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Author
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Topic: Cosmogony, Holography and Causality
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Christopher M. Langan
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Member # 264
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posted 29. September 2003 23:34
Good discussion. Since Rex Kerr has been (intelligently) questioning and critiquing the CTMU and its conceptual ingredients, I'll post a quick response to some of his points.
Rex asks "why logic as a basis for reality?" Because logic by definition comprises the rules of cognition (and thus of recognition), anything which does not satisfy it is neither directly nor implicatively recognizable as a part of reality. Moreover, logic has only one syntax - the syntax of human cognition, to which any other comprehensible syntax necessarily reduces by its necessary reliance on the basic logic functors in terms of which we recognize mental and physical reality. (If Rex's alternative axiomatization of logic is consistent, then it is so only by reduction to logic qua cognitive syntax.)
When Rex holds any claim of certainty regarding the logical consistency of reality to be nothing but "unjustified conjecture", he is saying that reality may be logically inconsistent. By the definition of logic, and the mutually-normative truth values and logical functors which comprise it, this amounts to saying that reality may violate the rules of cognition. But since the rules of cognition are what allow us to recognize reality, this amounts to a contradiction.
Rex compares logic to impulse functions, which he characterizes as (possibly unreal) cognitive constructs that help us break reality down into manageable chunks. An impulse function is an input-to-output transducer defined to operate in a particular way suiting a particular explanatory context (or the rule or mapping executed by such a transducer). But functions in general are quite another story. When cognition is generalized to coincide with information processing as executed by any consistent function or transducer, it is anything but unreal. It is in fact the stuff of which reality is made.
Rex asserts that claims of certainty regarding the CTMU are unreasonable. However, the CTMU is based on premises that have been clearly explained, and a case can be made that it is tautological. To effectively contest the certainty of the CTMU, one would have to invalidate one or more of its premises, or show that the CTMU does not necessarily follow therefrom. Merely questioning the certainty of logic won't work; the certainty of logic is tautological given its definitional equivalence to the rules of cognition through which we recognize reality. Again, that which does not conform to logic cannot be recognized as a part or aspect of reality, either directly or by implication.
Regarding the conceptual difficulty of cognition, Rex dismisses arguments based on "cognition of the gaps". In the context of a self-contained mathematical structure supporting the concepts of attributive (semantic and syntactic) information, cognition may be generalized as information processing and/or generation. Beyond this, we don't need to know what it is or what it does, except that (1) it must obey a set of logical invariants comprising its identity and supporting its procedural integrity, and (2) it must display mathematical characteristics appropriate to its generic functionability within its supporting structure, e.g. telic coherence and reflexive (self + input) modeling. From these attributes alone, certain interesting consequences can be derived regarding it.
Rex says that any attempt to solve the problem of mind-matter dualism without nested (embedded) models is nonsensical. This is quite true. Up to isomorphism, embedment is an identity relation; when one structure A is embedded in another structure B, A coincides with B to the full extent of A. Descartes denied that res cogitans and res extensa are the same thing; somewhat paradoxically, he maintained that they are fundamentally different. In contrast, the CTMU fully acknowledges their identity and their mutual embedment. The CTMU does this through conspansion (or conspansive dualization), which involves an alternation based on dual modes of containment (or embedment).
[ 29. September 2003, 23:37: Message edited by: Christopher M. Langan ]
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gedanken
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posted 30. September 2003 10:59
Christopher, now you ask that for presenters to disagree, they show incorrectness not with arguments and notions that were presented in this thread, but with specific arguments that are not even linked or presented here.
Or are you asking to demonstrate a problem with premise or argument specifically in your post listed posted 16. September 2003 03:00 on page 4?
Otherwise the essential argument has never been posted in this thread. I object to our being called, in order to disagree, to show error in an argument not presented.
(I'm sure that some are aware of some link or of other threads--I'm just not going to search something not even presented here by link. In other words I'm objecting to the lack of a link.)
[ 30. September 2003, 23:10: Message edited by: gedanken ]
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Rex Kerr
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posted 01. October 2003 02:30
Chris raises a number of good points, some of which I will address.
In particular, it seems as though that some of my earlier postings on alternatives to logic were poorly explained, poorly thought through, or both, on my part. This doesn't mean that I agree with Chris, although after refining my presentation perhaps he'll be able to show why the refined presentation doesn't work.
