Fine tune the form of argument

i just picked up off Wikipedia an excellent argument. If we were to prove that reason was flawed then that would flaw the proof since reason is flawed. Of course that would flaw the counter proof... its a mess.

My aim is not this. It is to show that for any symbolic system to be meaningful it must imply a non-symbolic "higher" heirachy, but obviously not be able to encode it. The "God" (or Mind) in the system so to speak.

Alternatively by reductio ad absurdum, if we were to assume that no non-symbolic realm was entailed, then a symbolic system would be able to entail itself. I seek to find out if this is the non-sense it seems to be.

Infinite heirachies, rather than a finite system, is the way to go.. at least it will keep the human race busy indefinitely!

An argument against materialism +

Just posted to a discussion board... but I have doubts

let me restate that another way in more depth if u don't mind reading it. You talk as though the table exists independent of the brain which percieves it, or the laws of physics under pin a reality which is independent of the brain which undertands them.
From a first person perspective you must admit you don't see 2 tables (the real one, and the perception) there is only 1 and that one is the perceived one. So what happened to the "real" one? Bad dualism steming from the materialist axioms we started with.
Lets start again (phenomenologically). There is only one table, that which you perceive. That is the thing you were calling "real". Your thoughts about it, which are not perceived, are just that "thoughts". when you think that the table is "real" actually that is a thought, not a state of existence! Hence how we can talk endlessly about it!
Now when you state in the 1st person that the perceptions are identical/product/what-ever of a "material brain" there are problems. Firstly that statement is an idea and has no "reality" - it's fantasy, like God. Secondly you are saying that your -now only - table (the perceived one i.e. the real table in your senses) is now not real but the result of this fantasy. Its very shakey territory, it will drive you mad, I hate this thought (for that is all it is).
The only escape is to reassert the primary status of the perception (the real table in the sense), for that is where all this thinking came from! Even if we think later it was an illusion, that is a thought, the "reality" is the "given".
Now that is true non-dualism, and strangely the notion of the "given" leads straight into notions of Pure-Mind, the Absolute and true-God. Ironic eh?

Doubts
=====
I'm still not done personally with the idea of the "given". Certainly I can be unconscious, and certainly i will die, losing all sense and thought. It seems that my ideas can gain knowledge of the "given" in a way that seems to transcend the "given".

Another example would be touching my own brain and watching not only the finger touching the tissue (in a mirror or something) but also the hallucinations it would create. My thoughts would be that the finger presses were causing the hallucinations. In other words the "given" was caused by finger presses to the brain, and that sets off all the thoughts about the brain being the cause of my experience.

Now I could take that a stage further and say that the finger press had caused a given and then caused all the thoughts themselves. That is the problem though isn't it because if the thoughts were caused by the finger press then the finger press is primary, and the thoughts simply entailments of that.

That does bring us back to the given being the primary cause, because it was the given "data" about the finger press, and the "given" hallucinations, that then caused thoughts.

If I fall asleep and wake from unconsciousness that sets off thoughts also. Thoughts about being conscious and thoughts about being unconscious. Interesting then that consciousness is a thought then brought on by unconsciousness. Is consciousness a "given"? that is the question!!

i have assumed to this point that consciousness was the arena of the "given". The "given" being the objects in consciousness. But if consciousness itself is a given, something to be distinguished from unconsciousness only by thought I finally get the bigger picture. The "Given" as transcending even consciousness and that is what I have personally struggled for, for ages.

Now returning to recent posts in the investigation of a proof of the finiteness/incompleteness/indefinite nature of thoughts it is actually accademic! The post made on meditation is the true path, but I wanted to leave a legacy at this cross roads, one that I could return to which clearly summarised the reason for turning away from "thoughts". s it worth continuing? Its still exciting work for the thinking mind, especially making a Turing machine, and learning set theory and logic enough to construct Cantor/Godel/Von Neuman proofs with confidence and following the science of consciousness and mind.

However it seems clear that whatever these branches discover it doesn't change anything, that the mysterious immediacy of Mind, the true Given, cannot be investigated because from it all things come, even the thoughts and theories that fill the pages of science books. Are these devils sapping my energies?

