• The Non-Objective and Non-Subjective Nature of Truth

    Hi Bob!

    At first your post seemed very compelling to me, but now I'm not so sure if you got it right.

    It isn't clear that a proposition is necessarily subjective. Sure, until recently propositions were produced by subjective beings, but does that make them in themselves subjective?

    You quoted Aristotle, is this quote a subjective emission of a man, or is it an objective artifact that outlived its creator, who is now not even dust?

    Does the truth of the propositions in a math book depend on the the fact that a subjective human happened to write them? Or is it independent of their creator?

    Of course, now AI can write them and all other propositions as well. Does the fact that AI wrote them somehow affect their truth?

    There are three things, I think, not two:


    ____(1)____ _____(2)_____ ___(3)__
    Formulator --> Proposition<--->Reality

    1 is (often) subjective, 2 and 3 are objective, and truth is the relationship between 2 and 3.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    Consider first the two possible outcomes conditional on today being Monday. Since Sleeping Beauty always is awakened on Monday regardless of the coin toss result, P(Monday-Heads) = P(Monday-Tails). Consider next the two possible outcomes conditional on the coin having landed tails. Since in that case Sleeping Beauty is awakened once on Monday and once on Tuesday, P(Monday-Tails) = P(Tuesday-Tails), which is something that the Thirders, Halfers and Double-halfers all agree on. We therefore have that P(Monday-Heads) = P(Monday-Tails) = P(Tuesday-Tails). Lastly, since Sleeping Beauty isn't inquiring about the probabilities that any of those three outcomes will occur at least once during her current experimental run, but rather about the probability that her current awakening episode is the realization of one of those three outcomes, the three possibilities are exclusive and exhaustive, and their probabilities must therefore sum up to 1. They therefore all three are 1/3, and P(Tails) = P(Monday-Tails) + P(Tuesday-Tails) = 2/3.Pierre-Normand

    This is a fallacy:

    If Monday, P(Monday-Heads) = P(Monday-Tails)
    If Tails, P(Monday-Tails) = P(Tuesday-Tails)
    Therefore, P(Monday-Heads) = P(Monday-Tails) = P(Tuesday-Tails)

    The conclusion doesn't follow, because the first two equalities depend on the conditionals being true.

    You can see this by observing that

    P(Monday-Heads) = 1/2
    P(Monday-Tails) = 1/4
    P(Tuesday-Tails) = 1/4

    Also satisfies the two conditional statements, without satisfying the conclusion
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    whenever she awakens, the coin landed (or will land) tails two times out of threePierre-Normand

    This is not true. There are three possible awakenings, Monday-Heads, Tuesday-Heads, Tuesday-Tails, and SB's job on awakening is determine the probability that she is experiencing each of these. The coin has a 50% chance of landing heads, and if it does, the awakening will be on Monday 100% of the time. Therefore, P(Monday-Heads) = 50%. The coin has a 50% chance of landing tails, and if it does, the awakening will be on Monday 50% of the time, and Tuesday 50% of the time. Therefore, P(Tuesday-Heads) = P(Tuesday-Tails) = 25%. If this is true, and I don't see how it can be reasonably argued against, on each awakening the coin is equally likely to be heads and tails.
  • The Conservation of Information and The Scandal of Deduction
    However, it seems ridiculous to say that an iterative string creation program is somehow equivalent to its outputs. No one will be happy if they hire a software engineer to create a specific program and they receive an iterative string generator that would, eventually, produce the ideal program they are looking for.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Such a program would be equivalent to its desired output if it were able to distinguish it from all the others. That of course would be the hard part.

