On 16 Jan 2012, at 17:08, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 5:39 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
" Consciousness theories are easy because there are no facts they
need to explain"
" What? With comp, not only you have to explain the qualia"
With ANY theory of consciousness you have to explain qualia,
Correct.
and every consciousness theory does as well or as badly as any other
in doing that.
So you believe that the theory according to which consciousness is a
gift by a creationist God is as bad as the theory according to which
consciousness is related to brain activity?
" but it has been proved that you have to explain the quanta as well,
I don't know what that means.
It means that
1) the quanta does not exist primitively but emerge, in the comp case,
from number relations.
2) that physicalism is false, and that you have to derive the physical
laws from those number relations. More exactly you have to derive the
beliefs in the physical laws from those number relations.
" and this without assuming a physical reality."
But I do know that assuming reality does not seem to be a totally
outrageous assumption.
Sure. But I was talking on the assumption of a primitively physical
reality. That is shown, by the UD Argument, not be working when we
assume that we are digitalisable machine. It is not outrageous, it is
useless, non sensical, wrong with the usual Occam razor, in the same
sense that it is wrong that invisible horse pulling cars would be the
real reason why car moves.
> but there is an astronomical number of things that need to be
explained to understand how intelligence works.
Not really. It is just that [...]
If you know how intelligence works you can make a super intelligent
computer right now and you're well on your way to becoming a
trillionaire. It seems to me that when discussing this very complex
subject people use the phrase "it's just" a bit too much.
You seem quite unfair. I was saying, in completo: "It is just that
intelligent things organize themselves in non predictable way, at
all." The "it just" was not effective, and that was my point!
This means that indeed we can write simple program leading to
intelligence, but I can hardly be trillionnaire with that because they
might need incompressible long time to show intelligence. Better to
use nature's trick to copy from what has already been done. My whole
point is that intelligence is not a constructive concept, like
consciousness you cannot define it. You can define competence, and
competence leads already itself to many non constructive notions and
comparisons. The details are tricky and there is a very large
litterature in theoretical artificial intelligence and learning
theories.
Simple programs leading to intelligence are "grow, diverse, and
multiply as much as possible" in big but finite environment. or "help
yourself", etc. The UD can also be see as a little programs leading
to the advent of intelligence (assuming mechanism), but not in a
necessarily tractable way.
We discuss in a context where the goal is not to do artificial
intelligence engineering, but the goal is to find a theory of
everything, including persons, consciousness, etc.
"intelligent things organize themselves in non predictable way, at
all. The basic are simple (addition and multiplication)"
That's like saying I know how to cure cancer, it's basically simple,
"just" arrange the atoms in cancer cells so that they are no longer
cancerous. It's easy to learn the fundamentals of Chess, the rules
of the game, but that does not mean you understand all the
complexities and subtleties of it and are now a grandmaster.
OK. That was my point. I never pretended to even know what
intelligence really is. You should not mock the trivial points I make,
because they are used in a non completely trivial way to show that the
assumption of mechanism makes physics a branch of number theory (which
is a key point in the search of a theory of everything). A reasoning
made clear = a succession of trivial points.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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