I was reminded last night of the Other World. Particularly vivid after a few weeks of intense "thought". The experience when i was 14 of jhana, that transcendent state of mind brought on by many weeks of hard work and concentration at school and home as i sort to be the best I could be. Totally different from anything I have talked about in these pages, complete unimaginable peace and purity of knowing. I saw the infinity of space within my Mind. I remember especially being aware of the space behind my head. This was not visual space. It came from contemplation of the darkness that surrounding the spot of light cast by the lamp on my desk. That light I realised was created by the darkness, and at once my mind filled the space of darkness - which is all around in a dark room. I may have mentioned this in previous posts ( a failure of my memory). It struck me last night how special and unexplored that experience was, quite different from the arena of play recently.

Is the Mind a Turing machine?

Well there is an easy answer to that: can a human do calculations that are non-computable. What does mean also?

Physics, Consciousness & summary

change of direction. News this week that Oxford studies show that "parallel worlds" significantly solves a number of quantum problems.
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/parallel+universes+exist++study/838052

So i'm off looking at this side of the equation. Consider though that Dennett has shown that Consciousness does not give either a spatially or temporarily coherent picture of brain processing. There is no direct match, rather that space and time seem to be constructs within a Turing machine modelled within the brain. A level of removal. So anyone looking for direct relationship leaves a lot of evidence out.

A learned friend (i.e. i wouldn't dismiss his ideas, and I don't fully understand them) believes (I think) that human choice can determine quantum states, so that we effectively chose which parallel universe we occupy. However (and I will find the experiments) this does not account for the fact that quatum states can be shown to be short lived even without human interference. i.e. it doesn't have to be a human instrument that checks on Shroedingers cat. Now u could argue that the whole system remains in quantum uncertainty until any human observation is made... and i don't know the difference but that is to be rechecked.

In the background I have my own take on this all which is that Mind is prior to all investigation, so putting the cart before the horse will create all kinds of problems. I also challenge the assumption that Mind is a product of Brain. Expect: Mind escapes any attempt at its classification, explanation, or replacement in any way by "thought" which is a product of Brain. I'm feeding in my understanding of Buddhist insights into Mind's unlimited nature. The true reality "just is" and from that comes everything else. Afterall if it "just wasn't" what are we investigating?

p.s. the maths stuff, and computing stuff, is leading - I see - toward an understanding of non-computable which is what I will be scratching around with for a while. Damn i've wasted time. But the naive work i did in 1996 at least put me in the opinion that machines that work on their own data set, recursively, churn out non-sense. That links meaningful work to the environment and intelligence can't be an inner product. Consciousness as we know is outside the brain for how else can we see things? hehe. OK Todo: fully understand proofs of non-computable so I can see if i can either find the right one or construct it. Keep up the effort to show that all textual/symbol work must be done in conjunction with a historical Brain (these marks on the page while having low entropy) are meaningless without a trained human to read them, and that this Brain can't be a "finite state machine" whose output could be totally put to paper. That is what I am doing, but I'm not dumping my training cos u can't learn to read by reading!

Check these names: Hameroff, Penrose in connection with work after 1992 on microtubules and consciousness. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_n6_v15/ai_15447461/pg_1

btw in the smart language I'm learning i can frame the arguments thus: Thought is non-computable because there are issues with recursiveness. It would be like trying to think a thought. Consciousness even more so. And Mind is beyond all frames of reference. Investigate...

p.p.s. the issue of compression shows up too... because finding patterns in data is kike finding meaning too! and if there was a general algorythm then there would be a fixed way of getting meaning and then a machine could replace the human brain... a multiplicity of algorithms is the point and the mysterious (karmic) glue which determines which ones we use at any given time!

The Transcendental Set

Propositon: a set cannot be a member of itself

Using c to mean is a subset of, ¬c to mean not a subset of, e to mean is a member of, and ¬e mean not a member of, n to mean intersection

Take a universal set (U) of natural numbers: N
If E is the set of all the even numbers, then E c N but E ¬e N because "the set of even numbers" is not itself a number. (i.e. A is a subset of N, but not a member of N.)

Thus the process of "creating" a set seems to be an arbitrary "given" action performed by the thinker which is not present within the theory of sets. In other words, you cannot express the process of set creation within set theory, it is a mysterious process of "mind" that is required prior to set theory itself.

We can create a new universal set: the set of all natural numbers and sets of these numbers = N1

Now E c N1 and E e N1.

But if we create a new exotic set say all the even numbers and itself, E1

Then again E1 c N1 but E ¬e N1

Now we can continue this recursion one stage further, N2 = the set of all natural numbers, sets of these numbers and sets of these sets. There is an infinite recursion at each stage the new Nx not being a member of itself.

