[ExI] Modal Realism and Leibniz

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Sun Mar 16 02:58:59 UTC 2008


Bryan writes

> Lee wrote:
>>     Major differences between the [Modal Realism and MWI],
>>     aside from their origins and purposes, include:
>>
>>         * The states of quantum-theoretical worlds are entangled
>> quantum mechanically while entanglement for possible worlds may be
>> meaningless;
>>
>>         * according to a widely held orthodoxy among philosophers,
>> there are possible worlds that are logically but not physically
>> possible, but quantum-theoretical worlds are all physically possible.
> 
> This part (direct last paragraph) needs to be double-checked. I know 
> that what Wikipedia writes is mostly true in this sociohistorical 
> context, but I also know that if it is not physically possible, then it 
> is not 'logic', in the sense of the logic of the physics of the 
> universe, you see (coherency, in the same sense that Jef uses the 
> word).

Don't know from "coherency", but your "logic of physics" is not
what they are talking about.  For example, it is logically possible
that using my special mental powers I could teleport to Ganymede
and back during the next ten minutes, even though that is not
physically possible because of FTL restrictions.

>> > Charles S. Peirce would have something to say about this use of
>> > the word 'possibility' since, naturally, it is more tied to the
>> > human mind, and he really, really disliked anybody saying something
>> > was 'possible' when they did not have the true source code to the
>> > universe...
>>
>> So what---Peirce wanted to do to "possible" what I want to do to
>> "qualia"? [I.e., get rid of the term and probably the concept.]
> 
> More directly: if it is not possible, then your coherency needs to be 
> updated with some new nugget.

I don't know from coherency.  It helps me a lot when people use
a variety of different terms and phrases to describe what they're
talking about.  (As you can see, I'm not in a terribly good mood
today---sorry about that.)


>> > Is Lewis saying that possibilities exist (in the sense that a
>> > mental agent can rationalize that something might be 'possible'
>> > given his limited understanding of the greater world), or that if
>> > we allow such 'possibilities' we automatically must acknowledge
>> > their full and total existence?
>>
>> As you saw, Rafal answered
>>
>> > ### The way I see it, everything exists. I mean it in the hardcore
>> > metaphysical sense - whatever it means to "be", everything you
>> > can think of and a lot more, have this property. Even
>> > contradictions, even inconsistent logic, even mathematical
>> > impossibilities exist, as hard [real] as rocks, except we are not
>> > there to touch them.
>>
>> and that seems like maybe what Lewis was saying indeed.
> 
> I see. How can you mean it in the "hardcore metaphysical" sense, anyway? 
> Hardcore means hardcore: cold, hard reality.

I would say that hardcore metaphysical reality means something
like "not just in someone's imagination, but rather really existing
if not in this world than in some other equally real world". But
that's just a guess. That's what I inferred Rafal to mean (and
I concur).

> Ah, well, I suppose we can step it up to a meta-level, but I
> don't think this is what Rafal _or_ Lewis means.

I guess you're right.

> By my meta-level, I mean in the sense of Egan, in the sense of
> his line: think about it; even if you are constructing the most
> ridiculously arbitrary mathematics in existence that has no 
> relevance, you've just made it relevant to yourself! And so even 
> inconsistent logic can be mapped back to our brains, and there is no 
> law in reality saying that our brains can't have the chance to 'mess 
> up' and make inconsistencies and incoherencies.

Certainly. But I don't know if you're referring to Permutation City
or Diaspora or what. But it doesn't matter to me.  For example, 
for me to try to dream up a system of super-imaginary numbers
obeying the property that s = s + 1 (instead of the mundane
imaginary numbers where s*s + 1 = 0) might turn out to be
nearly as foolish as to work out a theory of round squares.
(Before anyone talks about infinity satisfying that first equation
or other amazing constructions, let me just say that I did
explore that years ago, but didn't find the results at all
interesting.)

> But I think Rafal's "hardcore metaphysical" is more like Platonic Idealism -- 
> a "meta dimension", which I can't (by the (un)nature of the thing 
> itself) pin down. I recommend we apply So-And-So's rule here: we keep 
> discussion to what we can access in reality and do, etc. etc. I do not 
> know the actual name of this rule, I am pretty sure it has existed before.

