Dear Bruno,
Thank you for your kind reply, but...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruno Marchal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Stephen Paul King" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Everything-List List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, August 20, 2005 10:16 AM
Subject: Re: subjective reality
Hi Stephen,
Le 19-août-05, à 22:47, Stephen Paul King a écrit :
It seems to me a proof that YD is false be equivalent to a proof that
a Machine X fails the Turing Test! Is this nonsense about falsifying YD
not a requirement that we prove a negative proposition?
Not at all and it is a key point. You confuse what I call comp, (I am a
machine, "Yes doctor", en gros), the strong AI thesis, that is machine
have phenomenal qualia (say), and BEH-MEC, behavioral mechanism: machine
can behave *like* if they had phenomenal qualia.
[SPK]
This looks suspiciously like confusing 1st person and 3rd person
aspects! But whatever the case, I disagree. Unless a means can be found to
record and playback (as in the movie Brainstorm) phenomenal qualia we have
nothing but factually unjustified belief in YD. With out proof all that one
has is BEC-MEC, i.e. the Turing Test.
To be clear: to refute mec-beh you need to prove that ALL machine (note
one!) fail the turing test (en gros), to refute the strong AI thesis, you
need to prove that ALL machine cannot have phenomenal experiences (or
subjective, first person, private, etc.).
[SPK]
Not really, all that is required is that it is in principle impossible
for the class of Machines to emulate minds. IF minds are purely classical,
AI goes through. IF minds as some aspect that is QM that is indispensable,
the proof holds. QED. Unless there exists a subclass of Machines that
satisfies the all of the requirements to emulate an arbitrary Mind then
Strong AI is ...
To refute comp (see the definition in my SANE paper) you need to show that
for all level of digital description of yourself, none can be turing
emulable.
[SPK]
This is too high a bar to ask for! In effect you have made comp
unfalsifiable! Like I stated in the first place, you are asking for a
skeptic to prove a negative!
Logically (that is, without OCCAM) we have
comp ==> STRONG AI ==> MEC-BEH
Note that STRONG AI does not entail comp, because "machine could think"
does not entail "only machine could think" (of course if "machine can
think" then with OCCAM, it is reasonable to suppose comp. But given I
propose a proof it is important to keep in mind we cannotI use OCCAM. I
mean I doen't propose any original theory, I take the oldest one and show
it is incompatible with another old prejudice:
materialisme/naturalism/physicalism).
So comp is the strongest hypothesis. Now, comp is weaker than any theory
which fixe a level of description. In that sense comp is very weak. Indeed
comp is weaker that quantum mechanics (without collapse), or any actual
theory except Penrose one (despite defect in Penrose reasoning, the
conclusion are similar: comp and materialism are incompatible.
[SPK]
I hope you can address the Calude et al paper some day... ;-)
1.. C. S. Calude, P. H. Hertling, K. Svozil. Embedding quantum universes
into classical ones, Foundations of Physics, 29, 3 (1999), 349-379.
http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~svozil/publ/1999-embed-jfulltext.pdf
Onward!
Stephen