Is it possible to close this infinite recursion by being self referential? So that T was a set of sets of such sets to an infinitely level of recursion i.e. T e T

We would need to say something like: T = the set of all sets where each member x, if x ¬e N can be unpacked recursively until x e N.

However there is the obvious problem that this loop cannot be resolved because T = {T, ...} and at each stage it must start again to unpack itself.

However if we were to create a super set without complex conditions basically the set of everything. A set that truely can belong to itself. I have come to consider what the meaning of such a set is? Can it actually be formulated, is it meaningful?

Consider so far: there is the arbitrary process required by the human operator to construct a set. Even just using the empty set {} an infinite set can be created as is used to define the natural numbers (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/set-theory/primer.html/l4). Quite how we construct sets tho is quite arbitrary and requires the "intelligence" of an operator to "decide" what to do. Logical systems can't solve themselves else the whole of maths and thought would be there on a plate. So while we can consider such a set, real set theory requires meaningful decisions by the operator to "create" sets and monitor the process of proof and deduction. The set T is composed from an indefinite number of meaningless and contradictory sets (like the set of all sets that do not contain themselves). It is a real chimera of no rigorous value.

Let us take such a transcendental set T which has one member namely itself.

T = {T}

This defines a recursive set so that unpacking any number of times gives us equalities of the form:

T = {..{{{{T}}}}..}

If we try to create a new set containing the transcendental set {T} we find that it is the same as T. The recursion works indefinitely in both directions (i.e. unpacking and repacking).

T has only one member itself, but defines an infinite "heirachy" of sets. Heirachy was the property that stopped us previously making {A} a member of A.

Now let us take an exotic transcendental set with a second non transcendental member.
T = {T, A}

This creates a recursion downwards when we try to "unpack" and a heirachy of the form
T = {.. { { { {T, A}, A} ,A} ,A} .. ,A}

However If we repack (recurse the other way) we can ask what is {T} ? i.e. what is the set containing T?

It clearly isn't T itself (which is {T, A} ) and it isn't a member of T either.

Again the process of heirachy stops us from including T within itself. It is no-longer a transcendental set.

If however we take the set A again (which is a subset of T) then we could repack the two together {T, A} and continue the recursion backwards.

...this is to be completed...

I was also thinking that the first exploration shows us that when a set is determined by reference to members it can't be a member of itself because there is the recursive problem of finding out what the members are.

However if a set is defined by reference to set properties that are clear regardless of the members then we can determine set membership without recursion, and then the possibility of self inclusion arises.

To investigate that I was considering the properties of a set. Let P be the set of all set properties
P = {definition, description, cardinality}

P should be self referential at least in that if it is a set it should fulfill those criteria.

P = {"a list of different entities separated by commas and enclosed in brackets", "the list of all set properties", 3}

Now using these we can construct sets without reference to their members, and so avoid the recursion problem.

1) A set containing a set: T = {T}

2) A set whose member is named T: T = {T}

3) A set containing 1 member T = {T}

But these are rather fake examples. A necessary example would be the set of all sets which MUST contain itself since it is a set. T = {T, ...}

I'll leave the investigation there for now till its clear where to go...

The Ultimate

A brief foray into set theory last week came as an attempt to prove that the Ultimate must be a different type of thing to everything else. Hiding in the wings was the idea that the Mind must be a "given" in any thinking - not in Cartesian sense that there must be a thinker - but in the sense that thought can't hold together without something linking the thoughts etc. Whatever that is it can't be itself a thought. Its the general view that there must be a heirachy in any system where each level cannot access the higher level. Thus for example God cannot Himself a thing in the world He created, or that a Table can't be the same type of thing as its components etc

The form of the proof was that there cannot be a set containing the Universal set.

Let us refer to the ultimate Universal (E), the set of all things, and all sets of things. There is nothing which is not in this Ultimate set. The question is: is there a set containing E?

If there is a set containing E then it must be a member of E. However if there is not a set containing E then E is unlike all things in that it is not a member of any set.

Let us define a set T = {E}

and since T is a set it belongs to E. Now how do we define T'? On the one hand T' is everything else in the universal set E, on the other it is

...

to be completed there is a tricky bit here, creating a set seems to protect us from the problem!!!!