Hear, hear!  Even though I am a mathematical platonist, and I believe
in the literal existence of, say, every positive integer and (equivalently)
in the literal existence of every pattern.  But for now, yeah, let's keep
it to "what we can access in reality" as you suggest.  I happen to believe
strongly in MWI, and following David Deutsch in the fabulous "Fabric
of Reality", the shadow photons *really* are around us all the time
and are needed to account for everything we see, feel, or hear.

>> > 1) real - necessarily existent
>> > 2) impossible - necessarily nonexistent
>> > 3) possible - unnecessarily nonexistent
>> >...
>> > If anything it should be more like an observer bias to calculate
>> > out [overcome?] due to the anthropic principles and so on, since
>> > all subjective agents would present a slightly different bias in
>> > consciousness or awareness;
>>
>> A classic example of a sentence needed a follow-up or two:  "That is,
>> ...", and "In other words....".  I'm having trouble parsing that.
> 
> That's because I am having trouble processing the thought in general.

Well, if you make a few other stabs at least in *trying* to say in
in other ways, it always helps. "Always", even in those cases that
a failure to paraphrase or rephrase exposes the vacuousness or
lack of substance of the notion. 

> I can explain it from a completely different perspective that I have come 
> across before (on my own), but this is by no means helpful in expanding 
> the concept, perhaps only in letting it incubate in a few minds. From 
> time to time over the past decade, I have taken to the 'metaphysics' or 
> whatever of existence and the Beginning question: i.e., how could 
> something come from nothing? How could there ever have been nothing, 
> since nothing is something, but that something was nothing, which was, 
> and on and on and on. More recently I have formalized this as taking 
> Occam's razor to any idea, to any question, and chopping down at it.

Well, the "why is there something rather than nothing" and all that no
longer interest me at all.  Occam's razor, on the other hand, is of
course a sensible and almost always sure guide.

> I ask you to take the razor to any concept that you can think of,
> and use the razor (go on, do it -- cut away).

Hmm. You apply it to *concepts* and ideas, questions,etc.
I never heard of doing that. I always applied it to alternative
explanations. You sure it's appropriate to expand The Razor
this way?  Do you just mean refining ideas, simplifying questions
and so forth?  If you really mean something more than just that,
what, exactly?

> Tegmark apparently argues that this means that there are SASes
> all the way down to the fundamental basis of reality, but I don't
> see how he makes that leap, and I don't see it as necessary.

That's two of us. But there is a very noticeable and intelligent 
group of people who, exemplified by Schmidhuber, want badly
to reduce time to something else, i.e., just plain patterns. Take
Julian Barbour's book, for example.  In fact, take my copy.

>> > in more hard sci-fi terms, I'd argue that consciousness may not
>> > even exist, despite my experience and my mind, it's not a magical
>> > sauce. :)
>>
>> Well, now that I've come out of the closet about some GLUTs being
>> zombies, I could start with the incendiary remark that consciousness
>> is the chief characteristic separating zombies from other passers of
>> Turing Tests, e.g., us, and other passers for what we ordinarily
>> think of as conscious entities (e.g. crows, parrots, chimps, dogs,
>> liberals, etc.)
> 
> Huh? Turing Test requires another subjective agent to judge some other 
> process, it does nothing to do any fundamental provision to ... I do 
> not know how to explain this. But the Turing Test doesn't really add 
> anything to my toolbox personally, it just adds it to the *social* 
> toolbox.

Maybe a bad example on my part.  The TT is mostly about identifying
intelligence, not consciousness. Okay. It has other problems too.

> I need better terminology (and, to take your requests for 
> examples and explanations to heart:). in this sense, the Turing Test is 
> a mental tool that is on top of social layers in society, from brain to 
> brain, and is generally a result of the various Minskyian filters in 
> the brain or other selective processes of attention.

Could be, I suppose. "Mental tool that is on top of social layers
in society", eh?  The only thing I'm sure of is that there is nothing
wrong with your imagination.  I'd need to think about that a while.

>> > rather than a metaphysical ensemble, then I think that you would
>> > have to drop your MWI tie-ins.
>>
>> Wikipedia's two asterisk's items above already limit the connection
>> between modal realism, and the MWI.  It's not clear to me that you
>> are adding to the criticism, but maybe so.
> 
> Yep, I think I am. See my points about "logic" and if it's logical, then 
> how is it impossible, you didn't account for whatever new nuggets in 
> reality that you found etc. etc. Simple reasoning ("x causes y") can be 
> confirmed in the mind itself,

"Confirmed" or "validated". You better be careful with this stuff.
When you're on a roll like this, why don't you start new threads?