My first concern is that Chris seems to be either making an error in conflating, or assuming an identity between, the "order of knowing" and the "order of being", i.e. epistemology and ontology. Chris explains nicely why logic is a natural place to start as a basis for epistemology--for how we can know things about the world. That is, everything perceptible that we can make sense of must be expressible logically, etc.. But the key point here is that this is only "tautologically" true for perception, not for the state of the world. How we perceive the world and how the world is may not be the same. There may be an argument that epistemology and ontology collapse to the same thing--but traditionally, this view is not accepted, for reasons that I will explain if people are curious; and there are a variety of attempts to merge the two, which produce different consequences, and it would be nice to know which is being used here. As such, my question, "why logic as a basis for reality?" remains unanswered. The basis of reality is an ontological issue. Logic as a basis for perception is an epistemological one.
Also, I take issue with Chris's comment that "logic has only one syntax - the syntax of human cognition". Various lines of evidence (including that formal logic is learned!) indicate that the primitive cognitive operations humans perform are not the same as standard logical operations. There's a lot of cognitive psychology, psychophysics, and the like, that needs to be done before we can have definitive answers for what the primitive cognitive operations are. However, evidence that I am aware of from these fields, together with the architecture of the brain, and the various illusions and cognitive tricks that one can elicit, seem to indicate that the primitives involve noise-tolerant pattern-matching, consensus-building, and object binding. Not logic. One can use logic to describe these things. One can use these things to describe logic, too--that's how we learn logic. Logic has the advantage of being easy to communicate.
I'll accept the criticism that it is insensible to maintain that we cannot be certain that reality is logically consistent. I don't think absolute certainty is ever a realistic concept (just like infinity is never instantiated in reality), but the logical consistency of reality is at least as certain as anything else. It's a good enough working hypothesis--for our epistemology.
The statement that "When cognition is generalized to coincide with information processing as executed by any consistent function or transducer, it is anything but unreal. It is in fact the stuff of which reality is made." is, I imagine, fully consistent with the CTMU. I take this to be a conclusion that one would draw after accepting the CTMU, not a point of evidence in favor of it. If I am incorrect here, then I disagree with the statement on the basis of lack of argument for the claimed fact.
I don't have time to, on my own, look up the premises of the CTMU to see if any are invalid. It would be easier to do so, however, if Chris provided a link to (or a quote containing) a concise yet rigorous description of them. Presumably he knows right where to find them; for me it would involve a significant search.
[ 01. October 2003, 02:33: Message edited by: Rex Kerr ]
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Christopher M. Langan
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posted 01. October 2003 13:54
Rex says that I err in conflating or assuming an identity between epistemology and ontology. For scientific purposes, reality must be knowable as reality; otherwise, it is of no interest to us, and there is no way to discuss it or reason about it. So for scientific purposes, there is an epistemology-ontology-reality overlap...a place where they must be conflated. Deny this, and there go science and reason; they can't work. We acknowledge this overlap simply by considering and discussing reality, which we are interested in considering and discussing only to the extent that we can recognize it as reality. If there is something else out there that is so deep, dark and noumenal that it can never be recognized or logically inferred from our level of being, then it is of utterly no interest to science or philosophy. This is why the distinction between epistemology and ontology ultimately disappears in discussions about the nature of reality. On this level of reasoning, it is just as Descartes said: cogito ergo sum. To know (and be known) is to be.
Rex takes issue with my comment that "logic has only one syntax - the syntax of human cognition", alluding to evidence that formal logic is learned and that the primitive cognitive operations humans perform are not the same as standard logical operations. But they are the same, for they require a model, and the test of any such model is that it meet logical standards of definition and consistency. For example, say that we model cognition on its physical vehicle, a biological neural network (or "brain"). Complexity notwithstanding, we can in principle construct an adjacency matrix for such a network and assign firing thresholds and timed value sequences to neurons and synapses, thus achieving a vectorial representation of cognition. We can allow for learning by letting the firing thresholds vary; we can even allow for neural plasticity and cognitive impairment by allowing the matrix to undergo gradual or catastrophic evolution in a higher-order space of matrices. Cognition (and recognition, the interface of perception and cognition) is then a flow of information through an evolving matrix, a matter of 2-valued transformations of synaptic vectors and matrices thereof. Achieving a biopsychological explanation of cognition means mapping psychological events to such a 2-valued model, effectively reducing them to 2-valued logic.
Rex maintains that absolute certainty is never a realistic concept, but that the logical consistency of reality is at least as certain as anything else...a working hypothesis that is "good enough" for our epistemology. In fact, we can go somewhat farther that this, observing that any epistemology or ontology which runs afoul of 2-valued logic is imponderable and therefore of zero interest to science and philosophy. While it is true that we can consider illogic as (technically) a primal part of reality, we can do so only by excluding it from the level of reality that is actualized, and that we recognize and comprehend, in terms of 2-valued information (including information regarding any sort of "fuzzy" measures or functors). In fact, illogic is actively excluded from reality as its wave function evolves; Schrodinger's cat remains mercilessly confined to its box.
