On 24 Aug 2012, at 21:07, Jesse Mazer wrote:
On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
Chalmers followed my talk on the UD Argument at ASSC 4 and leaved
the room at step 3, saying that there is no indeterminacy as he will
feel to be at both places.
Do you have a link to the discussion, or was it not on a public
discussion forum?
It was live.
I wonder if Chalmers might have just meant that he would *define*
both copies as "himself" and thus say that "he" would be at both
places, while at the same time agreeing with you that each copy at a
different location would have its own distinct subjective experience
(qualia) and that neither would have any conscious awareness of what
the other copy was experiencing.
No. That was what I told him. But he left the place, simply, without
further comment, and quite disrespectfully. Many people were shocked
by this behavior, but said nothing. I think Chalmers is in part
responsible for the spreading of defamation I am living across the
ocean, and why nobody dares to mention the first person indeterminacy,
or my name.
I am afraid he has just been brainwashed by the main victims of a
manipulative form of moral harrasment., as I described in the book
ordered by Grasset in 1998 (but never published). He is quite
plausibly a member of the same sect which put fraternity above facts.
It is a form of hidden corporatism.
I'm afraid Chalmers might be just an opportunist. He is clearly not a
serious scientist, but seems to be an expert in self-marketing.
His fading qualia paper is not so bad, but is hardly original, and
lacks many references. The hard problem of consciousness is know by
all philosophers of mind since a long time as the mind-body problem,
and his formulation is physicalist and not general, also.
Bruno
This made perhaps some sense in his dualist interpretation of
Everett, (if *that* makes sense), but makes no sense at all in comp.
I guess that like John Clark he confused the 1-view of the 1-view,
with some 3-view on the 1-view.
I know only two people stopping at step 3. But if you know others,
let me know. (I don't count the person who stop at step 3 because
they have something else to do).
Bruno
On 24 Aug 2012, at 02:41, Richard Ruquist wrote:
Jesse,
This is what Chalmers says in the 95 paper you link about the
second Penrose argument, the one in my paper:
" 3.5 As far as I can determine, this argument is free of the
obvious flaws that plague other Gödelian arguments, such as Lucas's
argument and Penrose's earlier arguments. If it is flawed, the
flaws lie deeper. It is true that the argument has a feeling of
achieving its conclusion as if by magic. One is tempted to say:
"why couldn't F itself engage in just the same reasoning?". But
although there are various directions in which one might try to
attack the argument, no knockdown refutation immediately presents
itself. For this reason, the argument is quite challenging.
Compared to previous versions, this argument is much more worthy of
attention from supporters of AI. "
Chalmers finally concludes that the flaw for Godel, which Penrose
also assumed, is the assumption that we can know we are sound. So
the other way around, if Godel is correct, so is the Penrose second
argument, which Chalmers confirmed. However, Chalmers seems to be
saying the Godel is incorrect, hardly a basis for my paper.
Personally, when I am sound, I know I am sound. When I am unsound I
usually know that I am unsound. However, psychosis runs in my
family, and many times I have watched a relative lapse into
psychosis without him realizing it.
Besides I sent the paper to Chalmers and he had no problem with.
But he did wish me luck getting it published. He knew something I
had not yet learned.
Richard
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Jesse Mazer <[email protected]>
wrote:
A quibble with the beginning of Richard's paper. On the first page
it says:
'It is beyond the scope of this paper and admittedly beyond my
understanding to delve into Gödelian logic, which seems to be self-
referential proof by contradiction, except to mention that Penrose
in Shadows of the Mind(1994), as confirmed by David Chalmers(1995),
arrived at a seemingly valid 7 step proof that human “reasoning
powers cannot be captured by any formal system”.'
If you actually read Chalmers' paper at http://web.archive.org/web/20090204164739/http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-09-chalmers.html
he definitely does *not* "confirm" Penrose's argument! He says in
the paper that Penrose has two basic arguments for his conclusions
about consciousness, and at the end of the section titled "the
first argument" he concludes that the first one fails:
"2.16 It is section 3.3 that carries the burden of this strand of
Penrose's argument, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the
least convincing sections in the book. By his assumption that the
relevant class of computational systems are all straightforward
axiom-and-rules system, Penrose is not taking AI seriously, and
certainly is not doing enough to establish his conclusion that
physics is uncomputable. I conclude that none of Penrose's argument
up to this point put a dent in the natural AI position: that our
reasoning powers may be captured by a sound formal system F, where
we cannot determine that F is sound."