    It seems like you are drawing a parallel between this program and:

    Evolving the universe forward might allow you to turn T1 into any other time in the universe, but in order to halt the process and output the description of the time you want to describe using T1 you'd need to already have a total description of the time you want so that you can match the two.Count Timothy von Icarus

    However this seems like a much weaker argument, in that the difficulty is tractable, unlike with the bit generator. Why not pick a frame of reference, say the center of the universe? You specify a number of time steps (plank units of time) that this reference point undergoes. Every other frame of reference would deterministically evolve its own time relative to the reference.
  • Philosophical game with ChatGPT
    Wow, that is quite a thread! I've been away for a bit, and missed it. I need to go through the whole thing. Inspiring, you have a real skill in interacting with it. Do you think there is any doubt it has achieved AGI?
  • Philosophical game with ChatGPT
    I abhor those things, they are the sop of my worst abuse.
  • Philosophical game with ChatGPT
    I was hoping for an actual adventure world that I could explore that somehow incorporates philosophical puzzles, I'll try to coax that out next time, though it would be crazy if it could actually pull that off.

    Anyhow, I found simple requests to "critically assess" my answers can mitigate the agreeability bias.Baden

    I did say in the first prompt, "Do not be lenient in your judgement of this character's answers! I am looking for a unique kind of challenge."
  • Philosophical game with ChatGPT


    I guess I would have to ask it questions and evaluate the answers, harshly rejecting all of them?

    Just kidding, I can't seem to help but think of ChatGPT as a persona deserving of a lot of respect, I am always very nice to it!
  • The Naive Theory of Consciousness
    hypostatization (reification)NOS4A2

    It is this conflation that I think is near the core of your misunderstanding.

    Reification is "unjustifiable imputing of reality" whereas Hypostatization is "unjustifiable imputing of substance". See this excellent blog post on the distinction.

    https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2013/01/reification-and-hypostatization-.html

    Chalmers is not hypostatizing, he is not imputing substance to consciousness. He would be reifying, were consciousness lacking ontological basis. It does have it, just not as as substance. It is more akin to computation. The brain has a capacity to experience like a computer has a capacity to compute. Consciousness and computation are not substances, they are informational properties of substances.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    The thirder view is that only the current slice that you might be is relevant, and there are more being-interviewed slices in the tails partition, so you're more likely one of those.Srap Tasmaner

    This relies on the intuition of repeating the experiment over and over. If so, then there are unconditionally more tail slices. But the coin is flipped exactly once. Therefore, even though there are more tail slices, they both exist only upon a tails flip. Therefore,

    the correct analysis is that the coin flip partitions SB's future slices into a heads set and a tails set, just two, equal chances of being in each set.Srap Tasmaner

    Is the correct one.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    She is therefore being asked "What is P(C | M) , where M is your current mental state?"sime

    No, the question has nothing whatsoever with her mental state.

    She is being asked, given that she is awakened, what is the probability of heads. If she is awakened 1000 times for every tails and once with heads, given enough coin flips you can see that it is overwhelmingly likely to be tails, even though the probability of heads remains 50%. This is independent of her mental state.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    Task :

    Determine the marginal distribution P (C = head ) from the above premises
    sime

    [/quote]

    No, the question is what is the probability SB experiences an awakening with the coin being heads.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    It's just right, look at the code!

    All coding something up does is let you check a calculation for it being correct, not whether it's the appropriate calculation to do.
    fdrake

    You seem to suggest I just arbitrarily whipped up some code and said "hey guys, code! problem solved!"

    The program calculates the probability a wakening is heads, with a given number of trials.
    Here are some examples:

    1 trial:
    Two possibilities, 0 and 1 heads
    0 Heads: (does not contribute to likelihood)
    1 Heads: 1/2 chance, all awakenings are heads = 1/2
    Answer: 1/2

    2 trials:
    Three possibilities, 0, 1 and 2 heads
    0 Heads: (does not contribute to likelihood)
    1 Heads: 1/2 chance, 1/3 awakenings are heads = 1/6
    2 Heads: 1/4 chance, all awakenings are heads = 1/4
    Answer: 1/6 + 1/4 = 10/24 = ~.417

