Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On 01 May 2013, at 19:47, John Clark wrote: On Wed, May 1, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Darwin knew for a fact that he was conscious. Really? Yes really. References please. No. I was asking because the term consciousness seems more recent to me, and I am not sure it appears in Darwin. I might be wrong, but you made a strong statement, so saying no looks a bit like I made that up. you need to grasp the FPI and go farer than step two to see this. Which Foreign Policy Initiative are you referring to? Universal elementary logic. Bruno 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. 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: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 01 May 2013, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 10:49:11 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Apr 2013, at 20:58, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book, nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead. The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete color blindness. What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to understanding on any others. I am not sure I can help you. You confuse the levels. You don't really try to understand the point, which would mean that you talk like if you knew that comp is false. I don't expect you to help me, I'm trying to help you. Of course. But what helps me is reasoning, not personal conviction. I don't know that comp is false, but I know that if it isn't it won't be because of the reasons you are suggesting. Comp may be true in theory, but none of the replies to the Chinese room are adequate, or even mildly compelling to me. Searles confuse a program, and a universal program running that program. This page http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ is quite thorough, and lists the most well known Replies, yet it concludes: There continues to be significant disagreement about what processes
Re: How can matter (the universe) be a thought in the mind of a cosmic intelligence ?
On 01 May 2013, at 21:01, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 30, 2013 9:55:05 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 29 Apr 2013, at 17:38, Roger Clough wrote: How can matter (the universe) be a thought in the mind of a cosmic intelligence ? How can matter be a thought ? That is because matter is at the base entirely mathematical, as quantum physics suggests. References: Idealism in science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism The metaphysics of Leibniz. (http://team.academia.edu/RogerClough) Paul Davies in the Mind of God puts these scientists' discoveries into context with the writings of philosophers such as Plato. Descartes, Hume, and Kant. His startling conclusion is that the universe is no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here. By the means of science, we can truly see into the mind of God. Sir James Jeans wrote; The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.[59] Mechanism implies idealism, or non materialism. A lot of critics of mechanism assume materialism, but that is what has been shown incoherent, if there is no flaw (in UDA). If we are machine, then it has been argue that numbers dreams emerges from arithmetic, and appearenace of matter emerges from those dream. It is not strict idealism, as everything comes from arithmetic, but it is a form of idealism as the physics is reduced to an explanation in term of numbers only (or Turing equivalent). Mechanism implies idealism of a sort, but only an idealism based on the behavior of materials. Not at all. It is based on arithmetic or computer science. On the contrary, the behavior of materials is shown to be reduced to the infinities of number relations, and matter appears to be appearances. On the contrary of your suggestion that matter plays some crucial (but rather mysterious or unexplained) role in the mind. Turing machines require that something behave as a material structure behaves - as a concrete framework which persists with position and functional continuity. Not at all. Turing machines can be defined in term of addition and multiplication of natural numbers. Be careful to read good books or the original papers, as some popularisation of this are often wrong. This is not a fugue of subjective thoughts and emotions, or spontaneous impulses, it is a regulating edifice of matter-like ideas. Mechanism is materialism reduced to an immaterial essence. It is an evacuated idealism/null-phenomenology. You might study the UD Reasoning which shows that with mechanism, the notion of matter is reduced in term of sum on infinities of mathematical computations. Bruno Craig Bruno Dr. Roger Clough NIST (ret.) 4/29/2013 http://team.academia.edu/RogerClough -- 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 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: Numbers
On 01 May 2013, at 22:09, John Mikes wrote: Bruno asked why I have problems how to figure out 'numbers'. In his texts (as I remember and I have no quotes at hand) the world can be construed from a large enough amount of numbers in simple arithmetical ways (addition-subtraction). Also: numbers do not mean quantities. If his older post with pegs (II=two, =four etc.) is OK, the 'words' two and four DO mean quantities. If not, as 'numbers' they are meaningless combinations of letters (sounds?) we could call the series any way, as well as e.g.: tylba, chuggon, rpais, etc. for 1,2,3 - or take them from any other language (eins,zwei,drei, - egy, kettő, három) as they developed in diverse domains/lifestyles. The 'numbers' would be like Ding an Sich (German) however used as qualifiers for quantities if so applied (see Bruno's 'pegs' above). The terms we are using are not important. All we need is some agreement on some theory. Most things we need for the natural numbers can be derived from the following axioms (written in english): any number added to zero gives the number we started with (= x + 0 = x) 0 is not the successor of any natural number if two numbers are different, then they have different successors a number x added to a successor of a number y gives a successor of the sum of x and y. Are you OK with this? In science we know that we cannot define what we are talking about, but we can agree on some principles about them. More reasonably sounds the idea of my wife, Maria, who assigns the primitive development of quantities originally to proportions: larger (amount) - smaller (amount) evolving in some thousand centuries into the process of 'counting' the included units. That's very good, but we can also develop general statement. We would not have discover the universal number (the computers) without agreeing on those principles. I published on this list my thought for developing the Roman numbering signs. I started with 2 - a PAIR of hands etc. (not with one, which means only the existence) and branching into 5 (as fingers, as in pentaton music) already as 'many'. OK. I still have no idea what description could fit 'number' in Bruno's usage (I did not study number - theory - to keep my common sense (agnostic?) thinking free). See above. Bruno John Mikes -- 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: Why do particles decay randomly?
