On 29 May 2012, at 09:49, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2012/5/29 Quentin Anciaux <[email protected]>
2012/5/29 Colin Geoffrey Hales <[email protected]>
Here's a story I just wrote. I'll get it published in due course.
Just posted it to the FoR list, thought you might appreciate the
sentiments....
========================================================
It's 100,000 BCE. You are a politically correct caveperson. You want
dinner. The cooling body of the dead thing at your feet seems to be
your option. You have fire back at camp. That'll make it palatable.
The fire is kept alive by the fire-warden of your tribe. None of you
have a clue what it is, but it makes the food edible and you don't
care.
It's 1700ish AD. You are a French scientist called Lavoisier. You
have just worked out that burning adds oxygen to the fuel. You have
killed off an eternity of dogma involving a non-existent substance
called phlogiston. You will not be popular, but the facts speak for
you. You are happy with your day's work. You go to the kitchen and
cook your fine pheasant meal. You realise that oxidation never had
to figure in your understanding of how to make dinner. Food for
thought is your dessert.
It is 2005 and you are designing a furnace. You use COMSOL
Multiphysics on your supercomputer. You modify the gas jet
configuration and the flames finally get the dead pocket in the
corner up to temperature. The toilet bowls will be well cooked here,
you think to yourself. If you suggested to your project leader that
the project was finished she would think you are insane. Later, in
commissioning your furnace, a red hot toilet bowl is the target of
your optical pyrometer. The fierceness of the furnace is palpable
and you're glad you're not the toilet bowl. The computation of the
physics of fire and the physics of fire are, thankfully, not the
same thing - that fact has made your job a lot easier, but you
cannot compute yourself a toilet bowl. A fact made more real shortly
afterwards in the bathroom.
It is the early 20th century and you are a 'Wright Brother'. You
think you can make a contraption fly. Your inspiration is birds. You
experiment with shaped wood, paper and canvas in a makeshift wind
tunnel. You figure out that certain shapes seems to drag less and
lift more. Eventually you flew a few feet. And you have absolutely
no clue about the microscopic physics of flight.
It is a hundred years later and you are a trainee pilot doing 'touch
and go' landings in a simulator. The physics of flight is in the
massive computer system running the simulator. Just for fun you
stall your jetliner and crash it into a local shopping mall. Today
you have flown 146, 341 km. As you leave the simulator, you remind
yourself that the physics of flight in the computer and flight
itself are not the same thing, and that nobody died today.
No-one ever needed a theory of combustion prior to cooking dinner
with it. We cooked dinner and then we eventually learned a theory of
combustion.
No-one needed the deep details of flight physics to work out how to
fly. We few, then we figured out how the physics of flight worked.
This is the story of the growth of scientific knowledge of the
natural world. It has been this way for thousands of years. Any one
of us could think of a hundred examples of exactly this kind of
process. In a modern world of computing and physics, never before
have we had more power to examine in detail, whatever are the
objects of our study. And in each and every case, if anyone told you
that a computed model of the natural world and the natural world are
literally the same thing, you'd brand them daft or deluded and
probably not entertain their contribution as having any value.
Well almost. There's one special place where not only is that very
delusion practised on a massive scale, if you question the
behaviour, you are suddenly confronted with a generationally backed
systematic raft of unjustified excuses, perhaps 'policies'?, handed
from mentor to novice with such unquestioning faith that entire
scientific disciplines are enrolled in the delusion.
Q. What scientific discipline could this be?
A. The 'science' of artificial intelligence.
It is something to behold. Here, for the first time in history, you
find people that look at the only example of natural general
intelligence - you, the human reading this - accept a model of a
brain, put it in a computer and then expect the result to be a
brain. This is done without a shred of known physical law, in spite
of thousands of years of contrary experience, and despite decades of
abject failure to achieve the sacred goal of an artificial
intelligence like us.
This belief system is truly bizarre. It is exactly like the cave
person drawing a picture of a flame on a rock and then expecting it
to cook dinner. It is exactly like getting into a flight simulator,
flying it to Paris and then expecting to get out and have dinner on
the banks of the Seine.