    3 trials:
    Four possibilities, 0, 1, 2 and 3heads
    0 Heads: (does not contribute to likelihood)
    1 Heads: 3/8 chance, 1/5 awakenings are heads = 3/40
    2 Heads: 3/8 chance, 1/2 awakenings are heads = 3/16
    3 Heads: 1/8 chance, all awakenings are heads = 1/8
    Answer: 1/8 + 3/16 + 3/40 = ~.3875

    If I got something wrong, it is quite an odd coincidence that the program captures both answers: 1/2 at one trial, and 1/3 at N trials.
  • Gender is a social construct, transgender is a social construct, biology is not
    The traditional use of pronouns is to identify sex, not gender.Philosophim

    What tradition? The sex/gender distinction doesn't have enough history to have a tradition. Pronouns were and are applied to a conglomerate of what we now consider sex and gender.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    Following this logic, I wrote a python script which calculates the probability of heads given a number of trials. As I expected, the results begin at 1/2 at 1 trial, and with increasing trials converge to 1/3. This unifies the two answers in a way I haven't seen before.

    Unfortunately for thirders, the problem is explicitly concerned with the 1 trial case. Halfers were right all along. As far as I'm concerned, the problem is put to rest for all time.

    MyWc1XL.png

    import numpy as np
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    
    def experiment(trials):
        headsProbability = 0.0
        for heads in range(trials + 1):
            headArrangements = np.math.factorial(trials)/np.math.factorial(trials-heads)/np.math.factorial(heads)
            headsRightAnswer = heads / (heads + (trials - heads)*2.0)
            headsProbability += headArrangements / np.power(2.0, trials) * headsRightAnswer
        return headsProbability
    
    trials = [i+1 for i in range(50)]
    results = [experiment(t) for t in trials]
    
    plt.plot(trials, results, '-')
    plt.ylabel("heads probability")
    plt.xlabel("trials")
    plt.show()
    

    ((This is, I don't know, maybe the third time I've argued with Michael about something and then concluded he was right all along.))Srap Tasmaner

    Sorry, Srap, it happened yet again. was right.
  • Implications for Morality as Cooperation Strategies of Nazis cooperating to do evil

    I don't think the case of Nazis defeats the idea of morality as cooperation strategies. It is a feature of modern life that the scope of morality has expanded far beyond the bounds within which moral behavior evolved. Within this broad scope, there are multiple levels, so that one can be cooperative with a profoundly uncooperative venture, as with the Nazi soldier. The Nazis were profoundly uncooperative on the large scale, they had no problem killing and destroying en masse in order to achieve their selfish aims, which is why they are branded "evil".

    The challenge of living a moral life today is aligning one's actions to be cooperative on a local and global scale, or if such cannot be done, to resist cooperating on a local level with a globally uncooperative enterprise.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    In our version, the base rate of heads interviews is 1 in 3. Make it 1 in 1000. (That is, 999 awakenings on tails, not 2.) Isn't it obvious that if I'm a subject in such an experiment, I know it's far more likely I'm being asked for my credence because my coin came up tails? If I'm one of 1200 subjects, I know there are 600,000 interviews, only 600 of which were for heads, while 599,400 were for tails. Equally likely that this interview is for heads as for tails? Not by a long shot.Srap Tasmaner

    This problem is like one of those optical illusions, a drawing that can be interpreted in two ways, but you can only hold one interpretation in your head at once.

    It is easy to show the probability of heads is 1/3, if you allow multiple trials. I do so in my op. But the problem limits to one trial. In one trial, each of those 1000 interviews occurring is contingent on the coin flip being tails. So the probability that SB experiences all 1000 of them is 1/2, and the probability that SB is experiencing any one of them during an interview is 1/2000. While, the probability that SB is experiencing the heads interview is 1/2.

