On 01 Mar 2013, at 20:03, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Friday, March 1, 2013 12:41:52 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 01 Mar 2013, at 16:42, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Friday, March 1, 2013 10:23:24 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 01 Mar 2013, at 01:11, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either.
You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you
know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about
what you can know...either. :-)
Brent
blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no
testable consequences.
Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an
omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience.
You are the one claiming knowing that all machines cannot think.
I don't know that all machines cannot think,
Thanks God.
but I understand why the reasons for assuming that they ever could
are rooted in bad assumptions from the start.
Which bad assumption? You never give them without begging the
question.
The assumption is that sense can be reduced to or produced by
arithmetic.
You have not yet studied comp. That assumption is not in comp. On the
contrary it is shown explicitly that machine's sense is not reducible
in any way to anything finitely presentable.
I can excuse you because comp + materialism leads to that error, and
many account of comp do that error, but both UDA and AUDA single that
error. On the contrary, computer science and mathematical logic
prevents computationalism, well understood, to fall in the
reductionist trap. But you are the one continuing to defend a
reductionist conception of numbers and machines.
We can see this in the language example that I mentioned:
If we have some written characters is it possible to categorize them
optically, but these categories don't lead to discovery of any
phonetic information. Likewise, phonetic information doesn't lead to
any semantic information.
Each level of meaning of the text is defined by the capacities of
the interpreter - not to compute arithmetic relations, but to have
experienced meaningful expression through different sense modalities
(visual, audio, grammatical, semantic, poetic...etc) .
The fact that we can formalize these relations mathematically only
accounts for the idea that any public presentation can be digitized
and represented presented,
Up to here, comp entails what you say.
not that there could be any such thing as presentation or private
experience.
That's ambiguous, and comp contradicts it, if you say that comp
pretend there is a 3p presentation of private experience.
There are countless examples of this which I have brought up,
showing clearly that while logic or arithmetic is an obvious
extraction of sensory-motor experience (as we ourselves learn math
through gestures, moving fingers, beads, or other objects), sensory
experience is not a plausible outcome of any arithmetic process.
You are right on this. But a process is a 3p thing, akin to Bp.
Experience is given by Bp & p, which can already not been formalized
in any 3p term. We can bet on such relation, and that is what we do
when saying yes to a doctor, but this make a detour to some notion of
arithmetical truth, which is beyond all processes.
We have seen no arithmetic process which is not part of a human
experience or public physics, yet life on Earth does not require us
to perform mathematics at all.
That mixes many levels.
Some of the examples I have mentioned:
John Wayne's Resurrection: Using a computer to reconstruct John
Wayne's images and voice, high quality interactive movies are
produced in real time, with an AI interpreter. While it should be
easy to understand that this bit of interactive theater does not
constitute a conversation with the Duke himself, it is argued here
that I can't know that this absurdity isn't true.
Elvis the Anti-Zombie: Having a computer articulate my limbs and
vocal chords to imitate Elvis Presley perfectly, by Comp, there is
no reason to believe that I would begin to experience more and more
Elvis qualia. That if I acted enough like The King, then I must have
memories of his life, know the people he knew, etc. Again, the
absurdity is plain, but here, it is sufficient to dismiss it with
"You Don't Know That".
Geometry is A Zombie: It's pretty simple really. An abacus can be
used to compute geometric functions - we could find the length of a
hypotenuse if we knew the other sides, for example. Moving these
beads around and counting them does not require any kind of
triangular presentation. If the universe were truly arithmetic - if
it was all one giant quantum abacus...where would we get geometry
from, even in principle. Forget the fact that it is obviously
impossible for beads on bamboo sticks to 'imply' triangles without
an abacus user imagining that - the deeper problem is that sense is
completely redundant to computation. There is no good reason, no bad
reason, no maybe reason, no reason at all for computation to assume
any form other than the one it is already in, which is *no form*.
Then there's the pathetic fallacy. We know that language has these
poetic, metaphorical layers of meaning. We know that we use language
to anthropomorphize inanimate objects. We can call a ship 'she' or
give a computer a name like Watson. Not only is it absurd to take
these uses of languages literally, we should actively beware of the
influence of this kind of cognitive bias. It's complicated because
we can be too generous with some things and too prejudiced against
some people, but at the same time, we can still be right about
correctly recognizing the impersonal nature of objects and machines.