> but also in experimental checking (sort of), so as you get more
> advanced, it requires more checking, and I think this is why there's
> that gap where people assume "logic has to be so, so there has to
> be a further reality where this holds" - when in  fact, the logic is
> supposed to be confirmed and molded (humbled?) by reality, no?

When you write "logic", the first thing I think of is mathematical
logic. The discipline of formal logic, a branch of mathematics or
vice-versa, depending on the species of philosopher of math
you're talking to. 

I cannot see how to say "yes" to your question. Logic stands apart
from physics so far as I know. The nearest thing I ever heard of
(which actually seems to contradict your statement) is "quantum
logic", which is to me (and entirely due to my ignorance) a rather
poor way to deal with the "paradoxes" of QM.  You see, on the
readings of these truly bright people that study quantum logic,
"ordinary logic" isn't quite enough for QM. So you see, physics
doesn't lay a glove on ordinary logic or ordinary formal logic. 
This really oughta been in a different thread, we (i.e. you) have
wondered far afield  :-)

>> > [Lee asked Rafal]
>> >
>> >> Now on your usage of words, you and I and all the Lee's who
>> >> were/are fighting in the Second World War, are simply a part
>> >> of the great Tree of Me. An immediate difficulty you might want
>> >> to address is, "Does the tree of Lee overlap with the tree of
>> >> Rafal?"  If not, why not?  My own "fuzzy spheres" do allow
>> >> for overlap at their extreme edges.
>> >
>> > Are not all things, somehow related, if not physically then at
>> > least in our minds?
>>
>> Come again?  How is the most southern orange on the most southern
>> orange tree in Florida related to President McKinley's assassin?
>> I'm surely the first person in history to inquire about that
>> ridiculous "relationship".
> 
> And thus you have given ... ah, wait, I have already explained myself 
> (as you quote directly below - thanks):

Mind snipping stuff like this Bryan?  Most of us don't just go in
for stream-of-consciousness posting. (Sorry again about my bad
mood today.)  The last few paragraphs are probably just bloat.

>> > Somebody might reply to this saying "try to find a
>> > correlation between X and Y" and that would only serve to show that
>> > somebody has in fact made that correlation, and the more that
>> > people read that email, the more 'real' it is becoming (I do not
>> > mean to say that popular approval increases the realness, merely
>> > that the content is diffused over the surface area of the local
>> > reality, so it is becoming more than the 'nothing' that the
>> > original emailer was hoping to select for).
>>
>> Then the relationship between the Holy Trinity and God must be
>> pretty damn real by now.
> 
> Heh. I am not familiar with that particular relationship. But suppose 
> that we have ABC and XYZ things in reality, and we claim ABC
> [has] some relation [to] XYZ.

You mean the set {A,B,C} has some relationship to the set {X,Y,Z}.
BTW, please criticize my rendering of your sentence by the [] insertions
that I thought made it grammatical, if necessary.  

> Thus, our brains have been thinking of this relation 
> between these two (ABC and XYZ) things. Now, if you chant it over and 
> over again, that does not make the relation physically expressed, but 
> it does in fact make your brain tick in different ways, your mind-brain 
> is physical, no? It is processing matter, energy, information, and so 
> is making new structs as you go along, thinking about those relations. 

Indeed, our left brains are especially good at generating bullshit at
manic rates. I don't have time to see if you are getting at something
profound here or not. 

> Those new structs are physically there in the brain: think of it like 
> electrical storms across millions of neurons and exciting whirlpools of 
> viscous, incompressible fluids, kind of like the top of your flakey 
> cereal bowl except more exciting than breakfast at five in the morning.

That's what those thunderstorms of neuronal activity are, all right.
But that hardly makes them correspond to anything but their own
wild storming---if they're just "mad raving" having no connection
to physical reality outside the skin then I pay them no attention.

Lee

P.S. I have no time to carefully proof-read the above.  Your post
was 20K long.   If my reply is that long, then I'll kill myself. Gotta snip.



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