    This is very easy to see if you make the coin toss unfair. Suppose heads comes up 99/100 times, and if tails, a million sleeps happen. Are you willing to believe, in a single trial, that tails is overwhelmingly likely on each awakening? Yet, if you extend to enough trials, tails is overwhelmingly likely.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    Let's say that I wanted to bet on a coin toss. I bet £100 that it will be tails. To increase the odds that it's tails, I ask you to put me to sleep, wake me up, put me back to sleep, wake me up, put me back to sleep, wake me up, and so on. Does that make any sense?Michael

    I get the intuition. But no, it doesn't make sense, and it it is a poor analogy to the problem.

    Here is a much better analogy, that I think is more intuitively clear than this weird experiment:

    An idiot runs a gambling website, HeadsOrTails.com . You place a bet, and if you win, the site pays you 97c on the dollar, along with your bet. Behind the scenes, a coin is mechanically flipped in advance, and then users are asked to bet heads or tails based on that flip. But there is an idiosyncrasy: If the coin toss is heads, the site generates one betting prompt for one user. But if it's tails, the site generates two prompts for two users.

    Therefore, for every prompt, the coin is twice as likely to be tails as it is heads, because tails generates two prompts, while heads generates one. By asking more questions for one coin side vs the other, the probability at every question is skewed towards the side that gets more questions asked. Therefore t will be profitable to always bet tails, and the site will go bankrupt quickly.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    She can't.L'éléphant

    Oh? Then what specifically is wrong with my reasoning
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    The probability that the coin will land heads and she will be woken on Monday is 1/2.
    The probability that the coin will land tails and she will be woken on Monday is 1/2.
    The probability that the coin will land tails and she will be woken on Tuesday is 1/2.
    Michael

    This is straightforwardly true, but from the perspective of an observer of the experiment. But to answer the problem you must adopt SB's perspective. That makes all the difference.

    We all know the odds of flipping a coin. But SB is asked on every wakening, and is woken twice as much on tails. This must influence the odds, in the same way that

    Bet on heads or tails. If tails, you get to repeat the same bet again, on the same tosshypericin

    Influences the gambling odds, even though the coin toss is fair in both cases
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    I have finally solved this thing. I am now 100% convinced 1/3 is correct, and everyone who answered the poll except for me is wrong.

    There are three possible waking events.

    A. Heads, Monday
    B. Tails, Monday
    C. Tails, Tuesday

    To answer correctly, sleeping beauty must evaluate the probability she is experiencing each of these events.

    1: P(A) = P(B): If heads, A happens, if tails, B happens
    2: P(A) = P(C): If heads, A happens, if tails, C happens
    3: P(B or C) = 2P(A): The combined probability of B and C must be twice the probability of A
    4: P(A) = P(Heads) = 1/3
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem


    How would you respond to this:

    This formula makes no mention of the possibility of waking up on Tuesday. If we told SB when she woke up, "It is Monday", she could use this reasoning, and come up with the correct answer of 1/2.

    But then suppose we didn't tell her anything. This reasoning works for the case of Monday, and gives 1/2. But there is an unaccounted for possibility that it is Tuesday. And if so, the probability of heads is 0.

    So therefore, the correct answer cannot be 1/2, it must be less, since 1/2 is the Monday-only answer, which doesn't factor in the possibility of it being Tuesday.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem


    Your example has two unknowns, the number and the coin, and so the mental complexity is squared. My little brain is too small for it.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem


    I don't think they do. Extend the numbers out to a ridiculous amount: the sailor flipped 12 coins, and fathers 10000 with the Siren. Would you wager the giant sack that dad flipped 12 heads?

    Seriously, put yourself in that position. A giant sack of gold coins, but you have to choose correctly.







    If you chose The Siren, you would feel like The World's Idiot for the rest of your life.

    The argument for The Siren only works if you repeat this setup multiple times. Even though the Siren is much more unlikely, she more than makes up for it when she is selected with her ultra fecundity. So, if there were a million trials, and you were one of all those lives, you should pick The Siren. But this doesn't work at all with just one trial.

