Re: My estimation of Daniel Dennett continues to improve
2013/3/30 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 3:43 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: So if somebody else prevents me from doing what I want then I lack free will, No, you just lack the ability to exercise it. In other words you can't do what you want to do. So tell me again what the free will noise means. A lot of people have told you, but you don't want to listen and never will, so yes it doesn't mean anything, you win... your place in the plonk queue. Byebye. if you would decide freely to pass through a mountain like it was water you wouldn't be able to, on the contrary if you wanted freely to do something but someone coerced you not to, the only thing preventing you from doing it is the other person I don't see how it matters if its a person or a thing that interferes with me, either way my desires are thwarted. Coerced means a force was used to prevent me from doing what I want to do, and it doesn't matter if its another person or gravity I still can't do it. So tell me again what the free will noise means. John K Clark -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: 'Brain Waves' Challenge Area-Specific View of Brain Activity
On 29 Mar 2013, at 13:14, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 29, 2013 6:21:59 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Mar 2013, at 20:15, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, March 28, 2013 10:41:22 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 26 Mar 2013, at 17:53, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, March 26, 2013 10:13:09 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 26 Mar 2013, at 13:35, Craig Weinberg wrote: It is if you assume photons bouncing back and forth. unlike a universal number. The fixed point of the two mirrors needs infinities of reflexions, but the machine self-reference needs only two diagonalizations. As I said, you must study those things and convince yourself. It sounds like a dodge to me. Fundamental truths seem like they are always conceptually simple. I can teach someone the principle of binary math in two minutes without them having to learn to build a computer from scratch. You don't have to learn to use Maxwell's equations to be convinced that electromagnetism involves wave properties. ? I can explain diagonalization in two minutes. If this can help. What would help more is to explain how diagonalization contributes to a computation being an experienced awareness rather than an unconscious outcome. Diagonalization shows that a machine can refer to itself in many sense, which are equivalent in god's eyes, but completely different in the machine's eyes, and some of those self-reference verify accepted axioms for knowledge, observable, etc. How do you know that it intentionally refers to itself rather than unconsciously reflecting another view of itself? I don't know. But you are saying you know that it does that, so how do you know? If my car's wheel is out of alignment, the tire tracks might show that the car is pulling to the right and is being constantly corrected. That entire pattern is merely a symptom of the overall machine - the tracks themselves are not referring or inferring any intelligence back to the car, and the car does not use its tracks to realign itself. It is we who do the inferring and referring. or a cartoon of a lion talking about itself into some kind of subjective experience for the cartoon, or cartoon-ness, or lion- ness, or talking-ness. Self-reference has no significance unless we assume that the self already has awareness. Hmm... I am open to that assumption, but usually I prefer to add the universality assumption too. If I say 'these words refer to themselves', or rig up a camera to point at a screen displaying the output of Tupper's Self- Referential formula, I still have nothing but a camera, a screen and some meaningless graphics. This assumption pulls qualia out of thin air, ignores the pathetic fallacy completely, and conflates all territories with maps. On the contrary, we get a rich and complex theory of qualia, even a testable one, as we get the quanta too, and so can compare with nature. Please, don't oversimplify something that you have not studied. How can there be a such thing as a theory of qualia? Qualia is precisely that which theory cannot access in any way. Yes, that is one the main axiom for qualia. Not only you have a theory, but you share it with me. How do you know it is a main axiom for qualia? It is not someything I can know. It was just something we are agreeing on, so that your point made my points, and refute the idea that you can use it as a tool for invalidating comp. I agree that it is an important axiom, but only to discern qualia from quanta. It doesn't explain qualia itself or justify its existence (or insistence) in particular. Sure. Nice we agree on that axiom. My point was just that this cannot be used against comp, as the comp theory of qualia explains that particular aspect. It's like saying that the important thing about the Moon is that we can't swim there. The fact that I understand that the Moon is not in the ocean doesn't mean I can take credit for figuring out the Moon. To me it shows the confirmation bias of the approach. You are looking at reality from the start as if it were a kind of theory, I bet I can find a theory, indeed. But this does not mean that anything about machine can be made into a theory. Sure, I'm not denying that it is true that we can't swim to the Moon, or that this theory could not be part of a larger theory, but the theory still doesn't produce a theory justifying the Moon. It justifies the existence of the appearance of the moon, and its stability. Then the actual existence is geographical, contingent. Comp justifies that we cannot justify such things. so that this detail about qualia being non-theoretical has inflated significance. It is important indeed, but of course it is not use here as an argument for comp, only as showing that you can't use the absence of a theory as an argument against comp, because computer
Re: Any human who has played a bit of Arimaa can beat a computer hands down.
