________________________________ From: John Clark <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, August 26, 2013 10:55 AM Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 6:24 PM, Chris de Morsella <[email protected]> wrote: > I say quite clearly that and I repeat -- I am not interested in nor do I much > care whether humans are superior or inferior to computers. Take me at my word > when I say I don’t really care one way or the other, that this horse race is > uninteresting to me. I'm sorry Chris, I can't take your word for it because I don't think any rational being would advance a argument in favor of human superiority as incredibly weak as "All measurable processes – including information processing -- happen over and require for their operations some physical substrate"unless they'd already decided what they'd prefer to believe. Perhaps that is how you see it, but what you are seeing is the result of your own spin. I will repeat -- and you either take me at my word or go ahead and make an ass out of yourself by continuing to insist that I must be lying to you... no skin off my back. The point I was actually making in the sentence you quoted is that all processes happen in a local frame of reference, and that there is no universal all knowing point of view. Take me at my word or not.. your prerogative I guess -- its your head you are free to fill it with whatever you choose. > How incredibly pompous of you. Do you go popping into other people’s heads deciding what they believe a lot? >>Not as often as I'd like, I wish I had the ability to detect deception all >>the time but I'm not that good at it, however sometimes its obvious. No point in having a conversation if you have already made up your mind now is there? Either take me at my word or this is rather pointless. >>There is one thing that brains and cuckoo clocks and roulette wheels and the Tianhe-2 Supercomputer all have in common, things inside them happen for a reason or things inside them do not happen for a reason. >> Ahhhh yes back once again to your idée fixe. And how exactly does that help >> you understand the brain, the CPU or anything at all? This obsession of >> yours – it seems like one to me, for you keep returning over and over again >> to re-stating it. You believe things either happen for a reason or they >> don’t; though you cannot prove it. >>Let me get this straight you are >> skeptical that X is Y or X is not Y and demand proof. Have I really got that >> straight?? No you cannot prove that things in the brain happen because of some proximate definable and identifiable cause or otherwise they must therefore result by a completely random process. In a system as layered, massively parallel and highly noisy as the brain your assumptions of how it works are naïve and border on the comical. The brain is not a based on a simple deterministic algorithm in which the chain of cause and effect is always clear. You seem to fail to grasp how in complex chaotic systems -- such as the brain -- the linkage between cause and effect is not necessarily clear or even possible to work back to. I cannot help you if this is too subtle for how your mind wants to work; that is a deficiency in your own analytical abilities, and I cannot help you there. > Care to elucidate what is so darn original and profound about the tautology > you endlessly come back to? Up to now every tautology has had one great virtue, they are all true; but apparently you think that for the first time in human history you have found a tautology that is false. Have I really got that straight?? You are being pointless and gratuitously argumentative. > continually re-iterating your tautology. The switch is either on or it is off… you say. Everything either happens for a reason or it does not…. Or so you say. I don’t know that this is in fact so. So you really don't know if that is in fact so. Have I really got that straight?? >>The point that free will is a idea so bad it's not even wrong. > And you of >>course are free to believe that if you must…. though I find it a self-imposed >>impoverishment of the soul > So you think that if you have free will then you don't do things for a reason and so are not deterministic and you don't do things for no reason and so are not random. Have I really got that straight?? No you have it all twisted up in your binary way of viewing things. If all your brain is able to model is either or propositions then whats the point of carrying this conversation forward. > > If we are machines then we are surely fantastically complex and highly >dynamic ones. >>>Yes, and so are computers. >Sure, but, even now still orders of magnitude less so than us. Sure, but computers are gaining on us at the rate of about one order of magnitude every 7 years, and there is no end in sight. > You cannot really state that you understand a system, without actually > understanding the system. >>That is a tautology and thus obviously true, but you don't have to understand >>something to make use of it; we still don't fully understand how aspirin >>works but it has been curing headaches for well over a century. True but black box testing -- or describing a system only based on a knowledge of its inputs and outputs can only take you so far. Not arguing that this approach is without value, of course it has value, but in order to truly understand any process one has to crack it open and step through the fine grained details and get your hands dirty, which is why white box testing exists and is very widely used by the way. Have you ever bothered to ask yourself the reason why such a heavy reliance is also placed on white box testing (verification etc.) instead of just relying on black box techniques? > It is false to suggest that one can understand human intelligence or > consciousness, for example, without understanding how it emerges within us More tautologies, that is to say more true statements, but understanding doesn't enter into it. I don't have to understand Hungarian to copy a Hungarian poem. You can copy the symbols on a sheet of paper , but without understanding Hungarian you will never be impacted by the meaning or sensations that poem is seeking to convey. So perhaps you can faithfully copy a stream of symbols -- the meaning of which you ignore -- but that is a pretty empty and meaningless bit of knowledge that imparts very little understanding. If this level of understanding suffices for you and satisfies your own intellectual curiosity -- then so be it -- for you. I would rather get the meaning contained within the poem. You on the other hand would not even know it was a poem.... just a series of symbols arranged in some order. That is qualitatively different and is a meager degree of knowledge. > it is quite clear that you have no idea what I am talking about. On this we > very much agree. > Yes. John K Clark -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