We don't get in the line of fire of a machine gun and try to scare
it or bluff it.
If you conflate arithmetic and sense from the beginning,
That conflation is explicitly avoided.
then you have no chance of finding the hard problem or explanatory
gap, because realism becomes simulation, and numbers are assumed to
exist as sensory-motor agents. Again, we have not seen anything like
this. To the contrary, no byte of data has ever done anything by
itself,
This contradict arithmetical self-reference. Both the 1p and 3p self-
references.
and every form of computation is grounded ultimately in experience.
We have seen, however, that sense does indeed take on a life of its
own - inspiring new forms of expression and endless cultural
diversions to enhance the quality of our subjective participation.
Here you beg the question.
If we don't what consciousness actually is and what it does, then
we skip the important part and reverse engineer a false confidence
in unconscious programs.
And Bruno said, from Memory, in Sylvie and Bruno (Lewis Carroll): "I
am so happy that I hate spinach, because, you know, if ever I could
appreciate spinach, I guess I would eat some of them, and that is
exactly what I would like never to think possible".
You beg the question again.
When you start from the assumption that numbers and be themselves
and do things without a sensory context, you beg the question.
I state my assumption. You beg the question by attributing no
consciousness to a infinite class of possible beings, without arguing
at all. You just repeat "we can do that" and "they cannot".
It's easy to claim consciousness from numbers if you define numbers
as being conscious agents from the start.
Numbers are not conscious, with comp. Numbers can support locally and
relatively to an infinity of universal numbers, and arithmetical
truth, a conscious person. Indeed, the usual notion of knowledge
applies in that context, and prevent the reductionist identification
that you criticize.
Betting that machine could be conscious does not entail that we know
what consciousness is or rely on.
Why would you bet a machine could be conscious if you don't know
what it is?
To survive some disease, or to help someone else to survive, or to
tackle the machine's possible afterlife, etc.
You have a reductionist view of science, leading you to close
prematurely an inquiry.
Why do you think so?
Just look above.
All rational computationalist are open to the falsity of comp, and
what I show is that [comp + precise theory of knowledge] becomes
refutable, so that we can progress.
Any theory of knowledge which is not rooted in sensory-motor
experience is going to have to be scrapped.
This can be accounted by comp, but you fail to be enough precise on
what is "sensory-motor". When you say that sense cannot be formalized,
I answer that this is provably the case for machine's sense (like BP &
p, or Bp & Dt & p).
But up to now, comp explains a lot of things, even if incorrect,
notably the apparent many worlds, the quantum like logic of
observation, the existence of non communicable truth and sensations,
and eventually some non trivial Plotinian theology.
Comp does indeed explain a lot of things, but only public, generic
things.
It explains why machine develop private and public knowledge.
It has no way to explain qualia as something other than a black box.
?
On the contrary. See the archives or the papers.
Many Worlds, although I understand why it is compelling, ultimately
fails to understand significance. My understanding is that the
universe is actually a negentropic monopoly. The nature of
significance is such that nothing can escape the interconnectedness
of the totality, because all physics, spacetime, and experiential
possibilities supervene on it. Many Worlds, I suspect, is a
mechanemorphic attempt to find a way around sense and participation.
Many world is the physics. Not the psychology nor the theology. Those
things are related but can't be identified.
In a sense comp explains why first person are not machine, and only
borrow them to say hello to others machines. Why would not some
immaterial programs be able to support human first person?
Why would machines need a first person ontology to identify each
other?
There is no first person ontology. Only an epistemology.
It's the pathetic fallacy and begging the question to say that
machines say hello to each other? Why would they? 'Saying hello' is
a personal experience. Such a thing need have no meaning for a
machine.
Why? You confuse the first person associate to a machine, with the
"machine" itself (its plan or body local description).
I am not saying that this is true, only that it makes possible to
formulate the mind problem, indeed to translate it into a problem in
number theory.
There's value in that, and there's value in developing AI servants
which surpass us in specific ways. The problem is when we lose
respect for authenticity and propriety, and remake the world in the
image of a machine.
Some american argued that the problem in giving right to black people
is that such action could lead one day to a black person to become the
president of the USA. That was called: begging the matter.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