On 29 Mar 2013, at 13:31, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 29, 2013 6:28:02 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Mar 2013, at 20:36, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, March 28, 2013 1:29:19 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Mar 2013, at 13:23, Craig Weinberg wrote: Strong AI may not really want to understand consciousness This is a rhetorical trick. You put intention in the mind of others. You can't do that. You can say something like,: I read some strong AI proponents and they dismiss consciousness, ..., and cite them, but you can't make affirmative statement on a large class of people. That's interesting because it seems like you make statements about large classes of UMs frequently. You say that they have no answers on the deep questions, or that they don't see themselves as machines. What if Strong AI is a program...a meme or spandrel? What if the soul is in the air, and that each time you cut your hair you become a zombie? Then people would avoid cutting their hair I would imagine. Unless they were suffering. But seriously, what makes you think that Strong AI is not itself a rogue machine, implanted in minds to satisfy some purely quantitative inevitability? You are coherent because you search a physical theory of consciousness, and that is indeed incompatible with comp. I don't seek a physical theory of consciousness exactly, I more seek a sensory-motive theory of physics. I will wait for serious progresses. But your argument against comp are invalid, beg the questions, and contains numerous trick like above. Be more careful please. That sounds like another 'magician's dismissal' to me. I beg no more question than comp does. You miss the key point. There is no begging when making clear what you assume. You can assume comp, as you can assume non-comp. But you do something quite different; you pretend that comp is false. So we ask for an argument, and there you beg the question, by using all the time that comp must be false in your argument, and that is begging the question. Comp is false not because I want it to be or assume it is, but because I understand that experience through time can be the only fundamental principle, and bodies across space is derived. I have laid out these reasons for this many times - how easy it is to succumb to the pathetic fallacy, how unlikely it is for experience to have any possible utility for arithmetic, how absent any sign of personality is in machines, how we can easily demonstrate information processing without particular qualia arising, etc. These are just off the top of my head. Anywhere you look in reality you can find huge gaping holes in Comp's assumptions if you choose to look, but you aren't going to see them if you are only listening to the echo chamber of Comp itself. Indeed, if we limit ourselves to only mathematical logic to look at mathematical logic, we are not going to notice that the entire universe of presentation is missing. Comp has a presentation problem, and it is not going to go away. Well if you *understand* that time is fundamental, then comp is false for you. The pathetic fallacy is not a logical fallacy. You just say that you believe that comp is false, but machines have naturally that belief, as comp is provably counter-intuitive. I have no tricks or invalid arguments that I know of, and I don't see that I am being careless at all. Which means probably that you should learn a bit of argumentation, to be frank. Or just assume your theory and be cautious on the theory of other people. I'm only interested in uncovering the truth about consciousness. What other people think and do is none of my business. You are asserting without argument that a theory is incorrect, and you do this by assuming that it cannot do this or that, but with no argument that your personal feeling. I just explain to you that machines might have already that feeling, as it looks like when we listen to them. Bruno Craig Bruno Craig Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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-li...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at
Re: 'Brain Waves' Challenge Area-Specific View of Brain Activity
On 29 Mar 2013, at 13:44, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 29, 2013 5:41:19 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Mar 2013, at 18:59, meekerdb wrote: On 3/28/2013 7:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Intelligence, in my opinion is rather easy too. It is a question of abstract thermodynamic, intelligence is when you get enough heat while young, something like that. It is close to courage, and it is what make competence possible. ?? Competence is the most difficult, as they are distributed on transfinite lattice of incomparable degrees. Some can ask for necessary long work, and can have negative feedback on intelligence. That sounds like a quibble. Intelligence is usually just thought of as the the ability to learn competence over a very general domain. Intelligence is an ability to learn and become competent, but more importantly to understand and discern. Intelligence is the cognitive- level modality of sensitivity. intelligence (n.) late 14c., faculty of understanding, from Old French intelligence (12c.), from Latin intelligentia, intellegentia understanding, power of discerning; art, skill, taste, from intelligentem (nominative intelligens) discerning, present participle of intelligere to understand, comprehend, from inter- between (see inter-) + legere choose, pick out, read OK. That's why I think that intelligence is simple, almost a mental attitude, more akin to courage and humility, than anything else. Competence asks for gift or work, and can often lead to the feeling that we are more intelligent than others, which is the first basic symptom of stupidity. I don't