Rex is right when he supposes that my statement "When cognition is generalized to coincide with information processing as executed by any consistent function or transducer, it is anything but unreal...It is in fact the stuff of which reality is made" is fully consistent with the CTMU. But one need scarcely understand the whole CTMU to acknowledge the truth of this statement. One need merely observe that since information is 2-valued, no reality which lacks a consistent 2-valued functional description can be coherently perceived, conceived or cognitively rendered and processed as information by scientists, philosophers and other cognitive entities. In other words, if cognition could not be generalized in such a way that reality can be described in terms of it, then reality would lack a coherent cognitive representation, in which case it would be unrecognizable and uninteresting to, and existentially unsupportive of, cognitive entities like scientists and philosophers. This de facto contradiction, which harks back to Rex's attempted separation of epistemology and ontology, means that if we want to formulate a theory of reality (or even coherently discuss it), we must accept my statement as true. This does indeed constitute evidence in favor of the CTMU.
I fully sympathize with Rex when he says that he does not, on his own, have the time to look up the premises of the CTMU. Similarly, and I say this with all due respect, I do not have the time to give every time-challenged person a personal guided tour of the theory as though he were the first person to whom I had mentioned it, or even to provide detailed references. However, Rex does say that he takes exception to the CTMU, and it is hard for me to understand how he can do this without previously having familiarized himself with its basic premises. If this is in fact the problem, then Rex can try this paper in PCID. (Please see the section entitled "Some Additional Principles".)
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Rex Kerr
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posted 01. October 2003 21:50
I fully agree with Chris's method of identifying epistemology and ontology. I have a very similar view myself, for very similar reasons. Epistemology is necessarily the outer layer; but our ontology therefore needs only to address those things that we can actually know.
I also agree with the comments about relationships between logic, modeling, and human cognition. However, I don't see how those comments address whether logic has the same syntax as human cognition or a different syntax. I can write the same program in 8086 assembly language, C, or Prolog--but this does not mean that Intel processors have only one syntax--the syntax of Prolog. Likewise, this argument could be rewritten in Spanish, but although the syntax would be similar, it wouldn't be identical. So it is not the case that you can show an identity of syntax by showing that you can model a process using one syntax with a different syntax. Rather, you've shown an equivalence or inclusion of some sort between the expressivity of the two.
I must be in an agreeable mood, because the comments about the realism of absolute certainty make sense too, given that one can use two-valued logic to model N-valued systems in an extraordinarly clunky but logically valid way, and to model N levels of uncertainty in an even clunkier but still logically valid way.
Now we get to the key place where it looks to me like a major mistake is being made. I'll quote the key passages:
quote:
One need merely observe that since information is 2-valued, no reality which lacks a consistent 2-valued functional description can be coherently perceived, conceived or cognitively rendered and processed as information by scientists, philosophers and other cognitive entities.
Fair enough. Information does not necessarily arrive in a 2-valued state, but you can always digitize it.
quote:
If cognition could not be generalized in such a way that reality can be described in terms of it, then reality would lack a coherent cognitive representation, in which case it would be unrecognizable and uninteresting.
This seems right, and the special case holds too: if reality could not be described in terms of existing cognition (not generalized), then reality would be unrecognizable.
However, these passages don't really support the statement that
quote:
When cognition is generalized to coincide with information processing as executed by any consistent function or transducer, it is anything but unreal...It is in fact the stuff of which reality is made
What we have decided in the above quotes not that it is the "stuff of which reality is made", but rather that it is the "mechanism by which reality is understood". This is a very important distinction because we can make observations without knowing what the causes were, or that there was a cause. Just because we can understand A and we can understand B, it does not follow that the transition from A to B can also be understood. (Except trivially as, "A happened. And then, B happened!")
This is where I think the epistemology/ontology problem comes up in full. If we are limiting our ontology to what we can know, this is fine, but we are not allowed to assume that we can always account for our knowledge. Phrasing such as "stuff of which reality is made" makes it sound like it can be accounted for. We lose things like the fundamental identity of objects from one time to the next, replaced with the apparent identity of objects from one time to the next. There really is no problem with this--I'd argue that it is what we actually do and that we can't do better. However, we have to keep in mind the limitations we are working under.
It's this attempt to retain the noumenal nature of reality (or equivalently, the all-encompassing ontology) while being limited by perception that seems to generate all kinds of problems.
