>> Yes, I'll match my understanding and knowledge of, and ideas on, the free
>> will issue against anyone's.
Arrogant much?
>> I just introduced an entirely new dimension to the free will debate. You
>> literally won't find it anywhere. Including Dennett. Free thinking. If we
>> are free to decide, then it follows we are also free to think
Oh, please . . . .
Consider first, that your if clause (If we are free to decide) is under serious
debate . . . . making it invalid to simply assume it and jump to the then
clause.
>> There is a crashingly obvious difference between a rational computer and a
>> human mind - and the only way cognitive science has managed not to see it
>> is by resolutely refusing to look at it, just as it resolutely refused to
>> look at the conscious mind in the first place. The normal computer has no
>> problems concentrating. Give it a problem and it will proceed to produce a
>> perfect rational train of thought, with every step taken, and not a single
>> step missed. (Or to put that another way - it has zero freedom of thought).
Hmmm. While I agree with your first statement of the difference -- that normal
(digital) computers (as they are most currently used) have no problems
concentrating, I don't see how it has any relevance to *or* proof of the fact
that the mind has freedom of thought (which I would seriously debate).
I also can't believe that you are arrogant enough to believe that *everyone*
involved in cognitive science has "resolutely refused to look at the conscious
mind in the first place".
You're just a common troll dude. You clearly don't have enough knowledge to
make the statements you're making.
Does anyone have a quick URL for the paper that shows that the less you know,
the more likely you are to believe that you're an expert and have all the
answers?
Personally, I'm going to try to overcome my enjoyment of debate and refrain
from replying any more to you until you ground yourself.
Mark
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Tintner
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 9:47 AM
Subject: Re: [agi] The Advantages of a Conscious Mind
Ben,
Yes, I'll match my understanding and knowledge of, and ideas on, the free
will issue against anyone's.
For example - and this is the real issue that concerns YOU and AGI - I just
introduced an entirely new dimension to the free will debate. You literally
won't find it anywhere. Including Dennett. Free thinking. If we are free to
decide, then it follows we are also free to think - not merely to decide
either way at the end of solving a problem, but free as to how we go about
solving that problem - free to spend a little more time or less time on it,
free to ask someone else's opinion or go with our gut instinct, free to list
the pro's and cons or to take the first reasonable idea that comes along, free
to attack it logically/algebraically or verbally etc. etc.
That is an extremely important dimension of free will. It simply hasn't been
considered. Clearly it should be.
For the purposes of AGI, you can put the free will issue to one side, at
least for a while, I would suggest, and concentrate on freedom of thought. You
see, it is absolutely fundamental to robotics to describe robots in terms of
degrees of freedom - of movement, (whatever your views on free will)..It is, or
will be, similarly fundamental to AGI to describe autonomous computational
minds in terms of degrees of freedom - of thought.
There is a crashingly obvious difference between a rational computer and a
human mind - and the only way cognitive science has managed not to see it is
by resolutely refusing to look at it, just as it resolutely refused to look at
the conscious mind in the first place. The normal computer has no problems
concentrating. Give it a problem and it will proceed to produce a perfect
rational train of thought, with every step taken, and not a single step missed.
(Or to put that another way - it has zero freedom of thought).
But human minds have major problems concentrating. Literally for more than
seconds on end. For a human mind to produce a rational reflective train of
thought for something like a minute is virtually impossible. Obviously this
varies according to the problem/ subject, but the basic problem of
concentration is acknowledged by a whole variety of psychologists from Williiam
James to Cszikszentmilhalyi - and undeniable.
Look at how human minds actually approach problems - their literal streams of
thought (something cognitive psychology still almost totally refuses to do) -
and you will find that humans can and do miss out at different times each and
every step of what might be considered a rational train of thought - they don't
listen to, or set the question/problem, don't look at the evidence or look at
irrelevant things, don't even try to have ideas, are biassed, don't think for
themselves but copy others' ideas, lose the thread, go off at tangents, repeat
themelves, are uncritical, don't check etc etc. In innumerable ways, we almost
always jump to conclusions and leave out ideal steps of reasoning. We are
incapable of producing extended rational trains of thought and movement. (Just
look at student essays, right?) We may be fairly effective reasoners, all
things considered, but by the reasoning standards of rational computers we are
irrational, period.
Now to the rational philosopher and scientist and to the classical AI person,
this is all terrible (as well as flatly contradicting one of the most
fundamental assumptions of cognitive science, i.e. that humans think
rationally). We are indeed "only human not [rational, deterministic] machines."