know that feeling more intelligent than others means you are stupid, maybe just vain. If taken literally, how could anyone become more intelligent than anyone else if as soon as they are intelligent enough to realize it, that made them stupid? Because they will never realize that (unless they confuse intelligence and competence, but then it is just a minor vocabulary issue). In case they realize that they are really intelligent (in the large sense exposed here), then they become stupid, indeed. You have something similar with the mystical illumination. If someone tell you I have seen God, you can be pretty sure he did not. Same with genuine happiness: it goes without saying, etc. Of course I talk on ideal and public case. In private you can say more, but often, even there, saying too much leads to the contrary effect. Bruno Craig Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: 'Brain Waves' Challenge Area-Specific View of Brain Activity
On 30 Mar 2013, at 02:13, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 29, 2013 1:59:44 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 29 Mar 2013, at 16:02, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 29, 2013 10:47:09 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 29 Mar 2013, at 10:44, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2013/3/29 Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be On 28 Mar 2013, at 18:59, meekerdb wrote: On 3/28/2013 7:52 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Intelligence, in my opinion is rather easy too. It is a question of abstract thermodynamic, intelligence is when you get enough heat while young, something like that. It is close to courage, and it is what make competence possible. ?? Competence is the most difficult, as they are distributed on transfinite lattice of incomparable degrees. Some can ask for necessary long work, and can have negative feedback on intelligence. That sounds like a quibble. Intelligence is usually just thought of as the the ability to learn competence over a very general domain. That's why I think that intelligence is simple, almost a mental attitude, more akin to courage and humility, than anything else. Competence asks for gift or work, and can often lead to the feeling that we are more intelligent than others, which is the first basic symptom of stupidity. That sounds more and more 1984ish... War is peace. ? Freedom is slavery. ? Ignorance is strength I never said that. I say that awareness of our ignorance is strength. It participates to our intelligence. That is true only if our intelligence is grounded in something which transcends its own ignorance... That's what the Löbian machines do, even just by looking inward. That's computer science. They question their ignorance or the question their certainty? They contemplate their ignorance, and use it to question their certainty. otherwise awareness of our own ignorance is just another layer of ignorance. This carries over to simulation - the ability to discern one thing as more real than another is meaningless unless our sense of realism is grounded in something beyond simulation. Right. The physical reality, with comp, is not simulable. Nor consciousness. Then what are we saying yes to the doctor for? For an artificial brain, which will hopefully simulate their organic brain at the right level, so that they keep the usual statistical relationship with their usual universal neighbors (the physical universe, their boss, their life partners, etc.). But machines can makes possible for some person to manifest themselves with some other person, with some non negligible probability. ? This is what you might understand if you read carefully UDA, at least up to step 7. Patterns don't care about patterns, or to quote Deleuze - “Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single center, a unique and receding perspective, and in the consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilizes and moves nothing. That makes sense in comp when describing the machine first person perspective. How is it different in a third person perspective? How do computations discern between hypothesis and mobilization, or more importantly, how do they move anything? Because they have faith in their ability to move something, which they develop through lasting and repeating true experiences. In some sense we might argue that the first person associated to a machine, is not really a machine, after all, nor anything describable in any 3p way. Which invites the question, in what way can comp claim to address consciousness? How does the 1p interface with the 3p? By the reinstallation of the connection/conjunction with truth. It associates an unnameable knower to a nameable believer. And that is what makes the first person immune for diagonalization, making it possible that [] x - x. [] is not a number. Provably so with []p = Bp p. What makes the first person feel? Their knowledge. Comp is not so much I am a machine that I (whatever I am) can survive locally with normal probability a digital brain/body transplant. What is saved in the process is an immaterial connection between some number, some environments or consistent computational-continuations, and an infinity of universal numbers. If we don't know what I is, then we really can't pretend to know whether it is automatically transferred from location to location simply by an affinity of signs and functions. We never know what things are, and that's why we assume theories, reason, and test them. public nature never say that you are correct. It can only say that you are wrong. In comp only God can tell you that you are correct, but if you repeat that, then you are wrong. We are not machines, Craig, we borrow machines (arithmetical relations). We are living on the boundaries
Re: Any human who has played a bit of Arimaa can beat a computer hands down.
