Re: What Computationalism is and what it is *not*

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 04:54:38 -0700


On 02 Sep 2005, at 03:05, Lee Corbin wrote:



Bruno: Tegmark's paper is interesting, except that he still (like many physicists) puts

the mind-body problem under the rug, and so he misses the impact of incompleteness,

and the fact that at the level of mathematical Platonism, the physical world is not

just a mathematical structure among others. With comp, although physics is secondary,

the physical world is not just a mathematical structure among others, but a very

special mathematical structures emerging from existing relations among a vast set

of mathematical structures.



Again, you seem to insist on your own language.



Not at all. I insist on the consequences of comp. Like Godfrey you have admitted not having read neither the UDA proof nor its constructive translation. Now you talk like if I was calling comp something else. That physics is secondary with comp is a result, a theorem in cognitive science/theology/biology (call that like you want). That materialism is incompatible with computationalism is a result, etc.
So please, you can doubt the result, and then you could perhaps point on some error in UDA, but it is unfair to pretend that by comp I am not just talking on the "well known" comp in cognitive science. Of course, many many many papers still confused comp and materialism, but unless UDA is wrong this is no more possible to do.


First, you admitted that by "COMP" or "comp" you *meant* computationalism.

I have always use that term. comp is just shorter and easy to pronounce.


Then you overlay all your own beliefs on computationalism,
which certainly confuses a lot of people.

No. I point on a theorem and refer to its proof. Actually I intervene in this list when people says something which can be shown not valid by the UDA reversal.


Here is what wikipedia says: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism

"Computationalism is a specific form of cognitivism which argues that mental activity is computational, i.e. that the mind is
essentially a Turing machine.


Lee, please take into account that those who wrote those words are probably not (yet?) aware of my result.
My fault, in part, because I am slow at submitting papers. Actually I have never do that. All papers which I have published has been ordered by some people who heard about my stuff. Why? That's another story.
Of course the reversal result introduces ambiguity in expressions like "mental activity". That is why I sum up "comp" by YD + CT + AR. ("Yes doctor" + Church Thesis + Arithmetical realism).







Many researchers argued that the trend in connectionism was towards a reversion to associationism, and
the abandonment of the idea of a language of thought, something they felt was mistaken. On the other hand, it was those very
tendencies that made connectionism attractive for other researchers.

"Connectionism and computationalism need not be at odds per se, but the debate as it was phrased in the late 1980s and early 1990s
certainly led to opposition between the two approaches. However, throughout the debate some researchers have argued that
connectionism and computationalism are fully compatible, though nothing like a consensus has ever been reached. The differences
between the two approaches that are usually cited are the following:

    * Computationalists posit symbolic models that do not resemble underlying brain
      structure at all, whereas connectionists engage in "low level" modeling, trying
      to ensure that their models resemble neurological structures.
    * Computationalists generally focus on the structure of explicit symbols (mental
      models) and syntactical rules for their internal manipulation, whereas
      connectionists focus on learning from environmental stimuli and storing
      this information in a form of connections between neurons.
    * Computationalists believe that internal mental activity consists of manipulation
      of explicit symbols, whereas connectionists believe that the manipulation of
      explicit symbols is a poor model of mental activity.


Here I agree comp must be distinguished with functionalism, and then comp is much weaker, because it says we are turing machine emulable *at some level*, which could be far more low than symbolic type of processing (it could even be the dovetailing on the solution of DeWhit-Wheeler cosmological wave equation). But this makes sense through the result I got, with the grandmother YD and without.




So please, Bruno, quit trying to imply that all computationalists (e.g. me)
believe *only* on the UDist or only in mathematical structures.


Don't confuse UDist (Schmidhuber Hal Finney sort of theory) and the UD. Original paper of UD "paradox":
Note the reversal is implicit (diplomatic stuff!).
The question is: Do you agree that YD, computationalism, and Uploading acceptance are mainly equivalent?
Then I have shown that this entails the reversal physics/computer-science.



For many, many years whenever you wrote "COMP" I assumed that you meant your
own theories.

I have no theory other than traditional computationalism (mind is turing emulable)


My theory is the standard "mechanist" thesis updated by Post, Godel, Church, Kleene, discoveries of the universal machine and its lobian theorem prover extension.





Naturally that included this extremely speculative concept of
Schmidhuber's and others that that both time and our physical reality are
merely a manifestation of timeless bitstrings.


This is perhaps the biggest difference between Schmidhuber and me. I give a detailed proof of the main proposition without making any speculation other than putting clearly the hypotheses on the table.
For many comp is obviously true and for many comp is obviously false. The least thing I illustrate is that comp is not obvious at all. Indeed, the mind-body problem is partially reduced to explaining how the physical appearances emerges from *all* computations through "internal first person points of view (which makes sense by CT).





"(2) Philosophical AI or Computationalism"
"Secondly, and of more relevance to this discussion, is computationalism or philosophical AI, (sometimes also known as Strong AI),  which is the view that all human mental activities are reducible to algorithms, and could therefore be implemented on a computer.


This is just wrong and is a typical confusion between p -> q and q -> p (which can be often seen as an abuse of OCCAM).
STRONG AI = machine can be conscious
COMP = me and humans are turing emulable. (+ humans are conscious).
STRONG AI does not logically imply COMP (machine could think does not logically entail that only machine could think! Of course with OCCAM, machine can think makes more plausible that we are perhaps machine, but given that I provide a proof we must distinguish deduction and  inductive inference).





Computationalism is an essential tenet of physicalism, which states that there is no need to assume any spiritual or non-algorithmic
aspect to existence.


Comp *was*  an essential tenet of physicalism. That's explain why the reversal is "shocking", for many, probably.
UDA shows that comp makes physicalism, materialism, naturalism wrong (or explicatively empty, like invisible horses pulling cars).




"Computationalism  is thus diametrically opposed to Buddhist philosophy, which regards the subtle mind (that which survives death
and goes on to the next life) as a fundamental aspect of reality,


Even before the reversal, YD is already quite close to the comp theology: you can save your soul on a disk, and survive a form of body transmigration, and the UDA shows that this put fundamental constraints on the nature of reality.




not an epiphenomenon of matter. Buddhism views a sentient being,
human or animal and its mind, as a totally different kind of thing from a machine or automaton."



Actually this is also an incredible simplification of Buddhism which has many different viewpoints on those matter. the "Milinda question" is arguably defending comp.
But then please again in consideration the reversal. I could accept that old, pre-reversal, comp can be thoughjt contrary to buddhism, but after the reversal I doubt such arguments remain valid.

Please, Lee, in older posts you acknowledge the newness of what I pretend having done, it is up to you to verify the UDA if you think an error has been commited. Ask any question.I probably underestimate the hardness and radical novelty of what I consider to be the result of a not so hard (but not so simple too) hypotheses-deductive reasoning.
The translation and "constructivisation" of the UDA argument, AUDA or the machine interview, is admittedly much more involved and demanding in mathematical logic.

Bruno






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