I'll give an example of where this comes up with two of the principles from pages 16-22 of the document Chris linked to. (I was hoping for something more compact and more precise, but from Chris's response, I presume that doesn't exist. I've intentionally picked two of the simpler-to-comprehend principles.)
quote:
The Reality Principle
Reality, i.e. the real universe, contains all and only that which is real. The reality concept is analytically self-contained; if there were something outside reality that were real enough to affect or influence reality, it would be inside reality.
Syntactic Comprehensivity-Reflexivity: the Mind Equals Reality Principle (M=R)
The M=R principle is merely a logical version of what empiricist philosophers long ago pointed out: we experience reality in the form of perceptions and sense data from which the existence and independence of mind and objective external reality are induced. Since any proof to the contrary would necessarily be cognitive, as are all proofs , and since the content of cognition is cognitive by embedment, no such proof can exist; such a proof would undermine its own medium and thereby cancel itself.
Here we have two different definitions of reality. The top one is a standard definition motivated by standard ontology. The bottom one is what you are forced to accept given epistemological constraints.
The two are not equivalent.
There is the possibility that an affect or influence impinges upon reality, and we can observe the consequences but can't understand it.
It is tempting, but unsupportable, to cry, "No, it can't be! It is absoloutely certain that all causes are perfectly comprehensible in principle!"
[ 01. October 2003, 22:21: Message edited by: Rex Kerr ]
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gedanken
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posted 01. October 2003 22:39
Do papers like Churchland's On the nature of explanation: A PDP Approach* ever make it into philosopher's discussions of "logic"?
* Churchland, P.M. (1990) On the nature of explanation: A PDP Approach. Physica D 42: 281-292., also found in a couple of other volumes. I've referenced it before, look up the thread.
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Christopher M. Langan
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posted 02. October 2003 01:42
Rex makes the following distinction:
quote:
What we have decided in the above quotes not that it [generalized cognition] is the "stuff of which reality is made", but rather that it is the "mechanism by which reality is understood". This is a very important distinction because we can make observations without knowing what the causes were, or that there was a cause. Just because we can understand A and we can understand B, it does not follow that the transition from A to B can also be understood...we have to keep in mind the limitations we are working under.
"Making an observation" amounts to cognition. Registering a transition from a state or event A to another B is also an act of cognition, whether or not a causal relationship between A and B can be understood or verified (in which case it too is cognitively registered). Such instances of cognition are how we experience reality; as Hume and Kant and others have pointed out, we can at best infer the existence of an external world from the consistency of our thoughts and perceptions. But inference too is cognitive, and under no circumstances can we recognize or infer the existence of anything that cannot be consistently embedded in our processes of recognition and inference. As we have already observed, embedment is an identity relation (up to isomorphism), and this means that reality is cognitive to the extent that it is embedded in our cognitive processes. On the other hand, where reference amounts to cognitive embedment, we lack the power to even refer to that which cannot be embedded in our cognitive processes. It follows that reality is cognitive to whatever extent we can meaningfully refer to it.
It is true that our cognitive reality is structured in such a way that we can often reason as though an external world exists. But we can never forget that as far as experience and observation and experimentation are concerned, "out there" exists for us as an image on the surface of our senses. I understand that this is difficult to grasp after several centuries of nonstop "The world exists independently of us on every level of being and it is our task to learn what it has to teach us!"; such articles of faith make it very hard for us to see ourselves as anything more than purblind moths beating our wings against a diamond-paned window with "Objective Reality" painted on it in heavy black letters. In some ways, this picture is accurate. But all we can say for sure of our cognitive limitations is that (1) to whatever extent they are real, they are limits on cognition and nothing else; and (2) if anything of a non-cognitive nature is hiding behind them, then it has no place whatsoever in our cognitive picture of reality. For cognitive purposes - that is, for all purposes scientific and philosophical - it does not exist.
[ 02. October 2003, 02:04: Message edited by: Christopher M. Langan ]
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Rex Kerr
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posted 02. October 2003 05:04
Fair enough. Anything that affects reality can at least be described as "something that affects reality", even if we can't say anything more about it because of cognitive/perceptual limitations. But then it seems as though the appropriate theory is CTMP--the P being perception--to avoid the baggage of the term "universe" which typically refers to an external reality and explicitly excludes qualities of the perceiver.
And further, I would say that this CTMP should not use logic as its primitive component, but rather the cognitive operations that our brains enact. Converting them to two-valued logic is inelegant at best, and leaves us without many important insights into why reality is to us as it is.
Also, you have previously made comments about CTMU being relevant to things like evolution and intelligent design. Somehow I find it difficult to imagine any connection. (Then again, I also find it difficult to grasp the connection between what you've said here and many of the claims in the PCID paper.)
