On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 1:54 AM Brent Meeker <meekerbr...@gmail.com> wrote:
*>>2) Natural selection can see intelligent behavior but it can't see >> consciousness.* > > > * > That's questionable.* *I don't think there is anything we can be more sure about than natural selection can't see consciousness. And you can't see it either except in yourself. * > *> I can certainly see the difference between conscious and unconscious.* *No you cannot!* > * > Conscious thought in the sense of imagining scenarios* *But the thing is, you may be able to "imagine scenarios" but natural selection can not. And there is no reason to think your "imaginary scenarios" correspond with anything in the physical world. * > *> with one's self in them is pretty damned useful.* > *I could not say this two years ago but today if you could only observe what an intelligent agent did then not only natural selection but also YOU could not tell if it was performed by an AI or a human, provided that the AI pretended to be stupider and think slower than it really can. * *>> 1) Why do you think definitions are better than examples?* > > *> Examples are more ambiguous.* > *Examples can contain such little ambiguity that even a child is not confused by them. You didn't learn English by reading a dictionary, you learned it because some adult pointed to a tall thing in the ground that had green stuff at the top and said "tree". All definitions are ultimately circular, that's why if you're totally unfamiliar with a concept in higher mathematics a definition of that concept will not help you understand it, it'll just be a bunch of gobbledygook, unless somewhere in that definition there are words equivalent to "such as". * > >> *>> 2) Where do you think lexicographers obtained the knowledge they >> needed to write the definitions that are in their dictionaries? **3) Are >> definitions of words also made of words, and do those words in the >> definition also have definitions made of words, **and do those words in >> the definition of the definition of words also have definitions made of >> words, and ....?* > > > *> They terminate in ostensive definitions which are special examples* > *Yes examples, if you dig deep enough into a definition you'll always come to an example at its root, or at least you will if the definition is worth a damn. * > *>>4) What is the definition of "definition"? * > > > > *> A description that picks out a single meaning of a word.* > *I asked Google for a synonym for the word "meaning" and it listed a bunch of them, but the very first one was "definition". And I asked for a synonym for "description" and it said "exemplification". As I said , all definitions are ultimately circular. Without examples language would be useless because there would be no way to make a connection between the squiggles on a page and something in the real world, a dictionary would just be a book that links one squiggle to another squiggle. * *John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* tbs -- 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 visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2OMcrODdgoRSwHfg_qdSeWTOr%2B3owZzc6wiSKTTiZouA%40mail.gmail.com.