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 01 May 2013, at 17:33, Telmo Menezes wrote to John Clark: At this point I'm not even talking about Science but logic and a distaste for cheerfully and strongly believing in 2 contradictory things. I believe that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution and I'm agnostic on consciousness. There is nothing contradictory about this, but I can't think of any further way to make my point. We'll have to disagree to disagree. You shouldn't, perhaps. May be it would be enough to just ask John Clark to push his logic a bit further. I agree that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution, but this assumes some mechanism, and thus Mechanism. Then the discovery of the universal machine shows that machine intelligence is a (logical) product of the elementary operations in arithmetic. Then machine can see their own limit, and are statistically forced to guess in something which can't be a machine, as arithmetical truth, for example. We don't need to know what consciousness is. If we can agree that consciousness is 1) undoubtable 2) incommunicable 3) invariant for digital substitution at some level. I believe in 3) but not with 100% certainty. Isn't it possible that, in fact, I was created just a couple of hours ago by adding the molecules of the food I had for lunch to my body, and that before I was someone else and we just happen to share the same (now fake) memories. I don't think this is the case, but can I be sure? Then we can understand that the mind body problem becomes a body statistical-appearance problem in the whole of arithmetic (not just the computable sigma_1, but the non computable pi_1, sigma_2, pi_2, . up to arithmetical truth). This generalizes both Darwin and Everett on arithmetic. It shows a non negligible part of what the physical reality is the border of. Machines cannot not be religious. It is unavoidable, unless you deliberately program them to not look deep enough, ... of course. I like your ideas, but I still lack the technical knowledge in some of the steps to feel confortable using them. And, btw, you are right with the 'artificial nets'. We will not make intelligent machines, we will fish in the arithmetical ocean and sometimes we get the chance to meet some-one, in some recognizable ways. We might learn deep lessons in the exploration, though. Nice. 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. -- 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: Why do particles decay randomly?
On Wed, May 1, 2013, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Artificial neural networks have been trained to fly planes, invest in the stock market, converts speech to text, recognise handwriting and so on and so on. True. For most of these cases, nobody understands how the network works, they only understand how they created the necessary conditions for a certain behaviour to emerge. Also true. So you know that under certain circumstances shit happens, and that's all that you need to know if you're just interested in how, but not if you also want to know why. So if you just wanted to know how to make a AI you could reverse engineer a human brain, you might not understand why your creation worked but that wouldn't stop it from working. The first activity [science] offers public rewards It helps you figure out how the world actually works not how you wish it works. And because what you've discovered is not just true for you but for the external world too I'd be interested to hear what you've found out. the second only offers private rewards. Well, I suppose navel gazing might lower the blood pressure in some people, but don't expect it to teach you anything important about the complexities of reality, otherwise you'll be as disappointed as the last hundred generation of navel gazers have been. And navel gazers turn into total bores as soon as they open their mouth because even if they really have found something it is only true for them. You freed yourself from the dogmas of Christianity but not from its morality. Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12. if you are a logical man then your doubts about the consciousness of a intelligent robot would be no greater than your doubts about the consciousness of your fellow intelligent human beings; and lets face it as a practical matter those doubts must be very very very very small. From a Bayesian standpoint, we are disagreeing on the value of a prior. This has nothing to do with logic, we just place different bets on an unknown. I don't understand, are you saying that you actually believe that it is likely that you are the only conscious being in the universe?? If you believe that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated then logically there is no alternative, you must believe that Charles Darwin was wrong. That doesn't follow. Like hell it doesn't!! You know for a fact that Evolution produced at least one being (and probably many billions) that was not just intelligent but conscious too, and there is absolutely positively no reason for Evolution to do that if intelligence and consciousness are unrelated. I believe that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution and I'm agnostic on consciousness. Then what I said before was entirely wrong, your views are not even close to being self consistent. 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: Why do particles decay randomly?
On Wed, May 1, 2013 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: It maybe that achieving intelligence via the evolutionary paths available to animals on Earth did entail consciousness. MAYBE?! There is quite simply NO way Evolution could have produced consciousness (and you and I know with absolute certainty that it did at least once and possibly twice and perhaps 20 billion times or more) if intelligence and consciousness were unrelated, and there are no ifs ands or buts about it. But evolution always has to work by modifying what exists. It's possible that there can be intelligent behavior, e.g. AI robots, that are not conscious In the one and only example we have of the construction of intelligent and conscious things we note that the intelligent part was much more difficult and took much much longer to achieve than the conscious part; so you believe that in regard to robots the default assumption should be that achieving the conscious part will be much more difficult to achieve than the intelligent part. My friend that simply does not compute. 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: Why do particles decay randomly?
