[EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > George and List: > a very naive question (even more than my other posts) since I miss lots of > posts that have been exuded on this list (since a decade or so of my incompletely reading it): > Has it been ever formulated (and accepted on this list!) what we mean by the verb "to observe"? What does an 'observer' do in its (not his!!!) 'observer minute'? WHAT (and not 'who') is an observer? >
Many hours spent on this one. My definition sounds odd but only because I have to literally 'build' observation that I have had to sort it out. As an engineer I know that building an X is a sure route to an intimate understanding of X....so...My design goal: construction of an artificial scientist (artificial general intelligence - AGI). Thus logically I must build an observer. So.. the design aim of the project has observation as follows...(off the top of my head!): Observation involves (necessitates) the AGI having experiences, some of which are an experiential representation of the external world. The process of generation of the experiential field(s) involves the insertion of the AGI in the chain of causality from that which is observed 'out there' through the external world to the sensing surface, impact (causal interaction) measured by sensing, transport (causality again) of the measurement through the AGI to the brain where the measurement participates in the causality that is the creation of the experiential field. It is by virtue of the existence/reality of the _entire_ causal chain that the experiential field can be created and be called observation of the external world. (Clearly experiential fields can also be created as hallucinations/dreams, without the full causality chain - but that is not the 'observation' we are talking about). In making use of the complete causal chain the oberver has access (inherits some of the properties of) to that which is observed. This is not 'creating reality' in the Berkeleyian sense. This is participation in it. This is construction of a representation of it from within the reality. This process I have described is observation and all of observation - nothin else counts as observation. No separable part of what I have described is observation including any subset of the entire causal chain (just for you QM wave collapse buffs). Take anything out of the above and observation is no longer happening. Connection of the observer with that external reality is gone along with all access to a-posteriori knowledge of it.... in the sense that with the faculty for observation as literally the only possessed a-priori 'knowledge', all other knowledge (a-posteriori aboutness) in respect of external reality flows. The best observers of all time IMHO? 1) James Joyce. 2) Douglas Adams. 3) Heraclitus Note they are not scientists.... they were much more fun! Maybe my AGI artificial scientist will run aweay and become a writer. I can be weird in so many different areas! It's a gift! polyweirdness :-) Colin Hales --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
