On treeness of Oak1, and other things

[FedUpWithFaith]

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/p.../9801057v2.pdf

Link doesn't work.

This forum fuckin' truncated it somehow. I'll try again. If this doesn't work I'll break it up below

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/ ... 1057v2.pdf



or piece together:

http://arxiv.org/
PS_cache/
quant-ph/pdf/
9801057v2.pdf

[SpeedOfSound]

You're mixing apples and oranges. I'm not arguing that trees have no existence outside the mind. But its the mind that classifies treeness.
Even your retort makes my point. Trunks and branches are words our mind has invented in "correspondence" to something it has perceived, perception being a function of the senses and cognition. You're are also taking a very classical take on "reality" where we experience "things" as observable objects, either directly or via detectors whereby we infer existence (e.g., neutrinos). It is quite possible that that form of classical realism does not govern all of reality, perhaps at its deepest essence. I think it's worth quoting Wittgenstein here:

Oh Fuck All! No I don't have a very classical take on reality. Moistly because I haven't gotten to that stage of my thinking yet. My take on treeness has to do with thalamo-cortical loops and the construction of neural nets. Nothing more and nothing less. These things aren't constructed by genes. They are constructed by experience of real patterns. No patterns, no classification. I don't give a flying fuck what some philosopher said prior to 1970 and I care not so much after that.

Your link to the PDF is most welcome. This is exactly where I am at in my middle stages of my thinking on reality.

Hehehe, welcome back old friend.

Did you ever look into digital physic/philosophys? That's where I was headed just before leaving RD and I did bring it up before i left. I'm a pretty firm believer now after exploring Gregory Chaitin's work and lots of other stuff. If you haven't checked it out you should. You might think it's bullshit, but you'll still find it fascinating I'm sure..

No. I will check it out. Can you get me that link too?

On RDF I was going on about something that I'm having trouble explaining to people about the purely informational nature of reality. I was somewhere out in Linear Algebra La-La-Land when I had to get busy with other things. I ran into the same problem with information. People wanted to bring the mind into it and I wanted to get the mind out.

[Little Idiot]

Science can change because of the beliefs of the scientist. Einstein was convinced that his general theory of relativity demonstrated a finite time, a creation and therefore a creator. His R3 was based upon his R2 understanding. But also his R3 understanding coloured his R2.
His famous words 'God doesnt play dice' is an example; he found the whole quantum probabilty idea to be wrong based on his R3, yet despite being such a genius scientist as he was, time showed him to be in error.
Also, Bohr derived much of his R2 by reference to the oriental R3; his principle of complementary opposites' for example, came dirrectly from the 'yin and yang' (he said so himself). Again, his R2 was influenced by his R3.
Einsteins science was positioned against for example entanglement, while Bohr's was in favour of it, not because of observation, but because of R3. Only later was there emperical data to show which of the hypothetical's was closer to emperical fact.
While it is true that emperical fact determines right hypothesis from wrong, it is also true that much of science forges forward on hypotheticals based on R3 BEFORE emperical observations are possible. Such as the Wheeler thought experiment refered to in the last thread, where an observation today determines an event in the distance past, for many years it remained a hypothetical, only later being demonstrated.

I use intuition all of the time to create hypothesis. You want to call intuition metaphysics?

No, normally I would call intuition by the name 'intuition.'
Metaphysics is not reason, intuition or any other way of knowing, isn't it defined in terms of the subject of study; being reality. You could say the study of the nature of reality, or the 'hidden' reality if you like.

It's the Penrose discussion again. In another forum I said this:

I think the word physical has become as intractable as our words for mind and experience. In a discussion on rationlia with LittleIdiot he was talking about a theory of Penrose that the universe expanded until it didn't care about time anymore and then simple became a Bigger Bang. Penrose intuits that the black holes left over from the previous would account for the granularity of the new universe and be therefore detectable. LI claims that this is some proof of metaphysics and I claim that it is just stranger physics.

The idea of physical matter is a common sense idea and it helps us to not get bumps on the head. In a slightly modified quote from the old non-ergo, yes matter is mostly empty space but you ain't a fucking neutrino.

But I guess we have extended the word to mean what physics tells us about the stuff we live in but have some of us missed the memo?