Would anyone here say that a conditional (e.g., if/else) statement (in some program) is conscious? I think such statements may form the atoms of consciousness, as they represent the point at which a program's behavior diverges based on the inspection of some information. Conditional statements are required for any kind of intelligent or responsive behavior, which might be why consciousness correlates with it. Jason On May 2, 2013, at 9:02 AM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 1, 2013, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Artificial neural networks have been trained to fly planes, invest in the stock market, converts speech to text, recognise handwriting and so on and so on. True. For most of these cases, nobody understands how the network works, they only understand how they created the necessary conditions for a certain behaviour to emerge. Also true. So you know that under certain circumstances shit happens, and that's all that you need to know if you're just interested in how, but not if you also want to know why. So if you just wanted to know how to make a AI you could reverse engineer a human brain, you might not understand why your creation worked but that wouldn't stop it from working. The first activity [science] offers public rewards It helps you figure out how the world actually works not how you wish it works. And because what you've discovered is not just true for you but for the external world too I'd be interested to hear what you've found out. the second only offers private rewards. Well, I suppose navel gazing might lower the blood pressure in some people, but don't expect it to teach you anything important about the complexities of reality, otherwise you'll be as disappointed as the last hundred generation of navel gazers have been. And navel gazers turn into total bores as soon as they open their mouth because even if they really have found something it is only true for them. You freed yourself from the dogmas of Christianity but not from its morality. Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12. if you are a logical man then your doubts about the consciousness of a intelligent robot would be no greater than your doubts about the consciousness of your fellow intelligent human beings; and lets face it as a practical matter those doubts must be very very very very small. From a Bayesian standpoint, we are disagreeing on the value of a prior. This has nothing to do with logic, we just place different bets on an unknown. I don't understand, are you saying that you actually believe that it is likely that you are the only conscious being in the universe?? If you believe that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated then logically there is no alternative, you must believe that Charles Darwin was wrong. That doesn't follow. Like hell it doesn't!! You know for a fact that Evolution produced at least one being (and probably many billions) that was not just intelligent but conscious too, and there is absolutely positively no reason for Evolution to do that if intelligence and consciousness are unrelated. I believe that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution and I'm agnostic on consciousness. Then what I said before was entirely wrong, your views are not even close to being self consistent. 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. -- 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: Why do particles decay randomly?
Brent, thanks for your remarks - I usually value them - now I think you went a bit overboard. *...Radical agnosticism, like solipism, is impossible to act on...* * * I presume you checked all knowable and not knowable cases to decide the 'impossibility'. How 'radical'? more than you find 'reasonable'? I try to be agnostic in order to free my mind for the unusual and so far unknown. But I recognize the possibility of such. I think that is a way of advancement. The other point: ...*to act on*...? is it a must? *...tables and chairs...? * Did you find some 'matter-like' in the ultimate dissection of matter? only if you call YOUR energy (??) matter. I prefer a 'mini-solipsism' adjusting all info about the world according to MY capbilities (genetic make-up) for MY world-image. Other people do it differently and have an un-identical world-image. I keep the 'origins' in my agnostic mass (mess?). On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 3:44 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/1/2013 12:34 PM, John Mikes wrote: Telmo: I would not draw nth conclusions on a plain assumption. Particles (IMO) are explanatory presumptions upon (mostly math-phys) temporary explanatory 'understanding' of some phenomena we got. Tables and chairs are also explanatory presumptions for some experiences I have. So are other people. Radical agnosticism, like solipism, is impossible to act on. So are the reasons for 'dacay' taken from the limited access we have so far. - The rest of it goes into the term RANDOM. 1000 years ago there was more 'random' than today. So was 'emergent' and 'unexplainable (not that all our today's explanations are 'perfect' (I do not use true). My agnostic view includes future explanations for - what we call - particulate decay (random in today's usage). If we suppose 'order' in the world - nothing is random. That reminds me of Kant's argument: If we assume there is justice, then their must be an afterlife in which this life's injustices are redressed. Instead of inventing an unobservable afterlife the simpler and more obvious conclusion is that we were wrong when we assumed there is justice. *...if we assume...* please, don't. You may escape from questionable conclusions. JohnM 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+unsubscribe@**googlegroups.comeverything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.**comeverything-list@googlegroups.com . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/**group/everything-list?hl=enhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/**groups/opt_outhttps://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: Why do particles decay randomly?