Then when dealing with Penrose's "second argument", he says that
Penrose draws the wrong conclusions; where Penrose concludes that
our reasoning cannot be the product of any formal system, Chalmers
concludes that the actual issue is that we cannot be 100% sure our
reasoning is "sound" (which I understand to mean we can never be
100% sure that we have not made a false conclusion about whether
all the propositions we have proved true or false actually have
that truth-value in "true arithmetic"):
"3.12 We can see, then, that the assumption that we know we are
sound leads to a contradiction. One might try to pin the blame on
one of the other assumptions, but all these seem quite
straightforward. Indeed, these include the sort of implicit
assumptions that Penrose appeals to in his arguments all the time.
Indeed, one could make the case that all of premises (1)-(4) are
implicitly appealed to in Penrose's main argument. For the purposes
of the argument against Penrose, it does not really matter which we
blame for the contradiction, but I think it is fairly clear that it
is the assumption that the system knows that it is sound that
causes most of the damage. It is this assumption, then, that should
be withdrawn.
"3.13 Penrose has therefore pointed to a false culprit. When the
contradiction is reached, he pins the blame on the assumption that
our reasoning powers are captured by a formal system F. But the
argument above shows that this assumption is inessential in
reaching the contradiction: A similar contradiction, via a not
dissimilar sort of argument, can be reached even in the absence of
that assumption. It follows that the responsibility for the
contradiction lies elsewhere than in the assumption of
computability. It is the assumption about knowledge of soundness
that should be withdrawn.
"3.14 Still, Penrose's argument has succeeded in clarifying some
issues. In a sense, it shows where the deepest flaw in Gödelian
arguments lies. One might have thought that the deepest flaw lay in
the unjustified claim that one can see the soundness of certain
formal systems that underlie our own reasoning. But in fact, if the
above analysis is correct, the deepest flaw lies in the assumption
that we know that we are sound. All Gödelian arguments appeal to
this premise somewhere, but in fact the premise generates a
contradiction. Perhaps we are sound, but we cannot know
unassailably that we are sound."
So it seems Chalmers would have no problem with the "natural AI"
position he discussed earlier, that our reasoning could be
adequately captured by a computer simulation that did not come to
its top-level conclusions about mathematics via a strict axiom/
proof method involving the mathematical questions themselves, but
rather by some underlying fallible structure like a neural network.
The bottom-level behavior of the simulated neurons themselves would
be deducible given the initial state of the system using the axiom/
proof method, but that doesn't mean the system as a whole might not
make errors in mathematical calculations; see Douglas Hofstadter's
discussion of this issue starting on p. 571 of "Godel Escher Bach",
the section titled "Irrational and Rational Can Coexist on
Different Levels", where he writes:
"Another way to gain perspective on this is to remember that a
brain, too, is a collection of faultlessly functioning element-
neurons. Whenever a neuron's threshold is surpassed by the sum of
the incoming signals, BANG!-it fires. It never happens that a
neuron forgets its arithmetical knowledge-carelessly adding its
inputs and getting a wrong answer. Even when a neuron dies, it
continues to function correctly, in the sense that its components
continue to obey the laws of mathematics and physics. Yet as we all
know, neurons are perfectly capable of supporting high-level
behavior that is wrong, on its own level, in the most amazing ways.
Figure 109 is meant to illustrate such a class of levels: an
incorrect belief held in the software of a mind, supported by the
hardware of a faultlessly functioning brain."
Figure 109 depicts the outline of a person's head with "2+2=5"
appearing inside it, but the symbols in "2+2=5" are actually made
up of large collections of smaller mathematical equations, like
"7+7=14", which are all correct. A nice way of illustrating the
idea, I think.
I came up with my own thought-experiment to show where Penrose's
argument goes wrong, based on the same conclusion that Chalmers
reached: a community of "realistic" AIs whose simulated brains work
similarly to real human brains would never be able to be 100%
certain that they had not reached a false conclusion about
arithmetic, and the very act of stating confidently in mathematical
that they would never reach a wrong conclusion would ensure that
they were endorsing a false proposition about arithmetic. See my
discussion with LauLuna on the "Penrose and algorithms" thread
here: http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/browse_thread/thread/c92723e0ef1a480c/429e70be57d2940b?#429e70be57d2940b
Jesse
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 6:38 PM, Stephen P. King <[email protected]
> wrote:
Dear Richard,
Your paper is very interesting. It reminds me a lot of Stephen
Wolfram's cellular automaton theory. I only have one big problem
with it. The 10d manifold would be a single fixed structure that,
while conceivably capable of running the computations and/or
implementing the Peano arithmetic, has a problem with the role of
time in it. You might have a solution to this problem that I see
that I did not deduce as I read your paper. How do you define time
for your model?
--
Onward!
Stephen
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
~ Francis Bacon
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