On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 1:23 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Thursday, March 28, 2013 5:52:04 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 6:29 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, March 27, 2013 1:03:27 PM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Craig, On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: From the Quora http://www.quora.com/Board-**Gam** es/What-are-some-fun-games-**to-**play-on-an-8x8-**Checkerboard-** besides-chess-**checkershttp://www.quora.com/Board-Games/What-are-some-fun-games-to-play-on-an-8x8-Checkerboard-besides-chess-checkers This is interesting because I think it shows the weakness of the one-dimensional view of intelligence as computation. Whether a program can be designed to win or not is beside the point, That's not really fair, is it? Why not? How else can I counter your argument against intelligence as computation if I am not allowed to use computation? My example would not prove that it's what the brain does, but it would prove that it can be. You are arguing that it cannot be. I'm arguing that a screw is not the same thing as a nail because when you hammer a screw it doesn't go in as easily as a nail and when you use a screwdriver on a nail it doesn't go in at all. Ok. Sometimes the hammer is a better tool and sometimes the driver is. As humans, we have a great hammer and a decent screwdriver. A computer can't hammer anything, but it has a power screwdriver with a potentially infinite set of tips. Ok, but if I understand your ideas, you're claiming that the hammer is also the fundamental stuff that reality is made of. Sorry if I'm misrepresenting what you're saying. If I'm not, I don't understand why computers can't have the hammer. as it is the difference between this game and chess which hints at the differences between bottom-up mechanism and top-down intentionality I see what you're saying but I disagree. It just highlights the weak points of tree-search approaches like min-max. What I gather from what happens when one plays Arimaa (or Go): due to combinatorial explosion, players (even human) play quite far away from the perfect game(s). The way we deal with combinatorial explosion is by mapping the game into something more abstract. How do you know that any such mapping is going on? It seems like begging the question. I don't know. I have a strong intuition in it's favor for a few reasons, scientific and otherwise. Have you tried thinking about it another way? Where does 'mapping' come from? Can you begin mapping without already having a map? Yes, I think I begin with a map based on previous experiences and then improve it as I discover it's weaknesses. I think the original map came from brute-force experimentation while my brain was developing in my early months of live. But this is just wild guessing, of course. The non-scientific one is introspection. I try to observe my own thought process and I think I use such mappings. Maybe you do. Maybe a lot of people do. I don't think that I do though. I think that a game can be played directly without abstracting it into another game. Ok, I believe you but I don't have the same experience. My wife does. She works in a creative field and she is very intuitive, with the typical aversion for math. She can beat me at chess quite easily, without appearing to resort to conscious strategic thinking. She describes it as doing what feels right. The scientific reason is that this type of approach has been used successfully to tackle AI problems that could not be solved with classical search algorithms. I don't doubt that this game is likely to be solved eventually, maybe even soon, but the fact remains that it exposes some fundamentally different aesthetics between computation and intelligence. This is impressive to me because any game is already hugely biased in favor of computation. A game is ideal to be reduced to a set of logical rules, it's turn play is already a recursive enumeration. A game is already a computer program. Even so, we can see that it is possible to use a game to bypass computational values - of generic, unconscious repetition, and hint at something completely different and opposite. Put another way, if there were top-down non-computational effort going into the game play, why would it look any different than what we see? Our brain seems to be quite good at generating such mappings. We do it with chess too, I'm sure. Notice that, when two humans play Arimaa, both can count on each other's inabilities to play close to the perfect game. As with games with incomplete information, like Poker, part of it is modelling the opponent. Perhaps not surprisingly, artificial neural networks are quite good at producing useful mappings of this sort, and on predicting behaviours with incomplete information. Great progress has been
Re: 'Brain Waves' Challenge Area-Specific View of Brain Activity
On Saturday, March 30, 2013 7:01:47 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 29 Mar 2013, at 13:14, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 29, 2013 6:21:59 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Mar 2013, at 20:15, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, March 28, 2013 10:41:22 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 26 Mar 2013, at 17:53, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, March 26, 2013 10:13:09 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 26 Mar 2013, at 13:35, Craig Weinberg wrote: It is if you assume photons bouncing back and forth. unlike a universal number. The fixed point of the two mirrors needs infinities of reflexions, but the machine self-reference needs only two diagonalizations. As I said, you must study those things and convince yourself. It sounds like a dodge to me. Fundamental truths seem like they are always conceptually simple. I can teach someone the principle of binary math in