On 02 May 2013, at 15:11, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 01 May 2013, at 17:33, Telmo Menezes wrote to John Clark: At this point I'm not even talking about Science but logic and a distaste for cheerfully and strongly believing in 2 contradictory things. I believe that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution and I'm agnostic on consciousness. There is nothing contradictory about this, but I can't think of any further way to make my point. We'll have to disagree to disagree. You shouldn't, perhaps. May be it would be enough to just ask John Clark to push his logic a bit further. I agree that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution, but this assumes some mechanism, and thus Mechanism. Then the discovery of the universal machine shows that machine intelligence is a (logical) product of the elementary operations in arithmetic. Then machine can see their own limit, and are statistically forced to guess in something which can't be a machine, as arithmetical truth, for example. We don't need to know what consciousness is. If we can agree that consciousness is 1) undoubtable 2) incommunicable 3) invariant for digital substitution at some level. I believe in 3) but not with 100% certainty. You don't need to believe anything, just to agree 'for the sake of the argument. And there is no certainties. Isn't it possible that, in fact, I was created just a couple of hours ago by adding the molecules of the food I had for lunch to my body, and that before I was someone else and we just happen to share the same (now fake) memories. I don't think this is the case, but can I be sure? Yes that's an arithmetical computational history. It exists, and so you have to take it into account in all experience/experiment of physics you can do. But if the normal measure behaves a bit, you might need to take into account that and similar rare history only to get the 10^1000 billionth correct decimal. In arithmetic you have all computational histories, and by the FPI you are distributed in all of them. Physics get statistical at the start. Memories are not really fake of not fake. They are appropriate, or not, relatively to probable histories. Then we can understand that the mind body problem becomes a body statistical-appearance problem in the whole of arithmetic (not just the computable sigma_1, but the non computable pi_1, sigma_2, pi_2, . up to arithmetical truth). This generalizes both Darwin and Everett on arithmetic. It shows a non negligible part of what the physical reality is the border of. Machines cannot not be religious. It is unavoidable, unless you deliberately program them to not look deep enough, ... of course. I like your ideas, but I still lack the technical knowledge in some of the steps to feel confortable using them. I appreciate you tell me. Normally UDA is understandable with only a passive knowledge of what a computer is, but AUDA, where the religion aspect is clearer, needs a good familiarity with the gaps between computability, provability and truth, coming from the incompleteness phenomenon in arithmetical logics and above. And, btw, you are right with the 'artificial nets'. We will not make intelligent machines, we will fish in the arithmetical ocean and sometimes we get the chance to meet some-one, in some recognizable ways. We might learn deep lessons in the exploration, though. Nice. Well, we can hope the best, but we can fear the worst. Even the bitcoin has made a little crack due to exaggerate speculation. Universal Machines, like brain, computers and cells, are really doors to the Unknown. It may be that lies plays some part in the exploration, like with the mimicking ants jumping spider which make the birds believing that they are non edible ants, when actually they are edible spider. Even Peano Arithmetic get some more provability power when the false axiom PA is inconsistent is added. Lies can run deep. Bruno 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- l...@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
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Thursday, May 2, 2013 4:39:43 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 May 2013, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 10:49:11 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Apr 2013, at 20:58, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book, nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead. The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete color blindness. What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to understanding on any others. I am not sure I can help you. You confuse the levels. You don't really try to understand the point, which would mean that you talk like if you knew that comp is false. I don't expect you to help me, I'm trying to help you. Of course. But what helps me is reasoning, not personal conviction. Consciousness cannot be accessed by reasoning, since reason is an experience within human consciousness. I don't know that comp is false, but I know that if it isn't it won't be because of the reasons you are suggesting. Comp may be true in theory, but none of the replies to the Chinese room are adequate, or even mildly compelling to me. Searles confuse a program, and a universal program running that program. Aren't universal programs
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On 02 May 2013, at 16:47, Jason Resch wrote: Would anyone here say that a conditional (e.g., if/else) statement (in some program) is conscious? I think such statements may form the atoms of consciousness, as they represent the point at which a program's behavior diverges based on the inspection of some information. Conditional statements are required for any kind of intelligent or responsive behavior, which might be why consciousness correlates with it. I am almost OK, but I would add perhaps that the if/then else must be self-referential, but then you get the universal machine, or close to it. e = if this-happens-to (e) then do this and that with the help of this or that part of e. You can solve the recursion with Kleene's theorem (Dx = xx method), or with the paradoxical combinators, or the sage birds, etc. I prefer to reason in term of persons' beliefs, and knowledge, observation (implemented through machines/bodies/numbers). Consciousness will be a sort of deep 1p invariant. But an instruction like if (input = ...) then do ... is a kind of sensation/observation, so I am OK. Bruno Jason On May 2, 2013, at 9:02 AM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 1, 2013, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Artificial neural networks have been trained to fly planes, invest in the stock market, converts speech to text, recognise handwriting and so on and so on. True. For most of these cases, nobody understands how the network works, they only understand how they created the necessary conditions for a certain behaviour to emerge. Also true. So you know that under certain circumstances shit happens, and that's all that you need to know if you're just interested in how, but not if you also want to know why. So if you just wanted to know how to make a AI you could reverse engineer a human brain, you might not understand why your creation worked but that wouldn't stop it from working. The first activity [science] offers public rewards It helps you figure out how the world actually works not how you wish it works. And because what you've discovered is not just true for you but for the external world too I'd be interested to hear what you've found out. the second only offers private rewards. Well, I suppose navel gazing might lower the blood pressure in some people, but don't expect it to teach you anything important about the complexities of reality, otherwise you'll be as disappointed as the last hundred generation of navel gazers have been. And navel gazers turn into total bores as soon as they open their mouth because even if they really have found something it is only true for them. You freed yourself from the dogmas of Christianity but not from its morality. Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12. if you are a logical man then your doubts about the consciousness of a intelligent robot would be no greater than your doubts about the consciousness of your fellow intelligent human beings; and lets face it as a practical matter those doubts must be very very very very small. From a Bayesian standpoint, we are disagreeing on the value of a prior. This has nothing to do with logic, we just place different bets on an unknown. I don't understand, are you saying that you actually believe that it is likely that you are the only conscious being in the universe?? If you believe that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated then logically there is no alternative, you must believe that Charles Darwin was wrong. That doesn't follow. Like hell it doesn't!! You know for a fact that Evolution produced at least one being (and probably many billions) that was not just intelligent but conscious too, and there is absolutely positively no reason for Evolution to do that if intelligence and consciousness are unrelated. I believe that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution and I'm agnostic on consciousness. Then what I said before was entirely wrong, your views are not even close to being self consistent. 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- l...@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
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 02 May 2013, at 17:35, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, May 2, 2013 4:39:43 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 May 2013, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 10:49:11 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Apr 2013, at 20:58, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book, nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead. The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete color blindness. What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to understanding on any others. I am not sure I can help you. You confuse the levels. You don't really try to understand the point, which would mean that you talk like if you knew that comp is false. I don't expect you to help me, I'm trying to help you. Of course. But what helps me is reasoning, not personal conviction. Consciousness cannot be accessed by reasoning, since reason is an experience within human consciousness. You are entirely right on this. But to communicate with others, even on consciousness, or on line and points, or galaxies or gods, we can only agree on principles and reason from that. I don't know that comp is false, but I know that if it isn't it won't be because of the reasons you are suggesting.
Re: Numbers
Bruno asked:* are you OK with this?* - NO, I am not OK: as I follow, 0 is NOT a number, it does not change a number. But how do you * A D D * a number to another one if it is not identified as a quantity? Can you add an electric train to the taste of a lolly-pop? You speak about 'axioms' (- in my words they are inventions to prove a theory's applicability.) So no *reversing* please: proving the theory by axioms. May I repeat the main question: is YOUR number a quantity? so you can add (two = *II *to three = *III* and get five = *I*) ?? If THAT is your axiom then numbers are quantity specifiers. We may AGREE on that, but then numbers are indeed the products of human thinking applied as humans think. *Q E D * * * *Bruno: ...**That's very good, but we can also develop general statement. We would not have discover the universal number (the computers) without agreeing on those principles.* * * That's a practicality and very fortunate. Does not enlighten the problem of what 'numbers' may be, if not quantifiers. JOhn On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 4:54 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 01 May 2013, at 22:09, John Mikes wrote: Bruno asked why I have problems how to figure out *'numbers'*. * * In his texts (as I remember and I have no quotes at hand) the world can be construed from a large enough amount of numbers in simple arithmetical ways (addition-subtraction). Also: numbers do not mean quantities. If his older post with pegs (II=two, =four etc.) is OK, the 'words' two and four DO mean quantities. If not, as 'numbers' they are meaningless combinations of letters (sounds?) we could call the series any way, as well as e.g.: tylba, chuggon, rpais, etc. for 1,2,3 - or take them from any other language (eins,zwei,drei, - egy, kettő, három) as they developed in diverse domains/lifestyles. The 'numbers' would be like Ding an Sich (German) however used as qualifiers for quantities if so applied (see Bruno's 'pegs' above). The terms we are using are not important. All we need is some agreement on some theory. Most things we need for the natural numbers can be derived from the following axioms (written in english): any number added to zero gives the number we started with (= x + 0 = x) 0 is not the successor of any natural number if two numbers are different, then they have different successors a number x added to a successor of a number y gives a successor of the sum of x and y. Are you OK with this? In science we know that we cannot define what we are talking about, but we can agree on some principles about them. Bruno: *...We would not have discover(ed) the universal number (the computers) without agreeing on those principles. * * * To have discovered the 'universal number'(?) (i.e. computers) is fine but that does not imply understanding on numbers: like numbers are such as to be applicable for... etc. My agnosticism needs more than that. Sorry. More reasonably sounds the idea of my wife, Maria, who assigns the primitive development of quantities originally to proportions: larger (amount) - smaller (amount) evolving in some thousand centuries into the process of 'counting' the included units. That's very good, but we can also develop general statement. We would not have discover the universal number (the computers) without agreeing on those principles. I published on this list my thought for developing the Roman numbering signs. I started with 2 - a PAIR of hands etc. (not with one, which means only the existence) and branching into 5 (as fingers, as in pentaton music) already as 'many'. OK. I still have no idea what description could fit *'number'* in Bruno's usage (I did not study number - theory - to keep my common sense (agnostic?) thinking free). See above. Bruno John John Mikes -- 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. -- 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
