On 26 Mar 2013, at 13:35, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Tuesday, March 26, 2013 7:21:39 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Mar 2013, at 19:35, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Monday, March 25, 2013 1:25:30 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Mar 2013, at 14:02, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Monday, March 25, 2013 6:26:00 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 24 Mar 2013, at 20:25, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Sunday, March 24, 2013 1:44:01 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
But that is what you get at the Turing universal threshold. If
you look at the computer's functioning, you will see local
computable rules obeyed by the gates, but that doesn't mean there
aren't non-computable agendas being pursued by genuine person
supported by those computations.
Absolutely, but does it mean that it has to be a genuine person?
To me it makes sense that the natural development of persons may
be restricted to experiences which are represented publicly in
zoological terms. The zoological format is not the cause of the
experience but it is the minimum vessel with the proper scale of
sensitivity for that quality of experience to be supported.
Trying to generate the same thing from the bottom up may not be
feasible, because the zoological format arises organically,
whereas an AI system skips zoology, biology, and chemistry
entirely and assumes a universally low format.
It is does not. Self-reference leads machine to develop multi-
variated leves of "formatting".
Why would it, and how could it?
You must study bit of computer science.
But just in very general terms, what would be the principle which
would tie together the function of self reference with any kind of
presented experience?
The (arithmetical) reality of the experience itself. It is a fixed
point of the map/brain when embedded in the arithmetical reality
(which is beyond words).
That doesn't make sense to me. That would make two mirrors facing
each other into a being,
Not really. A mirror is not a dynamical structure, unlike a universal
number. The fixed point of the two mirrors needs infinities of
reflexions, but the machine self-reference needs only two
diagonalizations. As I said, you must study those things and convince
yourself.
or a cartoon of a lion talking about itself into some kind of
subjective experience for the cartoon, or cartoon-ness, or lion-
ness, or talking-ness. Self-reference has no significance unless we
assume that the self already has awareness.
Hmm... I am open to that assumption, but usually I prefer to add the
universality assumption too.
If I say 'these words refer to themselves', or rig up a camera to
point at a screen displaying the output of Tupper's Self-Referential
formula, I still have nothing but a camera, a screen and some
meaningless graphics. This assumption pulls qualia out of thin air,
ignores the pathetic fallacy completely, and conflates all
territories with maps.
On the contrary, we get a rich and complex theory of qualia, even a
testable one, as we get the quanta too, and so can compare with
nature. Please, don't oversimplify something that you have not studied.
I might find it convenient to invent an entirely new spectrum of
colors to keep track of my file folders, but that doesn't mean
that this new spectrum can just be 'developed' out of thin air.
You must not ask a machine something that you can't do yourself, to
compare it to yourself.
But if you are saying that a machine can come up with a new format
by virtue of its self reference, then that is what I assume Comp
says is the origination of color.
Qualia obeys laws.
Qualia makes laws. Laws are nothing except the interaction of qualia
on multiple nested scales.
That's much too vague. I can agree and relate to comp. Qualia makes
the quanta, notably, but I was just explaining that we get a theory of
qualia.
If some qualia exist, some machine can realize them, but this does
not mean we can create some new spectrum, or that this would be an
easy task for a machine to complete when ordered. Most of our qualia
needed long time computations, and trial and errors, etc.
You can't make blue by trial and error because there is nothing to
try. It's a circular argument - for trial and error blue would
already have to be one of the possible qualia in the universe, in
which case trial would be redundant. By trial and error you could
perhaps stumble upon time travel, invisibility, teleportation, and a
thousand other super powers, but there is no way to stumble upon
even a single qualia in a universe which lacks them. It isn't in the
mix of possibilities. There is no solution to any function which
could possibly be x = {the experience of seeing blue}.
Hmm...
Consciousness does not seem to be compatible with low level
unconscious origins to me. Looking at language, the rules of
spelling and grammar do not drive the creation of new words. A
word cannot be forced into common usage just because it is
introduced into a culture. There is no rule in language which has
a function of creating new words, nor could any rule like that
possibly work.
You ignore completely the notion of creative set or universal
machine. You talk like if we could have a complete theory about
them, but we can't, provably so if we are Turing emulable.
You just communicate your feeling where the machine already can
explain why their feeling can be misleading on this subject.
Any particular feeling can be misleading only relative to some
other felt expectation and felt realization.
I am OK with this. All content of consciousness can be doubted,
except one ...
OK
The existence of feeling itself can't be misleading though.
... yes. That one. Consciousness is the fixed point of the doubt.
Universal machine looking inward are lead to that constructive and
creative doubt.
Couldn't it perform the functions associated with doubt without
experiencing doubt though? I could look at the flame of a candle
swaying back and forth and project some narrative of doubt and
prevarication, but must that be the case?
If comp is true, then non-comp is consistent and conceivable, yes.
