On 12 Feb 2012, at 06:50, L.W. Sterritt wrote:

I don't really understand this thread - magical thinking? The neural network between our ears is who / what we are, and everything that we will experience.

If that was the case, we would not survive with an artificial brain. Comp would be false. With comp it is better to consider that we have a brain, instead that we are a brain.




It is the source of consciousness - even if consciousness is regarded as an epiphenomenon.

UDA shows that it is the other way around. I know that is is very counterintuitive. But the brain, as a material object is a creation of consciousness, which is itself a natural flux emerging on arithmetical truth from the points of view of universal machine/numbers. But locally you are right. the material brain is what makes your "platonic" consciousness capable of manifest itself relatively to a more probable computational history. yet in the big (counterintuitive) picture, the numbers relation are responsible for consciousness which select relative computations among an infinities, and matter is a first person plural phenomenon emergent from a statistical competition of infinities of (universal) numbers (assuming mechanism).

Most people naturally believe that mechanism is an ally to materialism, but they are epistemologically incompatible.

Bruno





Gandalph


On Feb 11, 2012, at 9:34 PM, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012  Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think you are radically overestimating the size of the book and the importance of the size to the experiment. ELIZA was about 20Kb.

TO HELL WITH ELIZA!!!! That prehistoric program is NOT intelligent! What is the point of a though experiment that gives stupid useless answers to questions?

>If it's a thousand times better than ELIZA, then you've got a 20 Mb rule book.

For heavens sake, if a 20 Mb look-up table was sufficient we would have had AI decades ago.

Since you can't do so let me make the best case for the Chinese Room from your point of view and the most difficult case to defend from mine. Let's say you're right and the size of the lookup table is not important so we won't worry that it's larger than the observable universe, and let's say time is not a issue either so we won't worry that it operates a billion trillion times slower than our mind, and let's say the Chinese Room doesn't do ELIZA style bullshit but can engage in a brilliant and interesting (if you are very very very patient) conversation with you in Chinese or any other language about anything. And lets have the little man not only be ignorant of Chinese but be retarded and thus not understand anything in any language, he can only look at input symbols and then look at the huge lookup table till he finds similar squiggles and the appropriate response to those squiggles which he then outputs. The man has no idea what's going on, he just looks at input squiggles and matches them up with output squiggles, but from outside the room it's very different.

You ask the room to produce a quantum theory of gravity and it does so, you ask it to output a new poem that a considerable fraction of the human race would consider to be very beautiful and it does so, you ask it to output a original fantasy children's novel that will be more popular than Harry Potter and it does so. The room certainly behaves intelligently but the man was not conscious of any of the answers produced, as I've said the man doesn't have a clue what's going on, so does this disprove my assertion that intelligent behavior implies consciousness?

No it does not, or at least it probably does not, this is why. That reference book that contains everything that can be said about anything that can be asked in a finite time would be large, "astronomical" would be far far too weak a word to describe it, but it would not be infinitely large so it remains a legitimate thought experiment. However that astounding lookup table came from somewhere, whoever or whatever made it had to be very intelligent indeed and also I believe conscious, and so the brilliance of the actions of the Chinese Room does indeed imply consciousness.

You may say that even if I'm right about that then a computer doing smart things would just imply the consciousness of the people who made the computer. But here is where the analogy breaks down, real computers don't work like the Chinese Room does, they don't have anything remotely like that astounding lookup table; the godlike thing that made the Chinese Room knows exactly what that room will do in every circumstance, but computer scientists don't know what their creation will do, all they can do is watch it and see.

But you may also say, I don't care how the room got made, I was talking about inside the room and I insist there was no consciousness inside that room. I would say assigning a position to consciousness is a little like assigning a position to "fast" or "red" or any other adjective, it doesn't make a lot of sense. If your conscious exists anywhere it's not inside a vat made of bone balancing on your shoulders, it's where you're thinking about. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a johnkclarkian way and other things are the way matter behaves when it is organized in a chineseroomian way.

And by the way, I don't intend to waste my time defending the assertion that intelligent behavior implies intelligence, that would be like debating if X implies X or not, I have better things to do with my time.

  >The King James Bible can be downloaded here


No thanks, I'll pass on that.

>> Only?! Einstein only seemed intelligent to scientifically literate speakers in the outside world.

  > No, he was aware of his own intelligence too.

How the hell do you know that? And you seem to be using the words "intelligent" and "conscious" interchangeably, they are not synonyms.

>If you start out defining intelligence as an abstract function and category of behaviors

Which is the only operational definition of intelligence.

    > rather than quality of consciousness

Which is a totally useless definition in investigating the intelligence of a computer or a person or a animal or of ANYTHING.

> I use ELIZA as an example because you can clearly see that it is not intelligent

So can I, so when you use that idiot program to try to advance your antediluvian ideas it proves nothing. If you want to make a point use Watson or Siri or some other program that produces useful information rather than silly evasions

> Ok, make it a million times the size of ELIZA. A set of 1,000 books.

That's not going to do it, make it a million million million million billion trillion times the size of Eliza and that still will not do it if it's just a lookup table, even scientific notation would not be sufficient to describe how large that lookup table would need to be.


> If I'm a chef and I walk into a room, the room doesn't become a restaurant. Why stop at the room, why not say the entire city speaks Chinese? If consciousness worked this way then there could be no localization at all - the universe would be one big intelligence that knows everything about everything


Consciousness has no unique localization, but it's important to remember that differences in position is not the only way to differentiate one thing from another; "slow" is clearly different from "fast" but not because they are in different places. The same thing could also be said about the number eleven and the number twelve, they are different but position has nothing to do with it.

> Are you saying that if Watson takes 2 seconds to answer a question it is intelligent but if it takes 2 hours to answer the same question correctly is it somehow less intelligent? Speed is meaningless for this thought experiment.

But it's supposed to prove something about consciousness not intelligence. and if your mind worked as slowly as the Chinese Room you might be conscious of the life and death of stars but not anything that happened faster than that.

> We are alive because we are made of living organisms.

And living organisms are made of atoms, just exactly like everything else including computers. Life generally behaves in a more complex way than non-life but there is not a sharp line between life and non-life, and it's getting less sharp every day.


> You can't make a stem cell out of a semiconductor,

Certainly you can. The difference between stem cells and semiconductors is exactly the same difference between my brain and last years mashed potatoes, the way the atoms are organized.

  >I don't think the brain produces consciousness.

Then some other organ must, your big toe perhaps?

> I think awareness produces consciousness.

That's not very enlightening, awareness and consciousness are synonyms.


> Machines are automatic and pre-recorded, not live and aware.

A computer recently figured out what the trillionth digit of PI was, do you really think that number was pre-recorded?

> A bullet can do that because it's causing a physical catastrophe to the brain as a whole, not because it is reprogramming the organization of the mind.

I don't know what your talking about, a bullet to the brain is a reprogramming, things behave very differently after that.

   John K Clark










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