On 06 Aug 2011, at 23:33, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/6/2011 1:25 PM, John Mikes wrote:
On Sat, Aug 6, 2011 at 2:30 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 8/6/2011 8:35 AM, John Mikes wrote:
Stasthis,
let me barge in with one fundamental - not dispersing my reply into
those (many and long) details:
As I read your comments/replies (and I agree with your position
within the limits I want to expose here), I have the feeling that
you agree with the rest of the combatants in considering 'the
brain', our idea about 'intelligence' and 'consciousness' as
complete and total. I argue that it is not. Upon historic
reminiscence all such inventory about these (and many more)
concepts has been growing by addition and by phasing out imaginary
'content' as we 'learn', - an ongoing process that does not seem
to have reached the ultimate end/completion.
So you are right in considering whatever we new yesterday (my
substitution for today) but not including what we may know
tomorrow. Drawing conclusions upon incomplete inventory does not
seem acceptable.
Regards
John Mikes
If we wait until we know everything, we'll never draw any
conclusion; which is OK for science. But for engineering we need
to make decisions.
Brent
Brent: this is fine, we just should not mix up engineering with
science: "My" science is the agnostic decision that we CANNOT know
everything and feel comfortably in it. Also in my past engineering
I made decisions but never pretended them to be scientific results.
Thanks for the remark
John
That's why I sometimes return to my engineering viewpoint. It is
easy to speculate that some overarching "everything" construct
includes us and our world as an infinitesimal part.
I suspect a confusion with tegmark's kind of mathematicalism. Comp
gives us (us = the UMs and LUMs) the big role in the emergence of
physics; not an infinitesimal role at all.
That may satisfy some religious need for "explanation"; but it
doesn't help answer any engineering questions - such as "How do I
make an intelligent Mars Rover? And if I do will it be conscious?
And if it is will it be ethical to send it to Mars?"
There is no problem to come back on earth, especially during summer
holiday.
Science is modest: all it says is that IF the Mars Rover is conscious,
THEN physics has to be derived from a self-reference modality. If such
a physics makes the electron weighting one ton, you can conclude that
the Mars Rover is not conscious.
It might take some times before we get the existence and mass of the
electron from addition and multiplication, but we already know how to
proceed (time is needed to solve the related and genuine diophantine
equations).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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