That does not makes non-comp true or even plausible. Comp is not
provable. It is only refutable.
But comp is plausible, and doubly so after the discovery of the
universal machine.
Comp would be possible if there were no qualia, but I don't see how
Comp could or would make use of qualia, let alone generate an entire
universe overflowing with it.
It is a bit what happens, please study the theory. Qualia are useful
to accelerate information processing, and the integration of that
processing in a person. And they are unavoidable for machines in rich
and statistically stable universal relations with each others.
I don't know what you are saying that I am ignoring.
That universal machine are more weird entities that you and me can
suspect.
That I don't doubt, but I doubt that their weirdness is the same as
our weirdness.
All creatures have their own weirdness. We are different from
silicon machines, but the question is on the existence of a private
experiences, not on the similarity with your's or mine's.
I don't think that machines qua machines can have either privacy or
experiences beyond the limits of the natural inclination of the
materials upon which the program is executed. If the basic unit is
digital and binary, then the experience is probably limited to the
circuitry itself. A living animal cell has the capacity to self-
organize on higher levels but cannot be controlled completely. This
has nothing to do with materials or vitalism, it is a recognition
that consciousness can only be propagated as experience developed
through evolutionary scales of time, not reverse engineered from
instantaneous spatial configurations.
OK. But then universal machine are not machines qua machines.
I think it is a perpendicular weirdness which cannot stand
independently of some sensory experience.
I agree, but there is no reason to assume at the start that a
program cannot have a sensory experience, when embedded in the some
universal computations, istelf related to a reality (immaterial with
comp).
There's no reason for you to assume that, but I have several reasons
to assume that:
The pathetic fallacy.
The map-territory-relation.
The presentation problem (hard problem, explanatory gap, binding
problems, symbol grounding problem, body-space::experience-time
symmetry problem)
The failure of thought to recognize its own emotional and sensory
roots.
That is not reasoning. I will do what you do.
You do:
The I am superior fallacy
The map-territory fallacy
The God of the gap sort of explanation
The failure of thought to recognize the emotion and sensory roots in
others.
I don't deny that machines could be unintentionally creative, but
it isn't the same thing that we experience. We care, machines don't.
Well, as you know I assume that we are machines, so by definition,
whatever I or you can do, some machines can do it (us).
I study the consequence of that hypothesis, and I object only to
you argument that such an hypothesis is obviously false.
I would not say that it is obviously false, only that I can't see
how it could be true
I can explain why if a machine can have experience and enough
reflexivity, then the machine can already understand that she cannot
justify rationally the presence of its experience. No machine, nor
us, can ever see how that could be true. It *is* in the range of the
non communicable.
I don't have a problem with that, but I'm not talking about
justifying my own experience, I'm talking about justifying the
ontology of sensory-motor experience in general, particularly motive
participation.
That is what comp can explain. But if you bet that machines have no
experiences, you can not listen to them, and you are in a trap, built
by yourself.
If some aliens decide that we are not conscious, we will not find
any test to prove them wrong.
We won't need to, because if I'm right, they will already have a
sense that we might be conscious or else their consciousness is so
alien to ours that by comparison we are relatively unconscious to
them in their experienced reality. Like an ant colony, they might
guess we could be having experiences, but only children and
etymologists are likely to give it any serious consideration.
given that experience doesn't make sense as a product of forms or
functions,
Indeed. But no semantics of sufficiently complex programs can be
harnessed by those programs. Once you go through the Turing
universal level, understanding yourself only make yourself more hard
to understand, and more rich too.
Turing universality I think is a powerful reflection of some of the
important themes of 1p subjectivity from a 3p skeletal description,
but the description alone doesn't do anything. It can be used to
make more descriptions is all.
but forms and functions naturally follow from the extension of
sense into its own absence (entropy/spacetime). If there is
something that functions+awareness can do that functions alone
cannot, then I have no problem considering Comp to be an equal
possibility.
Yes, that's the case. that's the bomb contained in Gödel, Church,
Kleene, Post, Turing results.
Do those results specify awareness is required in arithmetic?
Absolutely.
Further, while I agree that the third person view of our body and
its behaviors are a good fit for mechanism, I don't see that such a
mechanism can coexist with the natural universe in which we find
ourselves where 1p and 3p are orthogonally juxtaposed.
Good insight. That is impossible. There is no natural universe. It
is the belief in a natural universe which stuck the progress on the
mind-body problem since we reify the notion of matter. Science and
theology are born from the understanding of this, but after awhile
we forget and resume the bad instinctive habits. It is a normal and
unavoidable conflict between life and afterlife. It will be with us
forever.
We don't have to insist on a natural universe, but we must admit the
1p and 3p perpendicular juxtaposition. I don't see that mechanism
makes sense in that context.
Study it, or be cautious in negative affirmation.