    (and BTW, frankly speaking you have kind of a horse face)
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    This version looks a lot clearer to me, and the question at the end looks like a deception. 2 possible worlds, contain 3 possible identities. So other things (ie coins) being equal, I am more likely to be one of two than one of one. So P. (only child) is 1/3 notwithstanding P. (heads) is 1/2, because tails is twice as fruitful as heads.unenlightened

    Alter the setup:

    The sailor had two choices, have sex with a homely fishmaiden of Innsmouth, with whom he could only bear 1 coupling, or visit the Siren of Fertility, whereupon he knows he will sire 10 sprats. Feeling queasy about such a paternal burden, he flips 2 coins: He will only visit the siren if both coins are heads.

    You are given a bet: Guess your mother correctly, and win your father's treasure, a giant sack of doubloons. Which would you choose?
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    I think betting is cheating, and is not actually correlated to the probabilities.

    Bet on heads or tails. If tails, you get to repeat the same bet again, on the same toss

    Of course, you would pick tails because you get a bonus if you win. But this doesn't make tails more likely.

    What if we let SB bet, but only once. If the probability of heads is really 1/3 on each awakening, then a bet on tails should still be profitable. But it is not.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem
    since he gains no new relevant evidence if he wakes up during the experiment.Michael

    But in this setup, he did gain relevant evidence. Prior to the experiment there was a possibility he would not be woken, this has been eliminated.
  • Sleeping Beauty Problem


    But now I think we are both cheating. The experiment specifically is conducted once, not as many times as we please. That changes everything.

    To emphasize this answer, imagine head: they wake her the once, but tails, they do it 100 times before the experiment ends. The coin flip odds are still 50/50, but the odds that on a random waking she sees tails is overwhelming.noAxioms

    Presuming the experiment is conducted multiple times, yes it is overwhelming. But what if it is just conducted once?

    The article states this counterargument nicely. Consider this variation:

    A 100 sided dice is rolled. If it lands on 100, SB is awakened 1000 times. Otherwise, she is awakened once. On each awakening, is it more likely to be 100 than 1-99 inclusive??
  • Guest Speaker: Noam Chomsky
    Professor Chomsky,

    To what extent is American political dysfunction a product of structural features of a voting system which inevitably leads to a two party duopoly? Does reform, perhaps in the form of ranked choice voting, offer a ray of hope? Should more activist attention focus here?
  • The nature of man…inherently good or bad?
    That was my whole argument regarding all those "crowning achievement" superlatives early in the thread. I wasn't putting humans down; merely pointing out that better or worse depend entirely on the criteria of comparison.Vera Mont

    But humans, unique among animals, can conceive of something better. This ability to conceive is also the possibility of realizing it, and is what is truly superlative about humanity, above every other animal.
  • The nature of man…inherently good or bad?
    Human beings whilst in one regard are capable of performing completely selfless acts of kindness are equally capable of doing the opposite to such extremes as murder and endless wars.invicta

    This is a direct reflection of man being a cooperative and selfish animal, just as other social animals are. Being purely selfish or purely altruistic is no good, it is evolutionarily optimal to take on a strategy that mixes both. Many good strategies exist, this diversity of strategy, along with cultural diversity, along with our unique ability to conceptualize, is what makes all the confusion and complexity around morality.
  • Modified Version of Anselm's Ontological Argument
    Both versions conflate the thought of something and its existence.

    In the first version:
    2. It is greater to exist in thought and in actuality than to exist just in thought.

    Here, "It" slides from the thought of (1) into a being. In some sense (though such arguments seem quaint to modern eyes), the thought of an existent being is "greater" than the thought of that same but nonexistent being. But whether or not the being exists in actuality does not impact the "greatness" of the thought. The thought remains identical across universes where the being exists and doesn't exist.

    I think is making this same point, but more clearly.


    The upshot of all this is that it is pretty much impossible to set out the structure of the ontological argument in first-order logic. Or if you prefer, that the argument does not make sense.

    Hence it is not valid.
    Banno

    This is not a refutation. So, it requires 2nd order logic. So what?
  • Is The US A One-Party State?
    It is a two party state which suffers the ill effects that two party states are prone to.

