On Monday, March 2, 2020 at 1:23:49 PM UTC+1, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 1 Mar 2020, at 15:24, PGC <[email protected] <javascript:>> wrote: > > > > On Sunday, March 1, 2020 at 3:09:31 PM UTC+1, Bruno Marchal wrote: >> >> >> On 28 Feb 2020, at 18:38, PGC <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> >>>> >>> What could be a "wrong" thesis about Watson and/or Holmes? >>> >>> >>> Good question. It would be like making a summary of a novel, which would >>> be wrong. If you say “Tintin never got to the moon” you are wrong, with >>> respect to the novel, and false, with respect to the mundane reality. But >>> if you say that the number 18 is prime, you are false, even among the >>> aliens. >>> >> >> If your literature professor didn't fail you, he or she should have. I >> say this without irony or humor intended. >> >> Nobody in the world, other than servitor humblebrag here, claims to know >> or have an authoritative grasp on where "mundane reality" ends and where >> the land of fiction and wishful thinking begins. Sure, we may know that >> some abstraction may or may not be locally more effective given some more >> or less defined domain... but that's far from claiming absolute >> reality/truth. >> >> >> I certainly do not claim the truth of Mechanism. I derive consequences of >> it, and insist that Mong the consequence, nobody can know if Mechanism its >> true, at least in some public way. Of course, someone having got an >> artificial brain; can, privately be happy with it, but still cannot claim >> it to be known as true. >> >> Somewhere you talked about Mechanism as a metaphor. Here mechanism >> explains why this always fail. Mechanism is just the assumption of the >> existence of a level where we are Turning emulable, but then that level >> cannot be known, and that is why it requires, for the practitioners, some >> act of faith. The ethic of mechanism is that mechanism could be wrong, and >> should never been enforced. It asks for an explicit consent, or refusal. To >> say yes to the doctor implies the right to say no. >> > > You can't post without bringing up mechanism, thereby assuming very > ambitiously that everybody you meet consents > > > I do not. Nobody can even guess if I believe in Mechanism myself or not. > > I think everybody here has reasonable confidence/evidence that you do: most posts you write are defenses of mechanism and attacks on what you call "materialism". And this is an understatement.
> > > (where are your "ethics of mechanism"?) to your use of what is still a > metaphor, > > > It is not a metaphor. > This certainty is absolute, while not providing the math/experiment/result of emulating the states of even one complex organism, such as our famous worm, to a degree that might convince any scientist of plausible tractability of the problem in computational terms. I use tractability in the sense of determining whether or not something appears practical given the current state of the art in computing. Nobody cares about folks whining about their neglected hypothesis, if those folks don't work on showing others that the hypothesis may be fruitful. You ask for a considerable leap of faith, requiring others to assume that an entire human can be cloned. Show them that you can emulate a worm's neurology, full accounting of complete state with neurons firing etc., using any assumption, mechanism if you want, and that would be evidence towards a more credible appreciation of mind/organism/brain as machine. To have blind faith in our future ability to do so, is hardly scientific. Science relies on evidence somewhere, not infinite explanations. > If you accept a digital artificial brain in the skull, > Then show me a worm's brain working in arithmetic. The felicity of doing so wouldn't ever mean, we've truly achieved what we set out to do, but the model and simulation would shed light on how far or close we are to realizing the core component of the thought experiment, and therefore it's plausibility at some point in time. Then people could make up their own minds on whether the problem is valid, or as Wittgenstein suggests, apparently a time waster of the usual kind, which ontological reasoning and identity questions have 2000 years track record of being. A German conservative parliamentarian intent on blocking parliament from some action he was opposed to, recently stated in a newspaper: "we should have a fundamental discussion on the subject."; knowing full well that all one has to do to block action is to loose people in defending their fundamental convictions. > the fact that you survive or die is not a metaphor. > Well, show us! > The artificial brain is not a metaphor. See my other post (we cannot know > which machine we are, except by being lucky, and taking “know” in the weak > Theaetetus sense of true belief, assuming mechanism true). > I'm immune to the interior reasoning because I'm not convinced of the door/premise of the reasoning in the first place: assume we clone an individual is the premise...* then show me the clone, the simulation, informed by your ethics, metaphysics, engineering etc. * It might be cul-de-sac with zero value for humans interested in sustaining survival and life. Metaphysically, it devalues life and paints a rather depressing picture of existence. Everybody's immortal, so why care about anything and/or anybody? > > > > in absence of convincing evidence that even a tiny part of reality, one > complex organism, can indeed be emulated effectively enough, > > > The contrary is true: we don’t have find any evidence of anything non > mechanical in Nature. > Show us the goods. Emulate just one complex organism from nature. > > The problem of Mechanism is not that people disbelieve it, but that people > take it for granted. The inconsistency happens when people believed in both > Mechanism and Materialism. > Wow, some people are inconsistent. This is the kind of psychological insight that is rather obvious and easy to obtain. Nobody needs fancy ontologies for trivialities. It would be more amazing to see anybody be perfectly consistent in regard to anything. Another reason the ontology becomes less credible. > > > > > > that we'd have sufficient context to even approach the question. Show us > successful emulations of just one complex organism, say your favorite > "worm", instead of bringing up conways gol in conways gol. The latter is > easy, while the former... just show us and we'll see. PGC > > > > You might look at my “Amoeba, Planaria and Dreaming machine”. Usually, > the extraordinary claim is “non-mechanism” (usually done by “believer” in > something supernatural). > Anyway, I don’t defend mechanism, nor do I attack it. It is not my job. I > show it to be testable (and tested) I study how far it is from > Neoplatonism, also. > Not only did I believe and read that at a point in my life, I defended computationalism on this list. For years. How you can forget this is concerning. My position now is closer to: stop explaining; the pleasantness of Platonism or correspondences of its inner reasoning with personal observations and mysticisms of yours... sorry, but none of this sheds light regarding its plausibility. Evidence is required for this: we are quite a long way from emulating a single complex organism, therefore the road is long on determining whether mind as machine metaphor, that presupposes cloning of entire individuals and uploading consciousness to some other substrate, would reach a threshold of plausibility beyond pure hypothetical possibility, making arguments of this type more concrete. Step 0 might already be too ambitious for many, without more context/evidence on the plausibility and practicability of mind as a machine. You want to engage the linguists/philosophers that allege platonism is pleasant but empty, inconsistent language game? Those folks won't be swayed by internal consistencies inside arguments with established premisses they don't accept. Show them how the math does worm neurology better than neuroscience by some measure, and the problematic platonic truth claims would appear less relevant. 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