Given the nature of our actual experience, it only makes sense to
me that 3p mechanism could arise as a multiplicity of 1p experiences,
Correct (with respect to comp).
reflected in a drastically diminished (and thus mechanical seeming)
presentation.
I don't know if it is true or false, nor if that would be a good
news or a bad news. Some consequences are fascinating, and it leads
to an elegant scheme of (incomplete of course) TOE (like elementary
arithmetic).
I think it is false from an absolute perspective, but nearly true
from a local perspective, so that studying consequences of Comp is
worthwhile, and indeed the only possible way to really deduce
knowledge about the 1p - provided that we remember to invert the
conclusions. Where Comp points to mechanism, we should see it as a
mechanistic reflection of the genuine experience which we cannot
contact indirectly.
If you could control the behavior of language use from the bottom
up however, you could simulate that such a rule would work, just
by programming people to utter it with increasing frequency. This
would satisfy any third person test for the effectiveness of the
rule, but of course would be completely meaningless.
Don't confuse machine and language.
Interesting... aren't they both made of the same thing in Comp? Is
there a separate arithmetic truth which creates machines and one
which creates languages?
Language is when machine talks, but the machine's mindscape is much
vaster than any of their possible language and theories.
Can't you use one machine's language to build another nested
machine though? Isn't that the self-referential implications of
Church-Turing?
Not the only one. Except for computability, all other epistemic
notions can grow on a transfinite ladder. All transcendental
surprises hide another one.
Comp leads to transcendental humility.
Still though, it seems pretty ambiguous...one machine's language is
another language's machine.
They can be translated, but can be very different. And then it can
differ for all epistemic notion except computability.
How are they not confused already?
What would it look like if the brain as a whole were driving
the neurons?
Either it would be like saying that a high level program can
have a feedback on some of its low level implementations, which
is not a problem at all, as this already exist, in both biology
and computer science, or it would be like saying that a brain
can break the physical laws, or the arithmetical laws and it
would be like pseudo-philosophy.
What about the relation between high level arithmetic laws -
like the ones which allow for 1p subjectivity in UM, LM, etc and
the programs which support them?
To eat or to be eaten relatively to the most probable universal
neighbors. The relations can be complicated.
Their being complicated is what I would expect from high level
laws - but how is it that low level processes wind up being
influenced by them? How does the law that says dumb code can
begin to think for itself come to be followed by dumb code?
?
How do low level processes know that they are subject to the
commands of the high level processes?
Usually, they don't know. But then some can observe and infer, and
build theories/questions.
Maybe 'know' is too strong. What I meant, is how do low level
processes come to receive and respond to high level commands?
Probably by a mixture of chance and conformity to the laws. Then it
is accelerated by reflexion and communication. It is a complex
question.
That's what I'm interested in .. this "conformity to the laws" and
"refexion and communication". What could that be other than sense?
It is more primitive that sense. Semantics can be based on such
notions, which can be based on number relations. It is not obvious.
You need a bit of mathematical logic to grasp this.
Not between the high level program and the low level program,
but between the X-Level truths and laws and all local functions?
Above the substitution level, only god knows, but you can bet and
theorize locally, and, below the substitution level, you get the
full arithmetical mess, the union on all sigma_i formula, well
beyond the computable. It is not easy, but there are mathematical
lanterns, and deep symmetries, and deep self-referential insight.
It is a reality that the universal machines cannot avoid.
It is the advantage of comp, you can translate the problem in
arithmetic, but it is not necessarily a "simple", sigma_1, problem.
There is a no universal panacea capable of satisfying all
universal machines at once, nothing is easy.
You have to look inward, eventually.
I won't be able to understand that, but it seems to me that if
exotic capabilities like 1p awareness can be made up of dumb
programmatic elements, then the top-down influence of potential
intelligence must be equally important as the bottom-up blind
stacking of logical operators. It seems like you want it both
ways - that the higher order arithmetic magic of UMs are both
separate from the primitive machines of today, but the potential
for magic is inherent and inevitable strictly from inferences of
the lowest arithmetic truths.
Not at all, they are beyond. You still think about arithmetic like
if incompleteness wasn't discovered.
I see incompleteness as a limitation on the ontology of
arithmetic, but you see it as an invitation to omnipotence.
I see it as pointing on the fundamental difference between truth
and what is observable, guessable, sharable, communicable, etc.
Incompleteness concerns our limitation, already just in front of
the arithmetical facts.
Since we can know that incompleteness exists though, I see that as
supporting the idea that sense transcends the limits of any
particular arithmetic or logical model of it.
It transcends the ability of the terrestrial and divine creatures
(except perhaps god, but with comp even god is a bit overwhelmed by
the creation: matter is when god loose power).
