On Tue, May 14, 2019, at 00:55, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote: > > > On 5/13/2019 4:18 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: >> 3) Or maybe it's "what the brain does", as many physicalists like to say. My >> body as mass, because the atoms that make up my body amount to that mass. >> What amounts to my consciousness? What are the building blocks? There is no >> accounting, there is no description in yours or van Neumann's sense. > > But there are models that work. That was my point in citing AI projects like > Watson
I mention this outside of our main discussion: Watson is mostly IBM marketing hype for scientifically-illiterate business executives. I say this as an AI researcher, not an AI-denialist. It does not deserve a place alongside serious research endeavors in the field. The Jeapordy player was cool, some nice papers came out of it (I have them and have read them all), but that is about it. The rest is just a bullshit business brand around cloud-stuff and old-fashioned business IT. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3321138/did-ibm-put-too-much-stock-in-watson-health-too-soon.html https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2017/07/02/is-ibm-watson-a-joke/ https://gizmodo.com/why-everyone-is-hating-on-watson-including-the-people-w-1797510888 https://www.techrepublic.com/article/stop-the-hype-the-real-value-of-ibm-watson-is-driving-small-incremental-business-value/ https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/08/you-can-call-it-hype-but-watson-is-getting-marketers-roi/ Etc. > and AlphaGO. AlphaGO is pretty cool. My feeling is that you are doing with AI what physicists tend to accuse outsiders to the field of doing with quantum physics: mysticism. I'm not accusing you of being the Deepak Chopra of AI-mysticism, I hold you in much higher regard than that, but I think maybe you lack the depth of understanding to see that there isn't as much there there as you might assume. AlphaGO is essentially a minimax decision tree. Go is infamous for leading to combinatorial explosion even more severely than chess, so decision trees where considered a no-go for a long time. The genius move here is to train a feed-forward neural network to prune the tree, providing something akin to intuition and making the decision tree both tractable and effective against expert human players. Reinforcement learning was used to train the tree by having the agents play against themselves (not in the first iteration of AlphaGO, but I think we can simplify a bit for the purpose of this discussion). This is all very neat and clever, but nothing was discovered in terms of computer science that wasn't already well-known in the 1980s. It just so happens that these approaches finally became feasible due to sufficiently powerful hardware. Now, this is no small achievement, and I have maximum respect for the AlphaGO team. But I failed to see what was learned in terms of how intelligence works, let alone what this has to do with consciousness, anymore than say, performing some linear algebra with NumPy or whatever. > The building blocks are perception, information processing, values, and > action. Well, if "perception" is a building block then there is already an implicit perceiver, so you are begging the question. Reminds me of this joke: Easy way to make your own megaphone! You just need: 1- Some duct tape 2- A megaphone > You say "there is no accounting" but that's because you're using > "accounting" as a synonym for "explain". The accounting in scientific theory > is in terms of a model that works. You're demanding of a theory of > consciousness that will do for consciousness what general relativity** does > not do** for the metric or for the stress-energy tensor, what Darwin** did > not do** for reproduction with variation. Darwin didn't have the full story, but now the main things are accounted for. We know how nucleic acids can be sequenced in very long molecules, thus digitally encoding the shape of proteins, that then fold into 3D shapes according to the laws of physics and can interact and compose themselves in ways that eventually generate complex organisms, that can interact to mix their respective strands of nucleic acids and create incubating environments for new, similar organisms to be generated. There are several scientific fields dedicated to the numerous details that I am glossing over in the silly explanation above. Under physicalism, for consciounsness, we have nada. Unless we start with the megaphone. > Maybe someday Bruno's theory will yield some interesting prediction (of the > future), but until then it's a theory doesn't do any work. So far it doesn't > even account for the effect of holding your breathe too long or ingesting > LSD. You know I appreciate Bruno and his work very much, but this is besides the point here. I am not arguing that Bruno has the answers (or not), just that physicalism accomplishes nothing that idealism does not, and in fact seems to lead to a dead end when it comes to consciousness. I am not even arguing that idealism provides the answers. I am just insisting on our ignorance, and I find it bizarre that scientifically-minded people such as you will be so reluctant to admit it. > The physical model that says consciousness is the brain processing > information by neuron's firing at synapses...a very successful model. Successful at doing what? > But the mysterians of consciousness This is something I really have a hard time understanding. We might disagree on some things, but I always assumed that we had more in common than what sets us apart: that we developed a passion for science because we are curious and reject bullshit authorities, such as that adult man who dresses like a white wizard in the Vatican or anyone who thinks that bronze-age people suffering from sun stroke in the desert somehow have something so profound to say that no other book is needed. That we believe that reality is intelligible, and that we can reason and talk about it, and that this can lead to some progress in our understanding. But here you are, name-calling those who are curious and refuse to stop asking the big questions, because the big questions that show cracks in your favorite word-view make you uncomfortable... Beware of spending too much time fighting monsters and so on... > want to pooh-pooh that because it doesn't talk about how their consciousness > "feels". > Yes. I don't understand the scare quotes. If you don't talk about how consciousness "feels" you are not talking about consciousness. You are just hiding from the big question. Also, you are accusing of "woo" those who insist on the reality of the only experience that can be directly verifiable, and remain sceptical of anything else. If that is "woo", then "woo" is better than what you call "science". > But neither does Bruno's . He talks about "arithmetic, seen from the inside" > as though that was more than a Platonic metaphor. Well, that's another discussion, and I'm sure Bruno is available to answer your questions, but even if you are right, it does not refute my point. Telmo. > > Brent > > > -- > 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 view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/6d7eae1d-f2b7-3fe9-2643-cd0db62b915e%40verizon.net > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/6d7eae1d-f2b7-3fe9-2643-cd0db62b915e%40verizon.net?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/98d87abf-ac74-4ddc-a656-97e424ff9f28%40www.fastmail.com.
