On 5/2/2013 7:02 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, May 1, 2013, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> Artificial neural networks have been trained to fly planes, invest in the
stock
market, converts speech to text, recognise handwriting and so on and so on.
True.
> For most of these cases, nobody understands how the network works, they
only
understand how they created the necessary
conditions for a certain behaviour to emerge.
Also true. So you know that under certain circumstances shit happens, and that's all
that you need to know if you're just interested in how, but not if you also want to know
why. So if you just wanted to know how to make a AI you could reverse engineer a human
brain, you might not understand why your creation worked but that wouldn't stop it from
working.
> The first activity [science] offers public rewards
It helps you figure out how the world actually works not how you wish it works. And
because what you've discovered is not just true for you but for the external world too
I'd be interested to hear what you've found out.
> the second only offers private rewards.
Well, I suppose navel gazing might lower the blood pressure in some people, but don't
expect it to teach you anything important about the complexities of reality, otherwise
you'll be as disappointed as the last hundred generation of navel gazers have been. And
navel gazers turn into total bores as soon as they open their mouth because even if they
really have found something it is only true for them.
Keep in mind that mathematics (including logic and computation theory) are done almost
entirely by "navel gazing".
> You freed yourself from the dogmas of Christianity but not from its
morality.
Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before,
at least I never heard it before I was 12.
>> if you are a logical man then your doubts about the consciousness of
a
intelligent robot would be no greater than your doubts about the
consciousness
of your fellow intelligent human beings; and lets face it as a
practical matter
those doubts must be very very very very small.
> From a Bayesian standpoint, we are disagreeing on the value of a prior.
This has
nothing to do with logic, we just place different bets on an unknown.
I don't understand, are you saying that you actually believe that it is likely that you
are the only conscious being in the universe??
>> If you believe that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated then
logically there is no alternative, you must believe that Charles Darwin
was wrong.
> That doesn't follow.
Like hell it doesn't!! You know for a fact that Evolution produced at least one being
(and probably many billions) that was not just intelligent but conscious too, and there
is absolutely positively no reason for Evolution to do that if intelligence and
consciousness are unrelated.
That shows that they are related as implemented in Earth's biology, but it's not clear
that can be generalized to concluded they must be related no matter how intelligence is
implemented.
Brent
> I believe that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution and
I'm
agnostic on consciousness.
Then what I said before was entirely wrong, your views are not even close to being self
consistent.
John K Clark
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