Dear Alexey and Lev,
Your essay is very nicely written, I like your prose and poetry. If I had one criticism to make, it would be that you ask to many questions and some of them seem to be left unanswered, but maybe I should read your essay again.
All the best,
Patrick
Dear Alexey and Lev,
To the dithyrambs which have sounded into your address, I need to add my voice only. Your work is really good, clever and poetical. But however, I will afford some speculations concerning the topic.
I suppose that the Mathematics is a contour map of that beautiful landscape which is named as the Laws of Nature which Beauty is a image (reflection) of Harmony. Harmony is the ideal of mind motivating it (mind) to evolution, i.e. to perpetually tendency to Harmony.
My very best regards,
Vladimir A. Rodin
http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2752
Many thanks, George!
To increase our chances for that coffee shop discussion, I've just sent you a LinkedIn connection request. In case you will happen to be in the Chicago area, please do not hesitate to let us know.
Yours, Alexey.
Dear Patrick,
Your compliments have a special weight for us. Thanks!
Could it really happen that some of our questions are left unanswered? :^)
Cheers,
Alexey.
Dear Vladimir,
Many thanks for your encouraging voice. Apparently, your speculations above are in full harmony with ours, aren't they?
I just started reading your essay, so you may expect some comments on your page.
Cheers,
Alexey.
Dear, George, I agree. Here seems little more than a good place to outline basic positions. My Gmail is just a catenation of my first and last name. Now I have one more amazing conversation to look forward to. If you happen to travel past Chicago, Cafe Descartes is on me!
Dear Alexey & Lev,
I've just returned to your essay. Very well written but I struggled with it the first time so didn't comment or score it. ..But as you don't mine quibbles!: You seemed to dismiss any possibility of a 'thought & matter' relationship before moving away to eulogize mathematics. I'd hoped you may see the architecture described in mine and other similar and excellent essays. You haven't commented on mine, but have you looked and considered them?
From philosophy I find Dennett's view the most coherent; that there really is no longer a problem. Are you familiar with that? He describes looking at a laptop at screen & mouse scale and saying "We can't possibly understand how that really works"! Do you refute his views?
From AI we now produce learning, decision making and consequential decisions drawn from memories serving the first via neural feedback loops which then becomes what we call an 'aim'. Any input can trigger some response. The models here show similar if far more complex mechanisms from multi trillion particle systems. Can you identify what more fundamental effect is required to replicate most mental processes?
And is Haldane's supposed 'self contradiction' not logically meaningless?
I do agree and embrace other parts, particularly the geometers. I hadn't seen Hardy on Euclid's and Pythagoras' theorems; "...there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy." Thanks for that. Interestingly I extend Pythagoras to 3D dynamics to identify a classical derivation of QM. Certainly 'unexpected' (except by John Bell!) not to mention shocking, but falsifiable and self evident none the less, for any not too scared to look!
I've found some from Fermilab have old doctrine fermly embedded! but I do hope you'll get to read mine carefully, do some rationalisation and comment.
Many thanks for your patience, and well done. Very best.
Peter
Dear Vladimir,
I have to admit that mostly I am puzzled by your composition, so that I do not even see how it does relate to the topic of this contest. One thing though attracted my attention in a special way:
"Eternity in our Universe is just a moment for the next level Universe, which our one is nested in, as a spatial pixel."
This image reminded me the butterfly parable of Chuang Chou (Zhuangzi), leading to his famous question, repeated much later by Descartes: what if all wanderings toward goals are totally misleading and futile, as dreams? Apparently, the Chinese sage left this problem unresolved, while the French father of science gave his circular solution. I guess this problem belongs to the core of the contest's topic.
Cheers,
Alexey Burov.
Dear Peter,
With your criticism, your compliments are especially valuable. Thank you.
We tried to show that the naturalistic approach to the mind-body problem leads to the Epimenides paradox; for this approach, there is no reason to trust and value any knowledge, except maybe one directed to more comfort. The problem of trust and value is at the corner of any serious cognition. You may find it in the Greek skepticism, in the Vedic Maya, in the butterfly parable of Chuang Chou, in the evil demon problem of Descartes, in Einstein's act of faith to the non-malicious God, in the Haldane's refutation of the dictatorship of the 'atoms of brain'. Theoretical Physics may be meaningful only if the fundamental trust to and value of knowledge are established, provided that reason can accept that ground. It is not the case for the naturalistic approach, as we briefly outlined. By itself, science cannot establish its own ground of trust and meaning. In more details, you may read about that, for example, in a recent book of Thomas Nagel "Mind & Cosmos".
Since I am keeping as a rule to read essays of those who spent their time on mine, I will try to succeed with yours before April 7th.
Thanks again and all the best,
Alexey.
Alexey and Lev,
Well Done! Your essay is thoughtful, elegant, and subtle. It is a logical extension of the previous essay topic.
If I understand what you have presented, you argue that sentience must be a property of matter and its structure. The essence of your argument is that any other hypothesis will lead to a self-contradiction.
In addition, you present evidence to support this belief as follows: Many mathematicians have a shared belief in the beauty and elegance of Mathematics. Since they independently arrive at this viewpoint, their minds must all share a similar structure that aligns their minds and hence their thinking with something more fundamental. Perhaps this is similar to a group of people all looking at the same light off in the distance.
Furthermore, some people have the ability to apply intuition to produce new hypotheses that are elegant and fit within several parts of mathematics. This is viewed as additional supporting evidence.
If I describe your ideas with just a single word, that word must be "elegant".
Best Regards and Good Luck,
Gary Simpson
Hi Gary,
Thank you so much for your generous compliments and associated images.
In the first part of our essay we tried to show that
the hypothesis of aleatory or mechanical emergence of thought from matter should be rejected, and not even due to the significant hurdles of its scientific weakness and unfalsifiability but because of its Epimenidic character, its entailment of cognitive suicide.
Some people appreciate that, others disregard, while a small portion of our readers understand this in the exactly opposite way. Clearly, this issue is not easy at all.
Your meditation, finished with
some people have the ability to apply intuition to produce new hypotheses that are elegant and fit within several parts of mathematics
is ours as well. We see here the same light, Gary!
Special thanks for rating our essay and all the best,
Yours, Alexey.