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Christopher M. Langan
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posted 02. October 2003 10:54
Rex acknowledges that anything that affects reality can at least be described as "something that affects reality", even if we can't say anything more about it because of cognitive/perceptual limitations. But we can say somewhat more about it, namely that it is recognizable as the source of a perceptible effect and is therefore cognitive to the extent of being referenced as a "cause". Rex goes on to critique the name "CTMU", opining that the U (for universe) should be replaced with a P (for perception). Perhaps Rex has a point - the universe of science is, after all, logically defined on our perceptions of it. However, one might equally well observe that it is high time for those who make an unwarranted distinction between reality and (generalized) cognition to face their fundamental equivalence despite whatever heavy conceptual baggage they may be in the habit of carrying along with them.
Rex then says that the "CTMP", as he seemingly prefers to call it, should not use logic as its primitive component, but rather the cognitive operations that our brains enact, observing that any attempt to convert these native cognitive operations to two-valued logic is inelegant and robs us of insight about the nature of reality. However, logic is in fact the syntax of cognition by definition. It is the most elegant, compact distillation of our cognitive operations that we have been able to achieve in several millennia - this is why we critically rely on it in technical fields like cognitive science - and it would be a shame to unnecessarily pitch it out the reality-theoretic window just because it is intentionally formulated on a higher level of abstraction and with greater concision and precision than various (admittedly interesting) details of neural architecture and dynamics.
Rex points out that I have previously made comments about the relevance of the CTMU to evolution and intelligent design, professing that he finds it difficult to imagine any connection between such important matters and the PCID paper. To this, I really don't know what to say other than "different strokes for different folks". I hope that as time marches on, Rex will gradually learn to appreciate at least a few of the observations and insights that I have tried to bring to bear on our understanding of nature.
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Rex Kerr
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posted 02. October 2003 14:59
Cognition is what humans actually do. Rational thought is the idealized version using (only) logic. Logic is the syntax of rational thought by definition, but unless you use cognition to mean rational thought (which some people do, but it is an inefficient use of language, since then we need some other term to refer to human cognitive processes), logic is not the syntax of cognition by definition.
It is cognition, not rational thought, which provides our epistemological playpen-walls. It is rational thought, not cognition, which has the syntax. Now, that said, we understand the primitives of logic well, and those of cognition rather less well, so I agree that using logic is a sensible place to start. It isn't an ideal way to build your worldview, though, since a gap remains between cognition and rational thought.
I'll post more details later of why I am baffled at jumps that are made between a sensible view of epistemology and some of the concepts in CTMU.
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Christopher M. Langan
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posted 04. October 2003 10:18
Rex, your critique of my terminology is semantic and arbitrary. You seem to want to reserve the word "cognition" for the entire set of operations performed by a mind, including ones that are illogical or erroneous, while I want to use it in a more variable and context-dependent way. For example, although I acknowledge that cognition can be illogical, I reserve the right to (also) use it to mean "rational cognition" where this is what I intend to discuss. I am justified in doing this because the content of irrational cognition, as opposed to its mere existence, is irrelevant to the structure of reality as it is described in the CTMU. Why is it irrelevant? Because it violates the (logical) syntax of any language capable of expressing a meaningful theory of reality.
I'll make two additional points. (1) In the CTMU, generalized cognition explicitly has syntactic and telic (pre-syntactic, trans-syntactic) levels. So if your objection also contains the idea that cognition can occur on multiple levels, this has already been covered. (2) Even though logic and cognition coincide in perceptual reality and its theoretical representation, I agree with you that any disjunction would naturally be of interest, and therefore urge you to continue your studies regarding it (such as they and it may be).
Some papers require more than one reading. If my paper is one of them, then so be it; all I could do was try to make the material accessible. But in any case, I have a piece of well-meant advice for you: if you really intend to maintain that there exists a yawning gap between the CTMU and "a sensible view of epistemology", you had better read the paper as many times as necessary in order to understand what it really says about the epistemology-ontology-reality relationship.
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Aliet Jacob
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posted 06. October 2003 01:26
Rex asks Chris to provide the premises of CTMU and ged objects to being asked to refute arguments (premise, inference, conclusion) that have not been made on this thread.
I can help Rex and Ged somewhat.
The first thing is: CTMU has no clearly stated premises: one has to exactingly glean them from CTMU. Langan has what he calls principles: MAP, M=R and MU and he presents in phases them via other principles: the Reality Principle, the Principle of Linguistic reducibility and the Principle of Syndiffeonesis.