two minutes without them having to learn to build a computer from scratch. You don't have to learn to use Maxwell's equations to be convinced that electromagnetism involves wave properties. ? I can explain diagonalization in two minutes. If this can help. What would help more is to explain how diagonalization contributes to a computation being an experienced awareness rather than an unconscious outcome. Diagonalization shows that a machine can refer to itself in many sense, which are equivalent in god's eyes, but completely different in the machine's eyes, and some of those self-reference verify accepted axioms for knowledge, observable, etc. How do you know that it intentionally refers to itself rather than unconsciously reflecting another view of itself? I don't know. But you are saying you know that it does that, so how do you know? Because every experience that I have ever had with symbols is that they do not literally refer to anything. A parrot need not speak English to repeat words interactively. A red octagon need not inherently refer to stopping just because we use it to tell ourselves to stop. I understand exactly what that is - how semiotics can help us tease apart the semantic from the pragmatic and syntactic, and my views help show how all three are symmetrical aspects of the whole, which is sense participation. Comp turns sense upside down, and conflates it with semantic and pragmatic modes under the completely inhospitable umbrella of syntax. Arithmetic is a disembodied, impersonal, and automated syntax which for some reason winds up becoming embodied as semantic personsbut there is no reason to imagine that could happen going by the arithmetic alone. The pathetic fallacy plugs the gap between who we know we are and what we want to believe got us here. If my car's wheel is out of alignment, the tire tracks might show that the car is pulling to the right and is being constantly corrected. That entire pattern is merely a symptom of the overall machine - the tracks themselves are not referring or inferring any intelligence back to the car, and the car does not use its tracks to realign itself. It is we who do the inferring and referring. or a cartoon of a lion talking about itself into some kind of subjective experience for the cartoon, or cartoon-ness, or lion- ness, or talking-ness. Self-reference has no significance unless we assume that the self already has awareness. Hmm... I am open to that assumption, but usually I prefer to add the universality assumption too. If I say 'these words refer to themselves', or rig up a camera to point at a screen displaying the output of Tupper's Self-Referential formula, I still have nothing but a camera, a screen and some meaningless graphics. This assumption pulls qualia out of thin air, ignores the pathetic fallacy completely, and conflates all territories with maps. On the contrary, we get a rich and complex theory of qualia, even a testable one, as we get the quanta too, and so can compare with nature. Please, don't oversimplify something that you have not studied. How can there be a such thing as a theory of qualia? Qualia is precisely that which theory cannot access in any way. Yes, that is one the main axiom for qualia. Not only you have a theory, but you share it with me. How do you know it is a main axiom for qualia? It is not someything I can know. It was just something we are agreeing on, so that your point made my points, and refute the idea that you can use it as a tool for invalidating comp. I agree that it is an important axiom, but only to discern qualia from quanta. It doesn't explain qualia itself or justify its existence (or insistence) in particular. Sure. Nice we agree on that axiom. My point was just that this cannot be used against comp, as the comp theory of qualia explains that particular aspect. That's like saying
Re: My estimation of Daniel Dennett continues to improve
On Saturday, March 30, 2013 1:30:46 AM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: Free will is intentionally favoring some set of sensory preferences So I have free will if I have intentionality and I have intentionality if I have free will. Did you learn that from astrology or numerology or by examining the entrails of a chicken? No, I learned it from intellectual cowards who are afraid to examine their own prejudices. Craig John K Clark -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: My estimation of Daniel Dennett continues to improve
On Saturday, March 30, 2013 5:06:10 AM UTC-4, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2013/3/30 John Clark johnk...@gmail.com javascript: On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 3:43 AM, Quentin Anciaux allc...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: So if somebody else prevents me from doing what I want then I lack free will, No, you just lack the ability to exercise it. In other words you can't do what you want to do. So tell me again what the free will noise means. A lot of people have told you, but you don't want to listen and never will, so yes it doesn't mean anything, you win... your place in the plonk queue. Byebye. That's the thing about free will. If you use it to decide that you don't have it, then you become correct. Craig if you would decide freely to pass through a mountain like it was water you wouldn't be able to, on the contrary if you wanted freely to do something but someone coerced you not to, the only thing preventing you from doing it is the other person I don't see how it matters if its a person or a thing that interferes with me, either way my desires are thwarted. Coerced means a force was used to prevent me from doing what I want to do, and it doesn't matter if its another person or gravity I still can't do it. So tell me again what the free will noise means. John K Clark -- 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Any human who has played a bit of Arimaa can beat a computer hands down.
