplistic terms, I view the physical universe as something that emerged from "Computing Space". This is a rather virtual cellular automata soup of logic, mathematics, and rule operators that give rise to every possible computational and geometric ensemble (see Tegmark for the Ultimate Ensemble). From this ensemble, every COMPUTABLE universe arises in some dimension. Tegmark actually proved that this was the most parsimonious solution to the multiverse question. That doesn't make it true of course. But for me, many elements of science and philosophy are converging on it being true, from the probable quantitization of time and space, resolution of Zeno's Paradox, degeneration of separate ontological schools, the empirical nature of mathematics (Chaitin's great discoveries) and many other things I could drone on forever about.

Is a substrate required? We only know of 'information processing' that occurs on a physical substrate. The substrate seems to posses 'processing', or 'interaction'. Is it implementing math, as I think you are suggesting, or is math and 'computing' mimicking the nature of the substrate, on the substrate?

If this universe is a computation it does not necessarily follow that reality is computation. This universe might be a computation performed on some 'real substrate', analogous to a physical computer generating a virtual world. (See Bostrom).

[Little Idiot]

The question raised here about substrate is important;

Is a substrate required? We only know of 'information processing' that occurs on a physical substrate. The substrate seems to posses 'processing', or 'interaction'. Is it implementing math, as I think you are suggesting, or is math and 'computing' mimicking the nature of the substrate, on the substrate?

If this universe is a computation it does not necessarily follow that reality is computation. This universe might be a computation performed on some 'real substrate', analogous to a physical computer generating a virtual world. (See Bostrom).

I think FuwF has said earlier that this is the foundational question, if the answer is yes the whole shebang falls down.

I would say the answer to that important question it is no, based on the opinion I hold that the physical can not be demonstrated to exist other than in a mental experience. We simply can not be sure of its independent existence, since we can never experience the physical other than via our own mind.

If we assume the physical exists independent of the observing mind, then there is a question to answer here, if however we consider that the physical is a product of the mind, then there is absolutly no need to think the physical could be a pre-requisite for information or data - the physical is itself a product of the minds construction of (mental) data in my model.

The question that I would propose is not is there a 'physical substrate' so much as is the data mental. In my model, the data is (obviously) mental, because 'its all mental' the question I would like FuwF and SoS to consider; is it possible, probable or impossible that the data we are discussing in the 'its all data' model is mental data.

I expect SoS to answer 'no' based on his mind-phobia

Due to my pro-mental bias, I think the whole 'data model' sounds like an expression of the same kind of concepts, the good thing being it is derived from modern understanding and theories, not the ancients, and is therefore less likely to be called 'woo'.

[SpeedOfSound]

This might be a lot more fun than chewing on LI. I need to get focused here. Post away if you have some ideas.

Well the big obstacle being the homunculus. No matter how much elaborate cognitive architecture or neuroprocessing is posited/evidenced, the question that is difficult to escape is "what does the observing?". It is possible to incorporate all rule bound cognition into a theory of mind without there being a subjective experience. Can observation take place without an observer? If it's an erroneous question to ask, as many do in fact suggest, then it's a very seductive one and it's the bane of any theory of consciousness.

Are the tools and methods of R2 enough to dispel the myth? Or is R1 a necessary condition to resolving this? It's paradoxical, and for good reason. The homunculus is a real thorn in the side in all R2 programmes because it's permanently embedded, but the same does not always apply to R1. Or, I should say, R1*.

About that time you went nuts, sounds interesting....

There ain't' no fucking observer!! Takes care of that one.

It is possible to incorporate all rule bound cognition into a theory of mind without there being a subjective experience.

the p-zombie delusion. No. Our minds functionality is not possible without subjective experience unless you are living in a thought experiment. If you are I would look for another flat. The Langoliers are coming!

If it's an erroneous question to ask, as many do in fact suggest, then it's a very seductive one and it's the bane of any theory of consciousness.

No. It's the bane of the Theory of Mind. Which is somewhere in R1.

But let's have a proper consciousness thread for all of that.

On the time I went crazy. It wasn't one of my craziest times. Not like when I was up on coke for 9 nine days. Not like when the bugs came! My sons told me "Dad. There ain't no Fucking Bugs!". What the fuck do they know?

This was a mini-spiritual experience of the insight variety and was the seed of this information universe thing except I was obsessed with fractals and synchronicity. It wasn't really that interesting. The bug story is far better.