Besides these principles, there are philosophical arguments involving determinacy, indeterminacy and self-determinacy, arguments addressing the problems of quantum physics, anthropic problems, discrete vs continuum models, duality problems and beyond that, one finds additional principles like the principle of hology, Principle of attributive duality, constructive-filtrative duality, conspansive duality, extended superposition, Principle of infocognitive monism, and Telic Principle.
Surrounding this framework of core principles are other marginal principles like the Super-Copernican principle and arguments derived from concepts of logic, homology, set theory and an extension of ideas from Physicists like Wheeler and Bohm. Ideas which, mostly, do not belong to mainstream theories of Physics.
I have refuted some of the mainstream and marginal principles that act as a foundation for CTMU and I believe Langan is aware of how I have done so but for some strange reason, he has taken to ignoring my posts. If he is not aware of my refutations, I could readily provide a link so that he can address my (counter) arguments or even refute them here.
What I will do will be to enumerate what can be regarded as CTMU premises, for the benefit of Rex and Ged because I believe they needn't reinvent the wheel (do what I did). I have spent time on the CTMU paper and will readily answer any CTMU-related question Langan cannot answer - because, as he claims, he is tired of answering such questions from time-pressed people. However, it would be good if Langan designed a "CTMU FAQ" or better yet, a "CTMP FAQ" for people like Rex to go through though.
CTMU Premises:
1. Our universe is self-determinant i.e. it "decided" when and how to create itself, its evolution , its composition and properties. This is as opposed to external determiacy, acausality and determinacy.
2. Our universe's "working" is atemporal. Its existence involves atemporal communication between law and state, syntax and information content to maximize its systemic self-utility.
3. Perception and cognition are only possible because reality is in states of true or false, real and unreal and other binary expressions - hence reality is based on (sentential) logic - which has mental qualities.
4. Reality is self-contained and closed (and there are two kinds of closure in CTMU).
5. The abstract is always the syntactic generalization of the concrete.
6. Language is always isomorphic to reality.
7. Reality equals reality theory.
8. We are all the same and related with everything else that exists. This means for example (no offense intended), that Rex and a dust particle in Mars are the same and are connected. Any (minor) differences between them only shows that they are reductively the same.
9. Informational coherence is the sine qua non of recognizable existence. Information is what holds things together.
10. Reality ultimately has a stable two-valued object-level distinction between objects, attributes and events.
11. The mind equals reality. Everything that goes on in the mind (cognition) is derived from what is real. Theory is equal to universe.
12. Everywhere we look, everything has the dual nature of mind and reality (even a sand particle). Hence reality everywhere consists of a common substance - infocognition.
There could be more, but I believe if one agrees with the premises above, one can be sure they will find just about everything in the CTMU paper agreeable.
Now If there is any premise Langan feels I have mis-stated or that is not consistent with CTMU, I will be ready to support it. I have added the always (for 5 and 6) in some of the premises because of CTMU's claim of being tautological. And by definition, a tautology is a statement that is always true regardless of the values assigned to its variables.
For Rex and Ged and interested parties - beyond the above premises, of course Langan uses neologisms and adopts a quasi-nomological approach (or even thaumaturgical approach) to create the mechanisms through which this infocognitive reality emerges and self-configures. One has to delve into Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment, momenergy, holography and holotrophic theories of the mind and universe, Bohm's implicate order and "proto-intelligence" and holomovement, homological concepts (boundary of a boundary is zero), set theory, logic, philosophy, and spend a lot of time attempting to resolve problems of Physics and other gray areas in human knowledge etc.
From this emerges the above principles plus hology, telic recursion, conspansion, the UBT and other, well, interesting concepts. I will be happy to answer any CTMU-related questions and happily offer any clarifications.
I think this thread has shown how inferior two-valued Logic can be inasfar as describing reality is concerned, and ged (via the doorway thingy) has shown the place of judgement where logic cannot effectively handle. Its true that we can always wrap logic around what we perceive but the extent to which Logic remains efficient in such circumstances will sometimes render logic "incapable". Experiences of the shift from flat-earth to an elliptical earth, geocentricity to heliocentricity among others demonstrate how inferior cognition is as far as describing reality is concerned (or we can chalk it up to human fallibility).
The fact that we have to rely on spectrometers, microscopes and the like show how much inaccurate perception can be when used without external aid. The ability to conceive and describe black roses and the inverses of a matrix, to dream of heaven and to describe dragons show how much cognition and language are not always isomorphic to reality and how much the abstract is not always based on the concrete.
But I dont want to criticize CTMU - what I would like to see is what others can do with it when they understand it. Thats why I am willing to help simplify it and reduce the apparent load the questions allegedly pose to Langan.