The reason why I would suggest the work of Penrose crossed the boundary between maths/physics into metaphysics is that his theory reaches from our physical world in this space-time geometry outside to something outside our space-time.

The hypothesis must be empirically tested or it is shit. It isn't R2 until it satisfies some criteria.

1. It has to be falsifiable.
2. It has to not be shown false, yet!
3. It has to be a plausible model building upon other knowledge in R2.

The hypothesis that there are Great Blue Bunnies in the sky fails #3.

Now on this god and science thing. I pray to god and talk about god ALL of the time in AA meetings. I get the same shit from my buddies who know I'm an atheist. Bevis n Butthead "heh,heh you said 'god'".

In the context of certain conversations it is a word, a little like solid, that describes some aspect of humanity. It doesn't make me a theist anymore than uttering 'Powdered bat wings' makes me a witch.

thats funny.
And quite true, the purpose of language being primary a tool for comunication, we must use words understandable to our company in any conversation.

But its different saying 'god' than praying to god...

[SpeedOfSound]

But its different saying 'god' than praying to god...

The poor motherfuckers that question me about my atheist prayer habits at AA meetings usually end up drunk by the time I am done with them. I have my ideas and I have my practices.

[SpeedOfSound]

No, normally I would call intuition by the name 'intuition.'
Metaphysics is not reason, intuition or any other way of knowing, isn't it defined in terms of the subject of study; being reality. You could say the study of the nature of reality, or the 'hidden' reality if you like.

...
The reason why I would suggest the work of Penrose crossed the boundary between maths/physics into metaphysics is that his theory reaches from our physical world in this space-time geometry outside to something outside our space-time.

Space/time is an idea from R1. A working model. Things have gone a bit beyond that in R2. It's still physics.

[Kenny Login]

People wanted to bring the mind into it and I wanted to get the mind out.

I don't mean to harangue you on this SoS, but that would be a fruitless task (tempting though it is for us all). If observation IS merely information reading information, or data observing data, as was hinted at in the previous thread, then there's a bit of explaining to do. Which is the task occupying a large chunk of cognitive- and neuro- science, and a task that's not without its very peculiar and deeply counter-intuitive obstacles.

Following on from this, and what fuwf pointed out about the restricted sets of R1 and R2, I suggest it might be useful to make the distinction between perception or experience that is readily available to a public empirical programme (formalised or otherwise), and that which is not so readily available. It then opens the door towards looking at the kind of perception or experience that isn't always available to an internal programme, i.e. to conscious awareness. Because some things don't so easily give themselves up, even for that.

Or, a la Donald Rumsfeld - the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. Although even the unknown unknowns are somewhat known.

This IS the getting your hands dirty on what it is to observe that popped up in the last thread (you know, the thread-that-must-not-be-named).

[FedUpWithFaith]

Can you get me that link too?

Shit, there are so many I have but they need to be organized. Just start with your own search on Wikipedia. You'll come across Fredkin, Tegmark, Zuse, Schmidhuber, t-Hooft, Wheeler, Wolfram, and many others. They all have different perspectives on this fairly nascent area (unless you equate it with a form of Platonism). Some people call it Modal Realism too. Wikipedia has a decent intro.

On RDF I was going on about something that I'm having trouble explaining to people about the purely informational nature of reality. I was somewhere out in Linear Algebra La-La-Land when I had to get busy with other things.

I recall it. I didn't think you got very far but it got me to thinking. In fact, your post was one of catalysts that led me to explore digital physics which does have coherent ideas and even has some theories that make predictions - though not quite testable yet.

I ran into the same problem with information. People wanted to bring the mind into it and I wanted to get the mind out.

That's very problematic. I don't see how you will succeed. But it will be fun to watch you try. I believe information/math/logic are the true essence of everything, not matter, energy, or fields and the universe/multiverse is really a form of Universal Turing Machine. Even if you could somehow "get the mind out of it" you still have to deal with the problem of what information is. What can we say about information if it can't be put into the message? Does that necessitate mind? Some would say so. I don't go that far. But it requires a relational transaction-oriented information processing system. Conrad Zuse postulated the first plausible means for this by the way of Cellular Automata. Fredlkin may have proposed it earlier. Wolfram pretty much took credit for their ideas in his "A New Kind of Science".

[SpeedOfSound]

People wanted to bring the mind into it and I wanted to get the mind out.

