On 2/20/2017 7:33 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Feb 18, 2017 at 1:19 AM, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:
Dark Matter and Dark Energy remain complete mysteries.
As far as I can tell, what we have is a falsification of current
theories. They appear to be good enough approximations for many
things, but then they fail at predicting the expansion rate of the
universe right? Maybe it's dark matter, maybe it's something else,
They are 2 separate mysteries. Dark Matter is a mysterious something that
makes up 28% of the universe and holds galaxies and clusters of galaxies
together. Dark Energy is a even more mysterious something that makes up 69%
of everything and causes the expansion of the entire universe to accelerate.
And about 4% of the universe is made of the sort of normal matter and energy
that until about 20 years ago was the only type we thought existed.
There is a straightforward extension of General Relativity and Quantum
Mechanics that explains Dark Energy, however it gives a figure that is
10^120 too large, it's been called the worse mismatch between theory and
observation in the entire history of science. I think it's fair to say we
really don't have a clue about Dark Energy, and Dark Matter is almost as
confusing.
If science failed so far at explaining something, then it doesn't
matter?
Science has an explanation for consciousness that works beautifully,
consciousness is the way information feels when it is being processed
intelligently.
I know that your position is that information processing is
nonsensical without matter. Many times you invited Bruno to compete
with Intel, etc. So what you are saying is that "consciousness is the
way matter feels when it participates in an intelligent computation".
This "explanation" begs the question already.
Then there's the issue of defining "processed intelligently". What
does that even mean? Where do you draw the line between intelligent
and non-intelligent processing? Let me guess: intelligent processing
is the kind that generates consciousness.
No, intelligent processing it that which leads to useful activity toward
a goal. That's why consciousness has to be consciousness OF a world in
which action is possible. It only exists in a context.
For me, the interesting question is whether there can be intelligence
without consciousness, or more accurately can there be intelligence
which is conscious in a different way. We can see from Big Blue,
Watson, and deep neural nets that there can be intelligence based
different kinds of information processing. I suspect this means there
would be different kinds of consciousness associated with them - but how
could we know and what would it mean? John McCarthy warned many years
ago that we should be careful not to create robots that had general
intelligence, lest we inadvertently create conscious beings to whom we
would have ethical obligations.
Brent
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