Re: Artificial Philosophizing
Jef Allbright wrote: On 2/7/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So Bruno says that: a) I am a machine. b) ...no man can grasp all aspect of man A and b above both make sense to me. Jef and Brent say that we are machines who (that?) philosophize. I'll agree that was implied by my statement. I suggest we start out by concentrating on the fact that Brent and Jef don't agree with Bruno's b) above. Note that I would in fact agree with both a and b above. So do I. Brent Meeker
Re: Artificial Philosophizing
On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 08:34:22PM +0100, Quentin Anciaux wrote: To the list, I don't understand how some of you accept the term we are machine and not we are digitalisable at some level and hence emulable at that level, could someone enlight me on this apparent contradiction ? Quentin Machine means more than Turing machine. For example, I would count a Geiger counter connected to a radioactive source as a machine, yet no Turing machine can reproduce its pattern of clicks. We are machine simply means to me that there is no immaterial soul breathing life into our bodies - we are ultimately 100% material. Cheers -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 pgpofm4lpo9XN.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: belief, faith, truth
Le 06-févr.-06, à 18:54, Tom ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: My answer is probably too short, but I want to take the risk of being misinterpreted in order to be plain: OK, I will take the risk of misinterpreting you. We can't JUST DO things (like AI). Actually a Universal Dovetailer do nothing. It is a program without inputs and without outputs. Whenever we DO things, we are THINKING ABOUT them. Like a loebian machine, or a lobian angel (by definition an angel is any platonic entity which is not able to be emulated by a turing machine). I'd venture to say that HOW WE THINK ABOUT THINGS (e.g. philosophy, epistemology, etc.) is even MORE important that DOING THINGS (engineering, sales, etc.). I could have a similar opinion. Eventually what I find important is that what we DO reflects what we THINK. That is one way of looking at the advantage that we humans have over machines. Mmmh feel superior ? (I guess you are using the pregodelian sense of machine). We have the capability to not just do things, but to know why we are doing them. Are you sure we know why? Are you sure machines cannot know why? This runs counter to the whole PHILOSOPHY (mind you) of modern science, that we are simply machines, and that there is no WHY. This is due to the materialist who like to use the idea that we are simply machine just to put under the rug all the interesting open problem of (platonician) theology. Since Godel's discovery this position is untenable. Now we know that we don't know really what machines are. With the comp-or-weaker hyp, we already know that if we are machine then the physical laws emerges from in a totally precise and testable way. This modern philosophy, if taken to its extreme, is the death of the humanness. Since more than 3000 years, there are two competing theories, or just methodologies in front of the fundamental questions. In the occident, they have respectively take the shape of: 1) Aristotle. In summary: open your eyes and try to figure out what is 2) Plato. In summary: close your eyes and try to figure out what is. My work: an argument showing that the roots of truth including physics is indeed in our mind, together with a constructive version of that argument. This one shows how to program a universal machine (computer) to look deep inside itself and expresses the physical laws, so that we can test Plato. First tests has been done and confirms Plato, and still more Plotinus. This illustrates that some back and forth between the two methodologies, like in most scientific work, is not forbidden! Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Artificial Philosophizing
Le 08-févr.-06, à 10:36, Brent Meeker a écrit : Jef Allbright wrote: On 2/7/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So Bruno says that: a) I am a machine. b) ...no man can grasp all aspect of man A and b above both make sense to me. Jef and Brent say that we are machines who (that?) philosophize. I'll agree that was implied by my statement. I suggest we start out by concentrating on the fact that Brent and Jef don't agree with Bruno's b) above. Note that I would in fact agree with both a and b above. So do I. ... and note that the coherence of taking simultaneously both a and b above is provided by the incompleteness results (Godel, ...) which can be summarized by ... no machine can grasp all aspect of machine. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Artificial Philosophizing