I don't mean to harangue you on this SoS, but that would be a fruitless task (tempting though it is for us all). If observation IS merely information reading information, or data observing data, as was hinted at in the previous thread, then there's a bit of explaining to do. Which is the task occupying a large chunk of cognitive- and neuro- science, and a task that's not without its very peculiar and deeply counter-intuitive obstacles.

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

[FedUpWithFaith]

People wanted to bring the mind into it and I wanted to get the mind out.

I don't mean to harangue you on this SoS, but that would be a fruitless task (tempting though it is for us all). If observation IS merely information reading information, or data observing data, as was hinted at in the previous thread, then there's a bit of explaining to do. Which is the task occupying a large chunk of cognitive- and neuro- science, and a task that's not without its very peculiar and deeply counter-intuitive obstacles.

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

Fuck you. Do your own homework.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/p.../9801057v2.pdf

Link doesn't work.

This forum fuckin' truncated it somehow. I'll try again. If this doesn't work I'll break it up below

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/ ... 1057v2.pdf



or piece together:

http://arxiv.org/
PS_cache/
quant-ph/pdf/
9801057v2.pdf

Put your link in URL tags, FUWF. The punctuation in it is confusing our sensors.

[SpeedOfSound]

I recall it. I didn't think you got very far but it got me to thinking. In fact, your post was one of catalysts that led me to explore digital physics which does have coherent ideas and even has some theories that make predictions - though not quite testable yet.
...
That's very problematic. I don't see how you will succeed. But it will be fun to watch you try. I believe information/math/logic are the true essence of everything, not matter, energy, or fields and the universe/multiverse is really a form of Universal Turing Machine. Even if you could somehow "get the mind out of it" you still have to deal with the problem of what information is. What can we say about information if it can't be put into the message? Does that necessitate mind? Some would say so. I don't go that far. But it requires a relational transaction-oriented information processing system. Conrad Zuse postulated the first plausible means for this by the way of Cellular Automata. Fredlkin may have proposed it earlier. Wolfram pretty much took credit for their ideas in his "A New Kind of Science".

This is threadworthy. I'm glad I got someone thinking about this. That's heartening.

The big problem is the word information. I usually think in terms of granularity. Penrose and his idea about left over evaporating black holes hinted at how what should be a homogeneous big bank ended up with clustering. It's the clustering that fascinates me. Though not at the level of space/time. Some other geometry.

This gets back to treeness. There is something that our brains glean from these patterns. It defines all of us. And of course we must not lose sight of the apparent fact that we are a part of the pattern as CosmoCons do.

A lot of this sparked for me when I was trying to avoid running into a deer while deer hunting when I had a crush on a hot blond while I was in Ely,Mn and I had a spiritual experience of sorts and went kind of nuts.

But that stories length and dizziness is only barely foreshadowed by that sentence I just wrote.

[SpeedOfSound]

Fuck you. Do your own homework.

Oh I see how you are. Stop in and fuck me up then leave the sweeping to me.

[Little Idiot]

I don't, and I think building arguments upon it as you guys are doing is going to go nowhere fast.

R1 is very problematic. We could have a thread on what common sense is and you haven't really even bothered to define it. You have muddled both conscious and subconscious forms of heuristic and intuitive decisioning with both innate and learned pattern recognition into it.

Yes. we could break this up until we had an entire encyclopaedia on epistemology. How long would it take me to get LI to agree with all of that? Another 2000 fucking years? Want to have a crack at it?

Not really, but it might be most of your argument. You can't expect to reach sound conclusions if your premises aren't sound.

<Is that the sound of nails being knocked into a coffin I hear>

In another post ID, you said "treeness" was a property of trees. I think I could argue that treeness is really a property of our minds to categorize things. The trees couldn't care less.

No. Minds would not have developed the neural nets to recognize any category if that category did not have some substance outside of the mind. Are you telling me that trees don't have trunks and branches until I classify them?

You're mixing apples and oranges. I'm not arguing that trees have no existence outside the mind. But its the mind that classifies treeness.
Even your retort makes my point. Trunks and branches are words our mind has invented in "correspondence" to something it has perceived, perception being a function of the senses and cognition. You're are also taking a very classical take on "reality" where we experience "things" as observable objects, either directly or via detectors whereby we infer existence (e.g., neutrinos). It is quite possible that that form of classical realism does not govern all of reality, perhaps at its deepest essence. I think it's worth quoting Wittgenstein here:

"[W]e cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connection
with other things. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 2.0121

If everything that we call “being” and “non-being” consists in the existence
and non-existence of connections between elements, it makes
no sense to speak of an element’s being (non-being). . . . Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, 50."

