> On 15 Mar 2019, at 13:43, Philip Thrift <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Friday, March 15, 2019 at 5:18:43 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > >> On 14 Mar 2019, at 14:03, Philip Thrift <[email protected] <javascript:>> >> wrote: >> >> >> >> On Thursday, March 14, 2019 at 7:54:49 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: >> On Thu, Mar 14, 2019 at 3:40 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@ <>gmail.com >> <http://gmail.com/>> wrote: >> >> > We may even have robots that can sit and talk with us about current >> > events, know everything in Wikipedia, etc. How "creative" they will be is >> > an open question. >> >> I don't think it's a open question at all. I can state without reservation >> that regardless of how intelligent computers become they will never be >> creative because the word "creative" now means whatever computers aren't >> good at. Yet. And thus due to Moore's Law and improved programing the >> meaning of the word constantly changes. What was creative yesterday isn't >> creative today. >> >> > On mathematics: Of course mathematics changes, because it is a type of >> > language, and languages change. >> >> If mathematics is just a language (as I think it is) then it can not be used >> to construct things, in particular it can't, by itself without the use of >> matter, construct a Turing Machine as Bruno claims it can. English is also a >> language but an English word has no meaning without an English speaker with >> a physical brain to hear it. >> >> John K Clark >> >> >> >> There is some AI art that sells at galleries >> >> >> https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/shortcuts/2018/oct/26/call-that-art-can-a-computer-be-a-painter >> >> <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/shortcuts/2018/oct/26/call-that-art-can-a-computer-be-a-painter> >> >> but that's about it I've seen. >> >> Turing machines in theoretical computing/math books are all fictional >> things, of course. > > “Of course”? > > > >> >> All actual computers are made of matter. > > No doubt that this is true, but that is not an argument that such matter are > not (stable) appearances. > > But as I try to explain here from times to times, the arithmetical reality > explains where and why such stable appearances appears. If I can say. > > You just seem to be a believer in a Primary Matter, but I have never seen one > evidence for it. Initially, “mathematician” were not believer in a > mathematical reality, but a skeptic toward the idea that matter is the > primitive reality we have to assume. But with mechanism, we don’t have to > assume matter, it explains matter, and unlike physicalism, it explains how > consciousness remains associated to the appearances of matter. > > You seem to beg the question by deciding that math objects are fiction and > physics object is not. > > No problem, but then digital mechanism is false. But there are no evidences, > it is just an old habit since the closure of Plato academy; > > Bruno > > > > > One could also look at it as a pragmatist.
This depends on your goal. Physics is better in prediction, than metaphysics and theology, except person for the first person expectation when taken seriously, but pragmatism is OK. > > Say I want to make something. I could say "I want to make it out of > arithmetic (numbers).” This would be like using string theory to prepare a pizza. I just let you know the logical consequence of YD + CT (indexical mechanism, “yes doctor” + “Church-Turing”). Then it is hard not to see how much contemporary physics confirms it. > But ways to actually do that is something like to write a program where > "numbers" do things in a computer. But we know what is going on here is > electrons moving through circuits and pixels. I have no idea what the electron are. The best I can find are books in quantum field theory which describes only intricate number relation, predicting rather well most measurable numbers related to the electron phenomenon. The physicists can even tell us if there is only one electron or many (cf Dirac). > > It could be "running" in my brain (assuming I can imagine the program > executing). But that does nobody else any good. It is the “in my brain” which might seem preposterous. > > Or I could type it up and file it away for later on a hard drive. > > Electrons, circuits, pixels, brain cells, hard drives. Matter. Or digital clock mechanism, like with Babbage machine, or just anything from any Turing complete reality, but if we assume mechanism, it is just undecidable introspectively, yet testable by observing nature. Up to now, what the physicist find incomprehensible is what all universal machine “rich enough” discover all by itself. > > On whether some ultimate Löb-Gödel theorem prover can "explain" self-aware > experiences: I still think that there are non-numerical first-class > experiential entities that are needed to completely "flesh out" true > experience. (And those can only come from matter.) I understand quite well the feeling. But the Löbian machine too. Actually. Let me past here what I just answered on QUORA: the question was “can consciousness be digitised?” << This is a subtle and hard question, and a hot question, and also a slightly ambiguous one, as my answer will try to make clear. Strictly speaking, the answer is no. Astonishingly, I guess, this follows from the Indexical Digital Mechanist hypothesis in the fundamental cognitive science, which is, to be short, the assumption that there is a level of description of my brain, or body, or body + finite part of the environment, at which I would survive, in the usual clinical sense, to a digital functional substitution, or more simply, the belief that we can survive with a digital brain, or, to relate this with the question asked, the belief that consciousness is invariant for a type of functional digital substitution. In that case it can be shown that consciousness will belong to the type of arithmetical truth being , for each “enough rich” mechanical machine-believer true, non definable, non justifiable/provable/nor computable immediately knowable, quasi trivial, indubitable It is a bit like Truth, by the theorem of Tarski, and it is a theorem *about* all such believers, that the “enough rich” machine-believers can justify themselves. The universal Turing machine, or combinators, programs, etc, (we assume the Church-Turing thesis) is confronted to something verifying the four points above. “Enough rich” means knowing enough of arithmetic to prove that if it exists a natural number having a decidable property the machine can find it. Also called Gödelian, of Gödel-Löbian, or simply Löbian machine. Consciousness is somehow “living” at the intersection of truth and belief. A bit like the point “you are here” on a map. The belief can be partially computable, but the consciousness is attached to an abstract type, realised in infinitely many histories, which explains why the “material intelligible” obeys to a (quantum) logic of alternative sets of events and alternative consistent (sound or unsound) histories. If you define the soul by the (conscious) first person somehow imposed by incompleteness, the Löbian machine knows that it has a soul, that it can’t, nor will try to, prove it to you, and that its soul is not a machine, nor anything capable of any communicable third person description. The universal (Turing-Church-Post-Kleene) machine/number is never completely satisfied, and is born universal dissident. A sort of baby god, and we are partially responsible if it becomes a Terrible Child, relatively to our (hopefully consistent) historie(s). To sum up: consciousness cannot be digitised, nevertheless a cell, or a brain, or a physical computer, or an arithmetical computer can make consciousness true for the machine-believer consistent and enough rich relatively to (infinitely) many histories brought in any Turing-complete (Turing universal) theory/believer/rational-machine. (Note: this reduces fundamental physics into a statistics on relative consistent extension in arithmetic, making the digital mechanist hypothesis testable, and quantum mechanics without wave collapse seems to confirm this “many-histories” interpretation of arithmetic provided by the “rich enough” machine). >> > > > - pt > > -- > 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] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list > <https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list>. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout > <https://groups.google.com/d/optout>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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