What I can do is ask Langan what the "rules of cognition" are since he has used the phrase - or Rex perharps can since he seems to understand it. I would also politely ask Langan to list the logical invariants which comprise the identity of cognition and which also supports its procedural integrity. And what "procedural integrity" means in the context of cognition. Or perharps Rex can? Especially with regard to (the unreality of) dreams, abstract ideas like the cofactors of a matrix and mirage.
To be known is not to be. Everyone knows dragons and mermaids. They still dont exist. Also, remember that two identical pins do not exhibit syndiffeonesis because being separate does not entail being different.
Regarding the argument that operations of cognition are the same as logical operations, the idea that cognition requires a (logical) model does not support the argument that they are the same no more than the idea that the operations of a toilet flushing mechanism and the operations of logic are the same. Even a tap/faucet meets logical standards of definition and consistency and can have its states/operations, to some degree, mapped to a 2-valued (logical) model. A better argument is required to support the claim.
Regarding the conflation of ontology and epistemology, the property of an entity having "coherent cognitive representation" does not entail its being of interest to scientists and philosophers. The argument assumes that philosophers know of everything that has "coherent cognitive representation".
And concerning the idea that everything (state, events) in reality is able to be described via two-valued logic, Hilbert thought that all mathematical questions were decidable and set out to codify all methods of mathematical reasoning (he wanted to solve the problem of vagueness brough about by Cantor's sets). His blissful optimism was shattered by Godel. Turing later showed that Godel's incompleteness indicated that there was no way of systematically deciding whether a computer program will ever halt - Turing's works were very instrumental in computation. Hence, in retrospect, Hilbert failed epistemologically but suceeded computationally - at least Chaitin thinks so.
What Langan is doing, with his claim that everything thats cognizant is reducible to two-valued logic, is trying to repeat history (whats worse is CTMU itself cant be formalized in any meaningful manner). There are things that can be formalized in two-valued logic and formal systems lend themselves to computation. Chaitins work on algorithmic information theory, randomness, the idea that lower bounds cant be proved, maximally unknowable or irreducible information and the idea that mathematical truths are true for no reason, seriuosly challenge Langan's hypothesis that involves attributing intelligence to (binary) logic or intelligence to the binary structure of (some aspects) reality, or attributing the former to the latter.
But I can project in Chaitin's random reality into CTMU's "intelligent reality" later. For now, lets examine Rex and ged's take on the CTMU premises.
[ 06. October 2003, 01:54: Message edited by: Aliet Jacob ]
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Rex Kerr
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posted 06. October 2003 05:07
I have had suspicions that many of the premises that the CTMU is based upon are similar to ones explicitly listed by Aliet; I found his list quite useful. However, given how many of the premises I disagree with (on a variety of levels, from "obviously silly" to "provably false" to "undemonstratable" to "I find it aesthetically unappealing"), I'm going to first try to return to Chris's document to see if I really disagree with the document and not just Aliet's synthesis.
Related to premise (1) is the following quote (p. 7 PCID CMTU paper): 'Through telic feedback, a system retroactively self-configures by reflexively applying a "generalized utility function" to its internal existential potential or possible futures.'
What are the constraints on this "generalized utility function"? If there are constraints, where do they come from? Since this is discussing a self-deterministic system, the constraints must come from the system. But the configuration (constraint) comes from this generalized utility function. So the answer must be that there is no constraint. But now we've just used a lot of fancy terminology to say, "we can give no reason for this." Which is equivalent to acausality. Primordial self-determinacy thus seems indistinguishable from primordial acausality.
(I shall neglect to address Wheeler's model, as I find it highly speculative and in contradiction with the lack of necessity of human observers to avoid interferance, as far as I am aware of the experiments. Wheeler's contributions to physics have been quite substantial, but this does not qualify him as an expert on philosophy, which this is. There are some good points and some not so good points in there.)
Here's a quote from page 12 which I want to keep in mind: "scientific explanations and interpretations glue observations and equations together in a very poorly understood way. It often works like a charm...but why? One of the main purposes of reality theory is to answer this question."
I want to keep it in mind because it also often works horribly. Reality theory should explain that, too.
Hm. There's a lot of stuff here and it's getting late. I think I'm just going to throw out a few thoughts, especially since I don't know how to proceed until I understand what is supposed to be included as "real". (Without knowing what is real, it is hard to tell if reality is a language, or whether saying it is a language imparts any information.)
Here's the problem with CTMU-reality.
Is reality well-definable as that which "contains all and only that which is real"? Let this be R. Let everything else be not-R. I am talking about not-R, therefore not-R has an effect on what is real. Thus the set of all unreal things is a real thing. This indicates that the set of unreal things is empty, and that anything that can be expressed is real--for example, "the blue demon unicorn who is the President of the Roman Empire". Philosophically, these imaginary statements are sometimes granted a type of reality. But now reality theory has to distinguish between genuinely real things and things which are real by closure.