Anyway that has led to Alan Turing and the Universal Turing Machine. The question I seem to have posed myself since a child has been this question of the Ultimate and whether there is anything beyond it, or whether it even exists. Were it to be decided one way or another what the nature of the Ultimate was it seems to have a lot of ramifications. For one it would stop people fighting thinking that they have got the position of ultimate. It would also sort out the body/mind problem because the question there is one of ultimate: some say that matter is sufficient for everything and others mind, and the people in between have got oil and water. It sorts out AI and whether finite machines can experience a "World" it ties a lot that i've struggled for together so I'm interested. Whether it helps with that question of Life remains to be seen, a Life spent searching the answer seems a bad answer and a bad question!

i continue to explore this but realise with some humility that maybe my faculties are not up to it, and there have been some truley great people before me who have not to my knowledge devised any rigorous views of the ultimate. Infact the ultimate seems largely unexplored by most. Maths covers it with Cantor and his theory of infinities, religions cover it with God. The view seems to be that the ultimate is impossible and beyond finite minds.

Now with Turing machines at least we could show that any notion of "the ultimate" either was or was not computable?

The persisting idea for myself is that whatever is done it seems that we lie outside the system being devised. If we ever were to devise an ultimate answer we would lie outside. So I suspect any proofs come in the form that the Ultimate could never contain itself. Turing machines written on Turing machines? that was the plan tonight but its late I'm tired and pumping out "notes" onto this ticker tape for my "system state" to start again at some time in the future.

Stuff here from Daniel Dennett who've I argued against before but am taking more seriously now as a means of seeing if there are any immanent contradictions.

Searle, Strawson, Saussure note to self to consider them...

Its a huge question not least because whenever I try to frame the question the frame itself becomes a limit that needs to be reconsidered. There seems to be no foundation large enough to create a proof that covers everything? I'm looking for a limit of thought that might liberate a world beyond thought, yet even thought is a tricky thing which refuses exact definition.

The undecidability of it, non-computability of it might be the way forward. There is neither a proof of the infinite, nor the finite because it is even more abstract than that. Imagine living in a world which was proven to be infinite. Isn't that as frightening a prospect as one that was proven to be finite? Its an interesting thought. I certainly want to tidy all this up, as said before about narcisism i am tired of doing the same thing, the same tricks, the same questions. Its been the best part of a life now chasing after the Ultimate, the Big Question, the Gold country, but I am tired... and hungry

Argument for why I am a narcisist

I think I am better than other people
I have this problem with idealising girls, but then finding then worthless
I do not like being contradicted
I can fall into a world view where i seem to be the only one existing
I like being an object of adoration
I do not like order, and seek instability, arguing for in the form of an indefinable Ultimate which cannot be bettered.


So I was just reading about this on the web. It fits certain facts, in particular the issue I have grown tired of namely the struggle to prove my worth. It seems that unless I "am" somebody then my life is worthless. However becoming somebody in the sense of having a particular status is not enough because it draws me into a fixed status, a mediocrity, so i abandon any particular status in search of the Ultimate. The Ultimate being some state that cannot be bettered which is all encompassing and which avoids the problem of being bettered itself, of being incomplete, of being mediocre. So the chaos continues so that I do not become fixed into a mundane state.

My defense is that seeking to be better as a person is not a bad thing. That not associating with those who one deems lacking in such a lofty desire keeps one vigorous. To enjoy the company of one who sees one as special is no different from love. Being contadicted for the sake of it, or unjustly without apparent cause is annoying. There is something particularly unusual about being oneself which gives ones own perspective a automatic first place or first person. That without balance can lead toward self-obsession.

The main point is that I am tired of all these things already. I do not want have to be better than others. Can't life be a peaceful acceptance of oneself without struggle and likewise the acceptance of others without struggle. The problem there is that so often others seem to make crazy decisions which do effect oneself and you wish that you had been in the position to make that decision yourself: top of the list the decisions to do all this warring. Governments innocently say that it was a carefully taken decision yet to myself it was always absurd. That does lead me to want to separate myself from these "idiotic" people. "Idiotic people" is a phrase I am tired of hearing from myself.

Anyway to personal resolutions to correct any imbalance are thus: firstly to seek an even view of others. If people make "crazy" decisions I at least must realise that to them they made sense, even if I am too idiotic myself to understand why. Secondly it is impossible to seek a total world view so that you might be in a position to make "correct" decision for everyone. Thus an individual can never know what is best for others, and therefore never "help" in an absolute way others because the individual only ever has a partial picture. Thirdly (I have made suprising progress here) seeking a satisfactory existence without the attention of others, especially girls.

Fourthly gets its special line (blog entry) because it links directly into the general flow of the blog. The Ultimate? new post...