On Saturday, March 30, 2013 7:08:25 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 29 Mar 2013, at 13:31, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 29, 2013 6:28:02 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Mar 2013, at 20:36, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, March 28, 2013 1:29:19 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Mar 2013, at 13:23, Craig Weinberg wrote: Strong AI may not really want to understand consciousness This is a rhetorical trick. You put intention in the mind of others. You can't do that. You can say something like,: I read some strong AI proponents and they dismiss consciousness, ..., and cite them, but you can't make affirmative statement on a large class of people. That's interesting because it seems like you make statements about large classes of UMs frequently. You say that they have no answers on the deep questions, or that they don't see themselves as machines. What if Strong AI is a program...a meme or spandrel? What if the soul is in the air, and that each time you cut your hair you become a zombie? Then people would avoid cutting their hair I would imagine. Unless they were suffering. But seriously, what makes you think that Strong AI is not itself a rogue machine, implanted in minds to satisfy some purely quantitative inevitability? You are coherent because you search a physical theory of consciousness, and that is indeed incompatible with comp. I don't seek a physical theory of consciousness exactly, I more seek a sensory-motive theory of physics. I will wait for serious progresses. But your argument against comp are invalid, beg the questions, and contains numerous trick like above. Be more careful please. That sounds like another 'magician's dismissal' to me. I beg no more question than comp does. You miss the key point. There is no begging when making clear what you assume. You can assume comp, as you can assume non-comp. But you do something quite different; you pretend that comp is false. So we ask for an argument, and there you beg the question, by using all the time that comp must be false in your argument, and that is begging the question. Comp is false not because I want it to be or assume it is, but because I understand that experience through time can be the only fundamental principle, and bodies across space is derived. I have laid out these reasons for this many times - how easy it is to succumb to the pathetic fallacy, how unlikely it is for experience to have any possible utility for arithmetic, how absent any sign of personality is in machines, how we can easily demonstrate information processing without particular qualia arising, etc. These are just off the top of my head. Anywhere you look in reality you can find huge gaping holes in Comp's assumptions if you choose to look, but you aren't going to see them if you are only listening to the echo chamber of Comp itself. Indeed, if we limit ourselves to only mathematical logic to look at mathematical logic, we are not going to notice that the entire universe of presentation is missing. Comp has a presentation problem, and it is not going to go away. Well if you *understand* that time is fundamental, then comp is false for you. I understand that *experience* (through 'time') is fundamental, only because no other option ultimately makes as much sense. The pathetic fallacy is not a logical fallacy. No, it's more important than logic. You just say that you believe that comp is false, but machines have naturally that belief, as comp is provably counter-intuitive. That's just comp feeding back on its own confirmation bias. Comp is a machine which can only see itself. It's the inevitable inversion meme which arises from mistaking forms and functions for reality rather than the capacity to project and receive them. I have no tricks or invalid arguments that I know of, and I don't see that I am being careless at all. Which means probably that you should learn a bit of argumentation, to be frank. Or just assume your theory and be cautious on the theory of other people. I'm only interested in uncovering the truth about consciousness. What other people think and do is none of my business. You are asserting without argument that a theory is incorrect, I have been asserting my arguments in writing for thousands of hours. Why do you say that it is without argument unless it is simply too awful to accept that there is no valid counter-argument? and you do this by assuming that it cannot do this or that, but with no argument that your personal feeling. Why are common sense observations shared by all people since the beginning of humanity reduced to 'my personal feeling', but esoteric works of mathematics from the last couple of centuries are are infallible? I just explain to you that machines might have already that feeling, as it looks
Re: Any human who has played a bit of Arimaa can beat a computer hands down.
