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
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-
l...@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
.
--
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
.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