Le 06-févr.-06, à 22:32, [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit : So Bruno says that: a) I am a machine. b) ...no man can grasp all aspect of man To be sure, and clear, note that I have never said I am a machine, nor man is a machine. All what I say is that: IF I am a machine THEN physics emerges from machine's psychology or theology. Both ontologically and epistemologically. Now, I have made some progress, and strictly speaking, I can replace the comp hyp by the much more general lobian hyp. This entails that machines and a very large class of non-machine shares the same physical laws. Of course my argument remains simpler to present with the comp hyp, and I still can refer to it for that reason. b) become no machine, no angels, nor Gods can grasp all aspect of itself. Even the Plato's and Plotin's big ONE can't, but it is not because it lacks something, in that case, it is more because it does not lack anything so that somehow it is far above the very idea of grasping. See Boolos 1993 (precise ref in my Lille thesis) for an explicit description of an angel (by which I mean any loebian entity which is not turing emulable, but still follows the G/G* logic). Tom says that to philosophize is one aspect of humanness that is more than a machine (i.e. simply following a set of instructions). The idea of following a set of instructions is level dependent. I agree it is basically inhuman. Now machine can observe themselves (in more than one sense) and this in general leads to unpredictable behavior. With or without the quantum hyp. it can be said that man or nature follows simple set of instruction like following the (linear and computable) solutions of the Schroedinger Eq. Jef and Brent say that we are machines who (that?) philosophize. Well, if we are machines, we must admit we are philosophizing a liitle bit :) Brent says that realizing we are machines is the beginning of (or another step in) the death of human hubris (arrogance). I agree, but loebianity is almost the most general characterization of humilty and modesty. For the modalist: humility = Dt - DBf, Modesty = B(Bp-p)-Bp. I will come back on this, when I will come back on the arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus' hypostases. I thought that Bruno maintains that humility is on the side of realizing that we cannot totally understand ourselves. No loebian entity can fully understand it-selves, and that gives to them many (really many) alternative exploration paths, which can recombine or not. Pascal, Reason can begin again when we recognize what we cannot know. Yes and no. Some have used that formula with the meaning that you can reason, but only starting from such or such sacred book on revelations. In particular I am not sure in which sense pascal did use it. Could we try to make sense of this, given that we believe in sense? I hope this help a little bit. I hope I can make it clearer, perhaps by finding a way to explain Godel's theorem and incompleteness phenomena, and how they are related to G and G*, and the discoveries of mystical machines (which are just machines which look deep inside themselves, in the Godel-Lob sense of self-reference). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Artificial Philosophizing
Le Mercredi 8 Février 2006 10:41, Russell Standish a écrit : On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 08:34:22PM +0100, Quentin Anciaux wrote: To the list, I don't understand how some of you accept the term we are machine and not we are digitalisable at some level and hence emulable at that level, could someone enlight me on this apparent contradiction ? Quentin Machine means more than Turing machine. For example, I would count a Geiger counter connected to a radioactive source as a machine, yet no Turing machine can reproduce its pattern of clicks. We are machine simply means to me that there is no immaterial soul breathing life into our bodies - we are ultimately 100% material. Cheers Hi, we (as observer) perceive at any given time a finite amount of information... so what you could know (still as an observer of a system) is finite, hence digitalisable at the level of information that you could know about the object, so I don't see why a radioactive source and the click pattern on a geiger counter cannot be simulated... You could object randomness, but generating (and executing) all program by the UD will generate all random string as well. Regards, Quentin
Re: Artificial Philosophizing
On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 08:17:05PM +0100, Quentin Anciaux wrote: Hi, we (as observer) perceive at any given time a finite amount of information... so what you could know (still as an observer of a system) is finite, hence digitalisable at the level of information that you could know about the object, so I don't see why a radioactive source and the click pattern on a geiger counter cannot be simulated... You could object randomness, but generating (and executing) all program by the UD will generate all random string as well. Regards, Quentin A UD can generate the set of all random strings, but it still needs to select a single string to be equivalent to a Geiger counter. AFAIK, this is impossible for a Turing machine, but rather trivial from a real, physical machine. I can do it on my computer, for example, showing it to be capable of more than a Turing machine. Cheers -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 pgpwEb2b656wF.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: belief, faith, truth
I was just about to ask what an angel was! You must have read my mind, Bruno. Non-machine-emulable is angel. OK. Why do they(?) have to be called angel? Can one liken them(?) to the theological description of an angel or is there some other reason? regards Kim Jones On 08/02/2006, at 8:42 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: (by definition an angel is any platonic entity which is not able to be emulated by a turing machine).