On Saturday, March 30, 2013 8:58:41 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 1:23 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Thursday, March 28, 2013 5:52:04 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 6:29 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, March 27, 2013 1:03:27 PM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Craig, On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: From the Quora http://www.quora.com/Board-**Gam** es/What-are-some-fun-games-**to-**play-on-an-8x8-**Checkerboard-** besides-chess-**checkershttp://www.quora.com/Board-Games/What-are-some-fun-games-to-play-on-an-8x8-Checkerboard-besides-chess-checkers This is interesting because I think it shows the weakness of the one-dimensional view of intelligence as computation. Whether a program can be designed to win or not is beside the point, That's not really fair, is it? Why not? How else can I counter your argument against intelligence as computation if I am not allowed to use computation? My example would not prove that it's what the brain does, but it would prove that it can be. You are arguing that it cannot be. I'm arguing that a screw is not the same thing as a nail because when you hammer a screw it doesn't go in as easily as a nail and when you use a screwdriver on a nail it doesn't go in at all. Ok. Sometimes the hammer is a better tool and sometimes the driver is. As humans, we have a great hammer and a decent screwdriver. A computer can't hammer anything, but it has a power screwdriver with a potentially infinite set of tips. Ok, but if I understand your ideas, you're claiming that the hammer is also the fundamental stuff that reality is made of. Sorry if I'm misrepresenting what you're saying. If I'm not, I don't understand why computers can't have the hammer. Yes exactly. The hammer is the fundamental stuff of reality, but computers are not real in the same sense as the parts they are made of are real. To overextend the metaphor, the fundamental stuff of reality would be tiny wax hammers which grow denser through time and hammering. Our sense and motive is like the 20lb sledge hammer, and we have hammered the wax hammers into a fragile, but very precise screwdriver. We can shape that screwdriver into a hammer instead, but no matter what we do, it is still going to be as soft as wax, because the density hasn't been aged into it. In reality, it isn't age, but experiences which accumulate as 'density' of significance. It's like leveling up. The materials of the computer have not graduated from physics to biological physics, so they can't participate in the biological levels of interaction. as it is the difference between this game and chess which hints at the differences between bottom-up mechanism and top-down intentionality I see what you're saying but I disagree. It just highlights the weak points of tree-search approaches like min-max. What I gather from what happens when one plays Arimaa (or Go): due to combinatorial explosion, players (even human) play quite far away from the perfect game(s). The way we deal with combinatorial explosion is by mapping the game into something more abstract. How do you know that any such mapping is going on? It seems like begging the question. I don't know. I have a strong intuition in it's favor for a few reasons, scientific and otherwise. Have you tried thinking about it another way? Where does 'mapping' come from? Can you begin mapping without already having a map? Yes, I think I begin with a map based on previous experiences and then improve it as I discover it's weaknesses. I think the original map came from brute-force experimentation while my brain was developing in my early months of live. But this is just wild guessing, of course. Is it really a map though, or do you just have access to condensed experiences of the territory? The non-scientific one is introspection. I try to observe my own thought process and I think I use such mappings. Maybe you do. Maybe a lot of people do. I don't think that I do though. I think that a game can be played directly without abstracting it into another game. Ok, I believe you but I don't have the same experience. My wife does. She works in a creative field and she is very intuitive, with the typical aversion for math. She can beat me at chess quite easily, without appearing to resort to conscious strategic thinking. She describes it as doing what feels right. That may be the key to understanding a lot of what happens on this list - we just have different psychological characteristics. It's unfortunate though, because split-brained experiments have shown us how left-brained dominance insists that on reductionist views, even when they are objectively delusional. Consciousness, in the
Re: Any human who has played a bit of Arimaa can beat a computer hands down.
On 29 Mar 2013, at 13:31, Craig Weinberg wrote I'm only interested in uncovering the truth about consciousness On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: You are asserting without argument that a theory is incorrect, and you do this by assuming that it cannot do this or that, but with no argument Bruno, did you really expect anything better? You are arguing with somebody who has publicly admitted that they believe astrology and numerology are valid methods of learning about the world. Given that Craig is in the habit of saying in nearly every post that consciousness is definitely X but consciousness is most certainly not Y I wondered what other methods he used to become so knowledgeable in the ways of philosophy; so I asked if he also believed that examining the entrails of a chicken can foretell the future but he did not answer. I think its a perfectly reasonable question given that all 3 were very popular during the medieval dark ages and prediction by means of chicken entrails is not one bit more imbecilic than astrology or numerology, so I just wondered if he had gone 2/3 of the way toward being a perfectly respectable member of the dark ages or if he had gone all the way. John K Clark -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Any human who has played a bit of Arimaa can beat a computer hands down.