Re: Arguments against uploading
Nice. It could be heavier on support on the points, but not bad for a superficial pop-sci treatment. My comments: It’s a mistake to think of this debate in terms of having insufficient understanding or technology to simulate consciousness. The point is that we already have sufficient understanding of the problem to suspect that in fact, the entire assumption that private experience can be assembled by public bodies is false. I see this not as a point of religious sentiment, but of physical ontology. To presume that we could ever make a program, for instance, which projects an image that we can see without any physical projection technology would be an error. No amount of logic can turn a simulation of water into actual water that we can drink. To quote Korzybski, “The map is not the territory”, or Magritte “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” It seems that we have become so enamored with computation that we have lost this sense of discernment between figures which we use to represent and the genuine presentations which are experienced first hand. Figures and symbols are only valid within a particular mode of interpretation. What is stored in a computer has no aesthetic content. If you tell the computer the data is a picture, it will barf out onto the screen whatever noise corresponds to that picture. If you tell the computer to use the sound card instead, then it will dump the noise as acoustic vibration. The computer doesn’t care, either way, data is just data. It is a-signifying and generic - the exact opposite of conscious experience which derives its significance from proprietary experience through time rather than mechanical function or forms. Consciousness is neither form nor function, it is the participatory aesthetic appreciation of form and function, and I am willing to bet that it is actually the fundamental principle of the cosmos, upon which all forms and functions, all matter and energy depend. As far as embodiment goes, the issue should be refocused so that human consciousness in particular is understood as a special case within the universal phenomenon of sensory-motor participation, which goes all the way down to the bottom. It’s not that mind needs a body, its that private awareness correlates to specific public presentations. These public presentations, while possible to imitate and substitute to the extent that the insensitivity of the perceiver permits, there is no way, from an absolute perspective to completely replace any experience with anything other than that particular experience. Unlike figures and symbols, experiences are rooted in the firmament of eternity. They make a certain kind of sense from every angle which is transparent - experiences allow us to triangulate meaning through them, and to elide or bridge gaps with leaps of understanding. (“A-ha!”). Experiences can misrepresent each other on different levels, conflicting expectations can produce ‘illusions’ but these all ultimately have the potential to be revealed through the fullness of time. Simulated reality offers no such universal grounding, and promises true prisons which are isolated from any possibility of escape. That could happen in theory as a consequence of Strong AI, but it won’t in reality, because Strong AI will, I think, evaporate in a cloud of hype eventually, and I think that this very conversation is a clue that it is happening already. This is not a bad thing, not a cause for mourning and disappointment, but an exciting time when we can set aside our toy model of physics which disqualifies its model maker for long enough to form a new, fully integrated model of the universe which sees perception not as a metaphysical ‘emergent property’ but as the private view of physics itself. Physics is perception and participation, i.e. consciousness. On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 9:41:36 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: http://io9.com/you-ll-probably-never-upload-your-mind-into-a-computer-474941498 -- Onward! Stephen I apologize in advance for the gross errors that this post and all of my posts will contain. ;-) -- 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: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Thursday, May 2, 2013 11:54:34 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 02 May 2013, at 17:35, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, May 2, 2013 4:39:43 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 May 2013, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 10:49:11 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Apr 2013, at 20:58, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book, nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead. The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete color blindness. What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to understanding on any others. I am not sure I can help you. You confuse the levels. You don't really try to understand the point, which would mean that you talk like if you knew that comp is false. I don't expect you to help me, I'm trying to help you. Of course. But what helps me is reasoning, not personal conviction. Consciousness cannot be accessed by reasoning, since reason is an experience within human consciousness. You are entirely right on this. But to communicate with others, even on consciousness, or on line and points, or galaxies or gods, we can only agree on principles and reason from that. Sure, but we have to
Re: Arguments against uploading
The arguments are not so much arguments, but a collection of dubious assumptions. His first argument is that the brain is not computable, which requires assuming the brain does not operate according to known physics, as all known physics is computable. The second and third objections are that we need to understand consciousness and solve the hard problem before we can replicate a brain. I don't see how this follows. Ted Berger offers a convincing argument against the necessity of needing a theory of mind to do his work (which is creating neural prosthesis): I don't need a grand theory of the mind to fix what is essentially a signal-processing problem. A repairman doesn't need to understand music to fix your broken CD player. The fourth argument is that special materials are needed for consciousness. Where is the evidence? The fifth argument is that a non-physical soul is required. If a gelatinous blob of cells can have a soul, why can't any other machine? The sixth, that it would be unethical is surprising. Is it unethical to give people artificial hearts, or limbs? Why will it be unethical to give them prosthetic brain regions or entire brains? The seventh, again requires belief in some kind of non-physical soul that can't be duplicated and is necessary for identity. The eight, well who wouldn't take the risk of hacking over the certainty