You always put that level confusion on the table. You could expect
to have dinner in a virtual paris if you were in a virtual world. If
you want an computational AI to interact with you, it must be able
to control real world appendices that permits it to *interact* or
likewise if it was in a virtual world, you should use a interface
with this virtual world for you to interact.
For example, a "real world" robot in a "real world" car factory
builds real cars... still the program that controls the robot is *a
program* 100% computational... yet it builds real cars... how ?
Simply because it has interface with the "real world" which permits
the program to handle "real world" objects, that assembled correctly
makes a car...
Quentin
You can't expect level to be mixed without an interface and I don't
see any problem with that.
Quentin
Some people, like Colin in his post here, seems to have difficulties
in understanding that digital processes can be digitally emulated
(i.e. exactly simulated) by other digital processes. Comp assumes that
the brain (whatever that is) simulates (exactly or not) a precise
digital process, and that this digital process is what will support
the conscious person, or makes its consciousness capable to manifest
itself relatively to our neighborhood. If that is the case, then we
can substitute a digital brain for the physical brain, even if we
cannot simulate the "real hardware" of the physical brain. (And that
is the case with comp because the real hardware is "made-of" all
computations leading to our actual digital state).
That the brain is a simulator is illustrated by the existence of
realist dreams. The brain is already able to make us believe that we
are "really" drinking a cup of hot coffee, when we are "really"
sleeping in our bed. Dream research has confirmed that during such
realist dream, the activity of the sleeping brain mirrors the activity
of the corresponding task if done when awake.
Then it is doubtful that the brain uses genuine non Turing emulable
subprocesses to do such task, although we cannot logically exclude
such a possibility (in which case comp would be false). It is doubtful
because such a "non-computable real number sensitive machine" would be
incapable to have the observable flexibility of the known brains,
which is based on super-redundancy in the means to handle information
processing. That would also makes Darwinian type of explanation
spurious. Indeed such explanations are based on the fact that we can
survive very easily the deviation from a normal type of functioning,
which allows the molecules used in the brain to evolve through
sequences of mutations. A genuinely non Turing emulable analog machine
would need a conspiracy of luck to get the "correct" infinitely
precise needed configuration, and that would need some miracle
(infinitely non probable event).
Bruno
It is exactly like expecting your computer simulated furnace
roasting you a toilet bowl.
Think about it. If there was no difference between a computed
physics model of fire and fire, then why doesn't the computer burst
into flames? If there was no difference between a computed model of
flight and flight, then why doesn't the computer leap up and fly?
These things don't happen! Not only that, any computer scientist
would say you were nuts to believe it to be a possibility. Then that
same computer scientist will then got back to their desk, sit down
and believe that their computer program can be brain physics.
Now I am all about creating real artificial general intelligence.
Call me crazy, but I find I am unique in the entire world. I am set
about literally building artificial inorganic brain tissue. Like the
Wright Bros built artificial flight. Like the caveperson built
artificial fire. I will build artificial cognition. There will be no
computing. There will be the physics of cognition.
Ay now here's the rub.
When I go about my business of organising and researching my
artificial brain tissue I get questioned about my weird approach. I
find that I am the one that has to justify my position! For the
first time in history a completely systemic delusion about the
relation between reality and computing is assumed by legions of
scientists without question, and who fail constantly to achieve the
goal for clearly obvious reasons..... _and I am the one that has to
justify my approach_? If I have to listen to another deferral to the
Church-Turing Thesis (100% right and 100% irrelevant) I will SCREAM!
Aaaaiiiiieeeeeiiiiuuuuaaaaaaarrrrgggggh!
I am not saying artificial general intelligence is impossible or
even hard. I am simply suggesting that maybe the route toward it is
through (shock horror) using the physics of cognition (brain
material). Somebody out there..... please? Can there please be
someone out there who sees this half century of computer science
weirdness in 100,000 years of sanity? Please? Anyone?
==================================================================
By Colin Hales
Natural physics is a computation. Fine.
But a computed natural physics model is NOT the natural
physics....it is the natural physics of a computer.
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