On Saturday, March 30, 2013 12:52:21 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On 29 Mar 2013, at 13:31, Craig Weinberg wrote I'm only interested in uncovering the truth about consciousness On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.be javascript:wrote: You are asserting without argument that a theory is incorrect, and you do this by assuming that it cannot do this or that, but with no argument Bruno, did you really expect anything better? You are arguing with somebody who has publicly admitted that they believe astrology and numerology are valid methods of learning about the world. I never said that I believe anything. I said that astrology and numerology are the most interesting and useful topics which I have come across. That has nothing to do with your biased view of astrology as superstition, but with understanding the roots of discernment, and the depths of psychology. Given that Craig is in the habit of saying in nearly every post that consciousness is definitely X but consciousness is most certainly not Y I wondered what other methods he used to become so knowledgeable in the ways of philosophy; so I asked if he also believed that examining the entrails of a chicken can foretell the future but he did not answer. I'll pretend that you are really asking a question here, rather than just spreading your bigotry - which is insulting to Bruno btw, as you aren't even talking to him but just using his participation to leverage your tantrum. If you were genuinely asking about prediction and divination, then I would answer that anything can be used as an oracle as far as being a prop to access super-personal insights - changing channels on the TV, flipping coins for the I Ching, pulling cards, rolling dice, etc. The result however is not, in my experience, a prediction, but an impersonal commentary on the moment/circumstance in which you are participating. Using entrails or any other spooky aesthetics for this kind of thing might change your results if it helped put you into a more sensitive mood, but I wouldn't know. I think its a perfectly reasonable question given that all 3 were very popular during the medieval dark ages and prediction by means of chicken entrails is not one bit more imbecilic than astrology or numerology, so I just wondered if he had gone 2/3 of the way toward being a perfectly respectable member of the dark ages or if he had gone all the way. It would be reasonable coming from an honest person. When it comes from someone who values winning arguments over the truth, then it is just so much sniggering and spit. Craig John K Clark -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Quick question
True or False: COMP implies that any fundamental physical constant is non computable? -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Quick question
On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 04:15:54PM -0700, Joseph Knight wrote: True or False: COMP implies that any fundamental physical constant is non computable? I would say false, unless you can say that pi is _not_ a physical constant. Another example that springs to mind is the magnetic moment of the neutron which is definitely physical, but maybe not fundamental. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Quick question
Sorry for the vagueness of my question; I would not count pi as a physical constant. I would count the empirically determined circumference:diameter ratio for a circle in our observed curved spacetime as a physical constant. The reason I asked is because Bruno has repeatedly claimed that COMP=noncomputability of physics but I'm wondering what exactly this would mean in practice. On Mar 30, 2013 6:53 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 04:15:54PM -0700, Joseph Knight wrote: True or False: COMP implies that any fundamental physical constant is non computable? I would say false, unless you can say that pi is _not_ a physical constant. Another example that springs to mind is the magnetic moment of the neutron which is definitely physical, but maybe not fundamental. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/53ZNGv7qPpo/unsubscribe?hl=en . To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Quick question
On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 07:15:00PM -0500, Joseph Knight wrote: Sorry for the vagueness of my question; I would not count pi as a physical constant. I would count the empirically determined circumference:diameter ratio for a circle in our observed curved spacetime as a physical constant. The reason I asked is because Bruno has repeatedly claimed that COMP=noncomputability of physics but I'm wondering what exactly this would mean in practice. IIUC, it means that what he calls first person indeterminancy will manifest itself as genuinely random phenomena, which is by definition uncomputable. An example of such phenomena might be the timing of beta decay of atoms, which is widely believed to be truly random. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Quick question
On 3/30/2013 5:15 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: Sorry for the vagueness of my question; I would not count pi as a physical constant. I would count the empirically determined circumference:diameter ratio for a circle in our observed curved spacetime as a physical constant. The reason I asked is because Bruno has repeatedly claimed that COMP=noncomputability of physics but I'm wondering what exactly this would mean in practice. Good question. I had assumed he referred to indeterminancy. The trouble with asking about physical constants is that they are only measured as rational numbers. 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