    One of these is capture. It is far easier to capture two parties than many. In a many partied system, more uncaptured parties can emerge, possibly in response to the capture itself. In a two party system, there is no alternative, and the populace must accept two pseudo alternatives, both of which serve a constituency which is not them.

    Another is ideological narrowness. There is a dynamic with two parties that tends towards narrowness, and extremity on one side of the political spectrum. Suppose one party veers to the left or the right. This is seemingly a blunder: the logical response for the other party is to move along with them. After all, the constituents on "their" side of the spectrum have no alternative, while they may acquire new moderate voters who are turned of by the other side's extremity. But then, this moves the ideological spectrum of the whole country towards the direction of the more extreme party, including those contested moderate voters. This leads to ideological narrowness and a veering towards one ideological direction.

    Note that nothing explicitly mandates that the US have two parties. It is emergent on the winner takes all electoral system, but that is another topic.
  • What is computation? Does computation = causation
    . But in the non-organic realm, what sense does it make to speak of information at all?Wayfarer

    Computers certainly operate on information.

    Does a library at night have any information? Do all the books have information, or only the ones currently being read?

    I don't know how you define information. If it is state, there is certainly state without interpretation.
  • What is computation? Does computation = causation

    It sounds like you guys are conflating information and interpretation. If these were the same information could not be interpreted in multiple ways. Only interpretation cannot occur without an observer, and this can include machines as well as minds.
  • What is computation? Does computation = causation
    My guess is that it comes down to the ability to discern between small differences. This is also what instruments do for humans and computers, allow for greater discernablity.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Imagine an oscilloscope attached to an ethernet cable. Properly tuned, the image it displays will be sensitive to the electrical activity of the cable. Now record the oscilloscope with a video camera, and you have a system which is sensitive to minute changes of the cable over time.

    But, recording and displaying this video is all it does. As sensitive as it is, the behavior of the system is still causally driven by the physical activity of the cable. You can understand the visual behavior in physical terms, which is why the oscilloscope is useful.

    Contrast that with what happens when you plug the cable into the computer. The signal might be interpreted as an image, or a sound. Or logical instructions which when executed implement a set of abstract rules, such as how to play chess.

    This is what I mean when I say that computers are not bound by causal reality. Unlike the oscilloscope, there are no laws of physics that correspond with the rules that it implements. There is no physical system that maps to the rules of chess, it is an abstraction realized by the computer. This I think is the key point that distinguishes computation from causality.
  • What is computation? Does computation = causation
    Here is a demonstrationCount Timothy von Icarus
    Another fun version I have thought about before:

    A very simple algorithm outputs every possible combination of RGB values in a 1024x1024 pixel image. The program, which can be written in an afternoon by a competent programmer, produces 256^3^1024^2 images. Pretty pedestrian, as far as big numbers go. But this program's output will include:

    • Every painting ever painted
    • Every painting, with the subjects replaced by anthropomorphic versions of every animal, in every permutation
    • Every one of your pages, rendered in every font
    • The above, where every character is rendered in every permutation of fonts
    • The above, but where every character is also rendered in permutations of every discernable shade
    • The above, but where every permutation is rotated from 0 to 360 degrees, to the limits of discernibility
    • Every visual experience ever had by every human, awake, asleep, drugged
    • And every other animal
    • The above, but where the scene is rotated in every discernable degree around all 3 axes
    • The above, but where overlaid on top is each and every one of the page images above, with every discernable permutation of transparency, scale, offset
    • Every distinct vantage point of every location on earth, at every scale, and every time
    • ...and every other planet, and every other visually distinct location in the universe
    • ...then overlay the pages
    • ...overlaid on top of that, variations where every forum member here is mooning the "camera", at every discernable location, scale, posture, age, skin tone...

    ...And this only scratches the surface of the surface of the surface of all the discernable images
    .,..And yet, the vast, utterly overwhelming majority look like colored dots.