Here's a statement which is simply false for me: "whereof that which cannot be linguistically described, one cannot perceive or conceive." I can smell and taste all sorts of things that I recognize, but am utterly powerless to linguistically describe. (This is related to premises (3) and (6).) This seems to undermine the attempt to perform a reality-closure operation based on human perception: qualia are experiences that are not necessarily dual-valued or easily dualizable. My linguistic sense of reality is affected by these non-linguistic sensations, so my perception of reality is super-linguistic.
Now, one could argue that the perception of "banana flavor" is a generalization of language in that you have the (banana, olfactory receptor, banana-experience) triple that is syntactically and semantically valid but the (banana, carpet fuzz, hiccup-experience) which is not.
The problem with this is that the whole justification for identifying reality with language is an epistemological one, based perhaps on the need for a sharp distinction between reality and unreality and the desire for closure. This need not be the case, however, as individual perception is most decidedly not closed in this fashion, and yet we can perceive just fine in the absence of closure.
I'm not sure whether much of the above makes sense. Chris touches on such a wide range of disciplines that choosing appropriate terminology is challenging at best.
Also, as I suspect that Chris may not care to try to re-explain this at length, Aliet, do you have some insight into what Chris is trying to address with "syndiffeonesis"? That X and Y can have qualities in common and differences is hardly a surprising concept; generating these differences in the absence of initial difference is more challenging, but that doesn't seem to be what syndiffeonesis is used for. If the point of the whole section is merely, "Real things have similarities, and they have differences," then I agree.
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Aliet Jacob
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posted 06. October 2003 05:52
Rex asks: "What are the constraints on this "generalized utility function"? If there are constraints, where do they come from?"
[CTMU-expert hat on]
The constraints are "emergent": at the UBT state, they are merely potentials and are only actualized as reality evolves from the UBT. The simplest constraint is in being real itself. For example a snake is not a tree. Thats a constraint. At the UBT, snakeness or treeness are merely potentials.
[/CTMU-expert hat on]
Rex states: "Primordial self-determinacy thus seems indistinguishable from primordial acausality."
Well, I arrived at the same conclusion.
Rex notes: "There are some good points and some not so good points in there."
Did you notice the unsubstantiated relation of Wheeler's momenergy with the homological concept of "the boundary of a boundary is zero"? Can you attempt to link the two?
Did you notice the "confusion" between spatial relatedness and temporal relatedness in the formulation of the super-Copernican Principle?
Anything real is everything that is related/connected to reality.
Rex states: "I am talking about not-R, therefore not-R has an effect on what is real"
You lost me there - how does not-R have an effect on R?
Also help me understand the thing about being able to perceive just fine in the absence of closure - is there an argument (already) that there is no closure? What does closure mean - self-containment or the property of being sealed?
Yes, thats a good question about how closure confers reality or realness to things and how reality without closure is achieved. Very good.
Rex asks: "Aliet, do you have some insight into what Chris is trying to address with 'syndiffeonesis'?"
Since Chris is here and he has not started ignoring you, perharps he had better answer himself.
Secondly, Chris seems to be out to resolve a paradox and presents syndiffeonesis as the solution.
First of all, Syndiffeonesis is a concept whose originality has been disputed.
Let me give you a nice little work: How many different meanings of the word unisection can you find under the Principle of Syndiffeonesis?
Also, don't fail to see how information and energy/force are conflated. Tell me if you fail to see how.
The extent to which the concepts of sameness/relatedness are implied in syndiffeonesis is broad to the point of being meaningless. Actually, everything that is real is the same. I find syndiffenessis inutile and unremarkable - it offers no insight into the nature of the universe.
Is there an actual paradox that syndiffeonesis solves?
Do two identical pins exhibit a difference?
Is reality stable because of logic? When the eyes and nose drop from a face, does the face become "unrecognizable reality"?
Try to answer these as you read on.
Do you encounter any fallacies of composition in syndiffeonesis?
Read on and remember the above.
[ 06. October 2003, 06:02: Message edited by: Aliet Jacob ]
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gedanken
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posted 06. October 2003 12:27
quote:
Anything real is everything that is related/connected to reality.
Say what? Would you care to defend this?
My guess is that this is related to a larger confusion. My imagination is "connected" or related to "reality". I often (but not necessarily) have dreams that have elements from "reality", and thus are "related" or "connected" in some manner. And the matter of degree of connectedness seems to be ignored. The very existence of the question of degree seems to be at the heart of the issue.
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