of biological death? Despite the large number of arguments, I find none of them convincing. Jason On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 11:45 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Nice. It could be heavier on support on the points, but not bad for a superficial pop-sci treatment. My comments: It’s a mistake to think of this debate in terms of having insufficient understanding or technology to simulate consciousness. The point is that we already have sufficient understanding of the problem to suspect that in fact, the entire assumption that private experience can be assembled by public bodies is false. I see this not as a point of religious sentiment, but of physical ontology. To presume that we could ever make a program, for instance, which projects an image that we can see without any physical projection technology would be an error. No amount of logic can turn a simulation of water into actual water that we can drink. To quote Korzybski, “The map is not the territory”, or Magritte “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” It seems that we have become so enamored with computation that we have lost this sense of discernment between figures which we use to represent and the genuine presentations which are experienced first hand. Figures and symbols are only valid within a particular mode of interpretation. What is stored in a computer has no aesthetic content. If you tell the computer the data is a picture, it will barf out onto the screen whatever noise corresponds to that picture. If you tell the computer to use the sound card instead, then it will dump the noise as acoustic vibration. The computer doesn’t care, either way, data is just data. It is a-signifying and generic - the exact opposite of conscious experience which derives its significance from proprietary experience through time rather than mechanical function or forms. Consciousness is neither form nor function, it is the participatory aesthetic appreciation of form and function, and I am willing to bet that it is actually the fundamental principle of the cosmos, upon which all forms and functions, all matter and energy depend. As far as embodiment goes, the issue should be refocused so that human consciousness in particular is understood as a special case within the universal phenomenon of sensory-motor participation, which goes all the way down to the bottom. It’s not that mind needs a body, its that private awareness correlates to specific public presentations. These public presentations, while possible to imitate and substitute to the extent that the insensitivity of the perceiver permits, there is no way, from an absolute perspective to completely replace any experience with anything other than that particular experience. Unlike figures and symbols, experiences are rooted in the firmament of eternity. They make a certain kind of sense from every angle which is transparent - experiences allow us to triangulate meaning through them, and to elide or bridge gaps with leaps of understanding. (“A-ha!”). Experiences can misrepresent each other on different levels, conflicting expectations can produce ‘illusions’ but these all ultimately have the potential to be revealed through the fullness of time. Simulated reality offers no such universal grounding, and promises true prisons which are isolated from any possibility of escape. That could happen in theory as a consequence of Strong AI, but it won’t in reality, because Strong AI will, I think, evaporate in a cloud of hype eventually, and I think that this very conversation is a clue that it is happening
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On 5/2/2013 7:02 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, May 1, 2013, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Artificial neural networks have been trained to fly planes, invest in the stock market, converts speech to text, recognise handwriting and so on and so on. True. For most of these cases, nobody understands how the network works, they only understand how they created the necessary conditions for a certain behaviour to emerge. Also true. So you know that under certain circumstances shit happens, and that's all that you need to know if you're just interested in how, but not if you also want to know why. So if you just wanted to know how to make a AI you could reverse engineer a human brain, you might not understand why your creation worked but that wouldn't stop it from working. The first activity [science] offers public rewards It helps you figure out how the world actually works not how you wish it works. And because what you've discovered is not just true for you but for the external world too I'd be interested to hear what you've found out. the second only offers private rewards. Well, I suppose navel gazing might lower the blood pressure in some people, but don't expect it to teach you anything important about the complexities of reality, otherwise you'll be as disappointed as the last hundred generation of navel gazers have been. And navel gazers turn into total bores as soon as they open their mouth because even if they really have found something it is only true for them. Keep in mind that mathematics (including logic and computation theory) are done almost entirely by navel gazing. You freed yourself from the dogmas of Christianity but not from its morality. Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12. if you are a logical man then your doubts about the consciousness of a intelligent robot would be no greater than your doubts about the consciousness of your fellow intelligent human beings; and lets face it as a practical matter those doubts must be very very very very small. From a Bayesian standpoint, we are disagreeing on the value of a prior. This has nothing to do with logic, we just place different bets on an unknown. I don't understand, are you saying that you actually believe that it is likely that you are the only conscious being in the universe?? If you believe that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated then logically there is no alternative, you must believe that Charles Darwin was wrong. That doesn't follow. Like hell it doesn't!! You know for a fact that Evolution produced at least one being (and probably many billions) that was not just intelligent but conscious too, and there is absolutely positively no reason for Evolution to do that if intelligence and consciousness are unrelated. That shows that they are related as implemented in Earth's biology, but it's not clear that can be generalized to concluded they must be related no matter how intelligence is implemented. Brent I believe that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution and I'm agnostic on consciousness. Then what I said before was entirely wrong, your views are not even close to being self consistent. 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: Arguments against uploading