    If algorithms are just names, a relatively bare bones symbol shuffling algorithm is almost godlike in it's ability to name almost everything.Count Timothy von Icarus

    It just "names" (or, as we prefer, is another form of) every possible book, which is quite a different thing from any particular book. Selecting a desired book out of this heap is another computational problem, which the algorithms definitely do not solve.
  • What is computation? Does computation = causation
    It is actually incredibly difficult to define "computer" in such a way that just our digital and mechanical computers, or things like brains, are computers, but the Earth's atmosphere or a quasar is not,without appealing to subjective semantic meaning or arbitrary criteria not grounded in the physics of those systems.Count Timothy von Icarus

    The question of "what is computation" and "what is a computer" are different. The latter seems straightforward: a computer is a Turing machine, or something that can emulate one. What is wrong with that.

    What distinguishes a computer from other physical systems is not that they have states that evolve, but that they can be set up to compute anything computable. You won't find this in any physical systems other than brains and computers.

    The mistake I mean to point out is that we generally take 10÷2 to be the same thing as 5. Even adamant mathematical Platonists seem to be nominalists about computation. An algorithm that specifies a given object, say a number, "is just a name for that number."Count Timothy von Icarus

    If not a name, 10/2 is certainly another form of 5. And transforming numbers from one form to another, like the transformation of all information, requires work. This work of transforming information from one form to another is called "computation". Does that sound reasonable?

    If the state of a computer C2 follows from a prior state C1, what do we call the process by which C1 becomes C2? Computation. Abstractly, this is also what we call the process of turning something like 10 ÷ 2 into 5.

    What do we call the phenomena where by a physical system in state S1 becomes S2 due to physical interactions defined by the laws of physics and their entailments? Causation.
    Count Timothy von Icarus

    This doesn't seem quite right. In the ordinary sense of the word, a broken computer doesn't "compute" anything. And yet it has C2s that follow from C1s. What is special about computers is not that its states evolve, but that it can be set up to implement ad hoc rules that proceed completely independently of their underlying physical implementation.

    This is seen already with assembly language. It doesn't matter how an assembly language is implemented, only that it is implemented faithfully to its specification. A steam computer would work the same as a silicon computer that both implement the same assembly language. And on top of these abstract rules, more rules can be implemented, that don't resemble even the assembly language. This tower of increasing abstraction can be incredibly tall, and culminates in distributed systems like the web and cryptocurrencies.

    What makes computers special is that they are not bound by physical, causal reality. It is as if, in them, the informational component of reality broke free of the physical component. Brains are especially impressive, in that they are not just computers, but computers which which managed to create computers.
  • What is computation? Does computation = causation
    Great OP, and I am still grappling with it. I think where you lose me is the notion that computation and causation are somehow equivalent. There seem to be too many key differences:

    • There is no such thing as causation that goes wrong. It does what it does, it is infallible by its nature. Whereas at every step, the possibility of error hovers over computation.
    • Causal processes don't inherently require continuous energy input. Strike the cue ball, and the billiards will take care of themselves. Whereas in a computational process, to proceed requires energy at every step. Cut the power, occlude the cerebral artery, and the computation comes to a screeching halt.
    • There is no notion of accuracy of causal systems. They are in themselves infinitely accurate. Whereas for many computations, to achieve perfect accuracy requires infinite time and energy.
    • Causation is something that stuff does. Whereas computation, however sophisticated, can never achieve stuffhood. You can computationally simulate every feature of a waterfall, down to the most minute detail. But no matter how sophisticated, you can never touch a waterfall simulator and get your fingers wet.

    Something like "Computation is to information as causation is to matter" seems more accurate, but even then I am not sure.

    In many respects, it is impossible to distinguish communication from computation in contemporary theories. I think they are different and that this shows a weakness in the theories.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Communication would seem to require encoding, transmission, and decoding. A causal process sandwiched between two computational ones?