But I would expect someone who cares about AGI to understand that this is
also all beautiful. Our extreme capacity for error can also be described as
extreme freedom of thought- and the basis of our adaptivity. Every error in
one context is an adaptive advantage in another. It's good and vital in all
kinds of situations to be able to jump to conclusions, for example. It's good
and vital to be able to completely restructure the ways you think about a
problem.
I would expect you and Pei to be deeply interested in that whole dimension of
freedom of thought (and also to see that it provides a functional distinction
between the conscious and unconscious mind, where currently NONE exists). If
you are not interested, no problem.
P.S. Re the free will issue, & laws of physics etc, I would suggest that
there is only one thing that should immediately concern you or anyone else -
nobody from Spinoza to Schopenauer to Einstein, to decidedly lesser deteminist
lights like Strawson, Honderich & Smilansky, has ever produced ONE SINGLE PIECE
OF EVIDENCE that animals and humans are determined - that their decisionmaking
and actiontaking shows or obeys any consistent, lawful patterns of behaviour
whatsoever. You can scour the entire literature for the rest of your life,
including Wegner and other determinist scientists, and you still will not find
one piece of evidence. NADA. In hundreds of years, science still has produced
no laws of behaviour for living creatures. Period. Laws of physics yes, laws of
behaviour, none.
Libet will come to your mind - who is in fact entirely irrelevant - precisely
because that is the only thing that even looks like evidence that has ever been
produced.
When you can produce ONE piece of evidence for deterministic behaviour, then,
just possibly, you might have some SCIENTIFIC (as opposed to philosophical)
reason to talk about the "illusion" of free will. Until then, none.
And if you're a betting man, pay attention to Dennett. He wrote about
Consciousness in the early 90's, & together with Crick helped make it
scientifically respectable. About five years later, consciousness studies swept
science and philosophy. Now he has just written about free will, and although
the book was pretty bad, it was important in being arguably the first by a
scientific philosopher to assert that free will is consistent with science and
materialism. I'll gladly place a friendly (and you might think outrageous) bet
with you that that book is similarly prescient and free will will be the new
default philosophy of science within 5-10 years. In case you haven't noticed,
it is actually already being widely taken in a kind of de facto, implicit
rather than explicit way, as the basic philosophy of autonomous mobile
robotics.
----- Original Message -----
From: Benjamin Goertzel
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 11:49 AM
Subject: Re: [agi] The Advantages of a Conscious Mind
Mike,
The conscious mind thinks literally, freely. How long it will spend on
any given decision, and what course of thought it will pursue in reaching that
decision are definitely NOT set, but free.
Ah, well, I'm glad to see the age-old problem of free will versus
determinism is solved now! Mike has spoken!! ;-)
Seriously ... have you read Libet's work on free will and the brain? Have
you read Dennett's book "Freedom Evolves"? How about "The Illusion of
Conscious Will"?
The illusion of free will is a pretty subtle issue. I have made my own
hypothesis regarding the sort of mechanism that underlies it in the human
mind/brain, which is described in my 2006 book "the Hidden Pattern" and in
preliminary form here:
http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2004/FreeWill.htm
You guys are clearly moving that way - but still appear to have a
somewhat confused philosophical understanding of why all this is really
necessary.
Mike ... really ... has it ever occurred to you that you might NOT have a
deeper understanding of these issues than people who have read all the existing
literature on the topics and thought about them for decades??
On some topics, naive intuition can be misleading. Especially topics that
involve illusions we humans have **evolved** to hold intuitively, so as to make
our lives simpler...
Please note that the naive notion of freedom you advocate contradicts all
known physics including quantum physics and (all currently seriously debated
variants of) quantum gravity. (As an aside, it also contradicts most mystical
and spiritualistic thinking which denies the typical, naive Western over-hyping
of the "autonomous individual.")
I remember a story by Kafka about a monkey trapped in a cage, who developed
human-level intelligence with the goal of escaping the cage. I don't recall
the wording but , translated into Goertzel-ese idiom, Kafka wrote something
like: "The monkey was not seeking freedom. By no means. Freedom is just a
complicated illusion. What the monkey was seeking was something simpler and
more profound and important: **a way out** "
;-)
This monkey is also seeking a way out, and I don't think the old illusions
of free will are necessary (or sufficient) for this purpose...
-- Ben G
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