On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 9:53 PM, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com>wrote:
"A simulated flame will do anything your simulation proscribes. That's > why it's not real." A simulated flame will do things that you can not predict and will surprise you even if you are the one who wrote the simulation program. Even in a universe where quantum mechanics did not exist and everything was 100% deterministic very often we wouldn't know what we are going to do next until we actually did it; nor could an outside observer predict our actions. And this quality of unpredictability is not limited to human beings, machines have it too. Machines can surprise both themselves and outside observers even in a fundamentally deterministic world. It would only take you about 5 minutes to write a program to look for the first even number greater than 2 that is not the sum of two prime numbers and then stop. Will the machine ever stop? The machine doesn't know, I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows. Maybe it will stop in 5 seconds, maybe it will stop in 5 billion years, maybe it will never stop. If you want to know what the machine will do you just have to watch it and see. The same is true for a simulation and the same is true for us, we often don't know what we are going to do next until we actually do it. > "A picture of an apple is not an apple. Even a fancy animated picture." > A picture of an apple IS an apple, in a fancy animated universe. "Information cannot cross any levels on it's own. Cartoons don't wander > off the TV screen and move into the spare bedroom." > That is true, nouns can't cross levels on their own, BUT adjectives can and you are a adjective, you are not matter, you are the way matter behaves when it is organized in a Craigweinbergian way. Adjectives are information and information can be processed. I'd even go so far as to say that although there are differences information is as close as you can get to the traditional concept of the soul and still remain within the scientific method. "there is no difference between simulated arithmetic and real arithmetic" >> > "Because there is no real arithmetic." I don't know what that means. When I use my hand calculator I expect it to perform real arithmetic, I don't even know what simulated arithmetic is. "or [a difference] between simulated intelligence and real >> intelligence." >> > > "That's a religious faith in my opinion." > How can that be religious faith when it can be investigated with the scientific method? Just ask a series of questions to a person, a machine, a man from Mars or whatever and judge the quality of the answers, use the same criteria you've used every day of your life to judge if the various fellow human beings that you meet in your activities are smart or dumb. I don't see where faith enters into it. "If I make a movie where the actors address the audience as Jim, and then > have a screening where I invite only people named Jim, then I have > simulated intelligence without any real intelligence at all." > Would that really fool you? I don't think so. All I'm saying is that you be fair, whatever method you use to judge the intellectual firepower of your fellow humans, and you must have some way, use that same method in judging the smarts, or lack of them, in machines. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