This isn't just metaphysical bullshit either. It may be physical. This is a fundamental principle of relational interpretations of quantum mechanics. In fact, David Mermin (an old professor of mine BTW) has a relational interpretation of Quantum Mechanics with a conclusion that is consistent with most other QM interpretations which I will highlight in bold below:

I. What quantum mechanics is trying to tell us

I would like to describe an attitude toward quantum mechanics which, whether or not it clarifies the interpretational problems that continue to plague the subject, at least sets them in a rather different perspective. This point of view alters somewhat the language used to address these issues — a glossary is provided in Appendix C — and it may offer
a less perplexing basis for teaching quantum mechanics or explaining it to non-specialists. It is based on one fundamental insight, perhaps best introduced by an analogy.

My complete answer to the late 19th century question “what is electrodynamics trying to tell us” would simply be this:

Fields in empty space have physical reality; the medium that supports
them does not.

Having thus removed the mystery from electrodynamics, let me immediately do the same for quantum mechanics:

Correlations have physical reality; that which they correlate does not.

The first proposition probably sounded as bizarre to most late 19th century physicists as the second sounds to us today; I expect that the second will sound as boringly obvious to late 21st century physicists as the first sounds to us today.

And that’s all there is to it. The rest is commentary.

You can find the rest of his paper here:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/p.../9801057v2.pdf

Thats a good way of thinking about QM. interpretations of QM was something SD objected to in the other thread, and the reason he did so is because this is where physics crosses into meta-physics. If we can put forward interpretations, then we attempt to cross that boundary because we are not discussing the interactions between physical objects in the world, we are trying to understand the very nature of the existance; where does it come from, what is it and so on. The distinction between physics and metaphysics is only one of convention, a soft-fact of language, not a hard-fact of reality if we ever achieve our aim as physicists and achieve our 'theory of everything' we shall probably find in includes topics historically considered as metaphysics

[Little Idiot]

Here is why I brought up treeness and R1/R2. It is a consistent wibble point of philosophers to talk about the reliability of our brain representations and the senses. From a simple statement about how science has found that our sense can be wrong the leap is made to doubting all of R1/R2.

Yet, even idealists put on their pants and walk around trees using R1 knowledge and they microwave their food with the fruits of R2.

So I want to establish a level of agreed upon validity of this physical world that we have knowledge of.

Do You understand that?

I understand you want to establish a level of agreement, and I am OK with that. I am a bit unsure about why we need call it R1 and R2 to do so...but I will go with it if your leading me somewhere.

I have never denied the experience of the physical. As an idealist, I do indeed prefer to wear pants.

I just say my metaphysical position is that the experience of pants is a mental experience, and as a sceptic we have no way to know for sure there is anything non-mental causing the experience - this is how I first entered idealism - to jump in saying the physical is not mental is NOT a proper sceptical position, it is actually a dogma, or at best an assumption. I have argued this point since my first posts in RDF in the matter thread (if you recall).

Do you understand that; to assert the existence of a world independent of mind is unestablished, an assumption.
Do you understand why I say its a sceptical position to question the posibility and factuality of such a world.

Yes I do and you are correct that we cannot be sure. I assume that the things I sense are outside of my mind and that includes you.

Nevertheless, I can put on my pants with or without the assumption.

Agreed, I too can put on my pants with or without my metaphysical view.

However, I do regard the agreement that we can not be sure there is a world independent of our mind as a major step forward - where I define forward as moving towards the posibility that idealism may be other than total woo.

[Little Idiot]

We should work tag-team together and bash SoS silly on this treeness thing

Funny, but when we were at RD.net together I recall SoS being my ally most of the time. Especially with Lifegazer. But that's OK. I'm the type of prick willing to turn on old friends. I have no loyalty but to the truth, whatever the fuck that is.

Very few of us are ready to declare such an alliance, truth is quite out of vouge at the moment.

Anyway, if you are loyal to truth, both Lifegazer and myself are your allies too; we just may see things differently.