You might still confuse a bit the truth, and what creatures can take
from the truth. We can only scratch the surface, we are limited even
through the experiential, but much more through the communicable.
That can explain why there is art.
Yes, I'm not hung up on communication. Sense has all kinds of
modalities in which experiences can be shared besides verbal
language. I see arithmetic as a specialized language, which is
tailored to a specific class of lowest common denominator 3p
universals. An immensely powerful language, obviously, but its power
is inversely proportional to its ability to properly address 1p
proprietary significance. It bets on 3p so much that it sees 1p as a
complex assembly of 3p rather than the simplicity behind all
possible wholes.
That would make you into an intuitionist, but that does not change
much in comp, or in arithmetic.
I don't understand why. Lots of things are incomplete, but we
don't assume that it means they are the ground of being. Why not
language? That seems much more incomplete and creative than
arithmetic.
Language are mode of expression. You *can* see machines as
languages, but it can confuse the beginners. The important
distinction is between truth and communicable.
We are indeed question ourselves. A brain, or a universal number,
is just an encapsulation of a question that the arithmetical
reality asks to itself, somehow. We are divine hypotheses, not
answers.
I don't see the human experience as merely hypothesis or questions.
That is why I prefer to separate machine and language, as it shows
quickly that we are hypothetical (and immaterial) ourselves. But we
are, in normal struggling for life situation, prevented to know
this. Again, it is the conflict between life and afterlife.
Theology is ... a morbid science, if you think twice on it.
To me it's like turning on a black light and concluding that only
fluorescent colors are real. Human experience has theological
dimensions, questions, and hypotheticals which engender the
'unbearable lightness of being', but there are other aspects of it
as well. That lightness is not a valid basis to try to duplicate our
universe or ourselves if a creator had to start from scratch.
We are participants, shapers of divinity itself. When we are
thirsty and drink cool pure water, there is no question or answer,
there is only the explosive tangibility of direct sensory
participation. The representation function is not plausible to
justify such a presentation.
We cannot represent to ourself that association, if it exists, but
this impossibility can be explained.
That sounds like a dodge. What are you saying it is that we can't
represent to ourselves?
Semantically, yes.
That we participate in the world? That we can enjoy drinking water
without having questions be answered?
Notably. Among many things.
We need certain vitamins also, yet we do not find the inhalation of
powdered vitamin pills to be an adequate substitute for nutritious
food. Even if pleasure could be justified as a motivator (it can't,
really) in a quantitative universe, there would not be any
advantage to having aesthetic variation in that pleasure. As in a
game, the abstraction of 'points' or 'scoring' is quite sufficient
to drive any advantageous mechanical action.
It does not, for real time behavior, in concrete complex environment.
Aha! Now you smuggle in a natural physical universe when it suits
your position.
No. I assume some physical reality at the start, if not I wouldn't
define comp with artficial and physical brain, build by real doctors,
who promised they will work in real time, so that I can see the next
real soccer cup. What is not assumed, and eventually abandoned, is the
idea that such "real physical phenomena" have to be assume at the start.
Real time is meaningless to a machine. However long the program
takes is the only reality of time there can ever be. Complexity is a
human expectation. Machines have no particular recognition of
complexity as far as I can tell. Concrete? Hahaha. Concrete indeed.
It is local, like your sensory experiences. You make opportunistic
statements. Try to get the point.
Qualia chunks a lot the information,
So do variables and subroutines, databases chunk as much information
as you want. Isn't the whole of quanta dedicated to chunking
information?
Not really. Apparently consciousness and qualia accelerates
informations processing in an unboundable way.
You run out of Greek letters, so instead of stacking Greek and
Chinese characters you invent color and feelings out of nowhere?
That's what we do.
I don't understand how nobody here can see that the wheels fall off
of Comp as soon as you try to justify qualia as a quant function.
This cannot be done entirely, but that fact can be explained. That's
the point.
You want qualia having no role at all? You will become eliminativist
or epiphenomenalist, then.
and accelerate your doing with respect to the most probable
universal neighbor.
Funnily, the first time I have been called crackpot, was when I said
that one day computer would use screen and images, instead of
printing tape. For exactly that reason. But today, the computers use
screen only for the help of the user. One day they will use mental
screening and imaging to speed themselves up. But that will still
take some time. We are not yet at the beginning of machine
evolution, even if the little baby gods are already born (the
universal numbers, brain and computers).
We disagree there. I think that optical image production is
superfluous to data transfer, storage, integration, etc. If you need
to add hardware and software to encode the data as images and decode
images as data, then why not just skip the images and send the data?
Because for me and you, but also for machine, the images can
structured the relevant information in a way which speed up the
retrievable of what is important. Of course that simplicity need a big
work for the brain/computer, but once you have it, you win lot of
time, which is a key to find prey and escape predators. Wandering
spiders have much big eyes than waiting spiders, for example.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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