On Thursday, May 2, 2013 3:08:17 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: The arguments are not so much arguments, but a collection of dubious assumptions. His first argument is that the brain is not computable, which requires assuming the brain does not operate according to known physics, as all known physics is computable. All known physics is computable because it is based on the public interaction of material bodies. Consciousness is not isomorphic to those kinds of interactions. Our thoughts and emotions are known physics as much as the measurements of objects, but we are not used to thinking of them that way. Whether or not the brain is computable I think doesn't matter because brain activity is only a representation of one aspect of experience, which is not going to be very useful taken out of the context of the total history of experience. The brain is a flatland footprint of experience. We might compute the contours of the sole of the shoe, but that doesn't tell us about the person wearing them. The second and third objections are that we need to understand consciousness and solve the hard problem before we can replicate a brain. I don't see how this follows. Ted Berger offers a convincing argument against the necessity of needing a theory of mind to do his work (which is creating neural prosthesis): I don't need a grand theory of the mind to fix what is essentially a signal-processing problem. A repairman doesn't need to understand music to fix your broken CD player. We don't need to understand the hard problem if we can replicate a brain, but understanding the hard problem tells us why replicating a brain doesn't mean that there is any subjective experience associated with its function. The fourth argument is that special materials are needed for consciousness. Where is the evidence? Well, there is the complete lack of any inorganic consciousness in the universe as far as we know. That isn't evidence, but it might be a clue. Materials matter to our body quite a bit. The fifth argument is that a non-physical soul is required. If a gelatinous blob of cells can have a soul, why can't any other machine? Because the blob of cells was once a single cell which divided itself because it had the power to do so. Perhaps a synthetic biology would work similarly, but the approach right now to machines is to assemble them out of dumb parts. There may be an important difference between an organism and an organization. The sixth, that it would be unethical is surprising. Is it unethical to give people artificial hearts, or limbs? Why will it be unethical to give them prosthetic brain regions or entire brains? If you had to develop artificial hearts by legions of making mutant children who had to live their lives in misery, then there would be an ethical issue. That would be the case if computation alone could indeed become conscious. Any program loop left running might be conjuring inconceivable agony for some machine-person in the Platonic aethers. The seventh, again requires belief in some kind of non-physical soul that can't be duplicated and is necessary for identity. Your position requires denial of any significant difference between conscious intent and unconscious reflex. The eight, well who wouldn't take the risk of hacking over the certainty of biological death? Yeah, that the risk of hacking is a red herring. We are already being hacked by commercial interests. Despite the large number of arguments, I find none of them convincing. I wouldn't either from that article alone, but they are ok as a short list to begin to investigate the deeper issues. Craig Jason On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 11:45 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: Nice. It could be heavier on support on the points, but not bad for a superficial pop-sci treatment. My comments: It’s a mistake to think of this debate in terms of having insufficient understanding or technology to simulate consciousness. The point is that we already have sufficient understanding of the problem to suspect that in fact, the entire assumption that private experience can be assembled by public bodies is false. I see this not as a point of religious sentiment, but of physical ontology. To presume that we could ever make a program, for instance, which projects an image that we can see without any physical projection technology would be an error. No amount of logic can turn a simulation of water into actual water that we can drink. To quote Korzybski, “The map is not the territory”, or Magritte “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” It seems that we have become so enamored with computation that we have lost this sense of discernment between figures which we use to represent and the genuine presentations which are experienced first hand. Figures and symbols are only valid within a particular mode of interpretation.
Re: Arguments against uploading
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 9:41 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: http://io9.com/you-ll-probably-never-upload-your-mind-into-a-computer-474941498 1) Brain functions are not computable because* *most of its important features are the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells. Well 10^11 neurons in the brain is a big number and 10^15 synapses in that brain is a even bigger number, but it is no where near to being infinite and every one of those neurons and every one of the 10^4 neurons in that neuron operates according to the laws of physics, therefore it is computable. It's true that random behavior is not computable, but hardware electronic random number generators cost about $2 if you think having one is important. 2) we may never be able to explain how and why we have qualia Even if that is true it would be irrelevant if you're reverse engineering a brain, if a upload works you don't need to understand why it works. 3) we still need to figure out how our brains segregate elements in complex patterns, a process that allows us to distinguish them as discrete objects. Computers can perform object recognition, I admit that today's computers are slow at it but they are rapidly getting better and it is certainly no show stopper. 4) Mind-body dualism is true, consciousness lies somewhere outside the brai*n*, perhaps as some ethereal soul or spirit. We know for a fact that if we change the brain consciousness changes and we know for a fact that if our consciousness changes so does our brain, and that certainly doesn't sound like dualism to me. And so ethereal soul joins luminiferous aether and phlogiston as obsolete scientific terms, although this point is sure to be a hit with Jesus freaks and snake handlers. 5) It would be unethical to develop I see nothing unethical about it but it would be irrelevant even if it was. This was supposed to be a list of reasons why uploading couldn't happen not why it shouldn't. 6) We can never be sure it works[...] the* *continuity of consciousness problem We can't be sure about anything. I think. And there is no continuity problem, the external world might jump ahead but to itself consciousness is always continuous. 7) Uploaded minds would be vulnerable to hacking and abuse And non uploaded biological brains are vulnerable to bacteria, viruses, and physical abuse; and at least with uploads you can always keep a up to date backup stashed away in a safe place far away. In short these pathetic reasons would not convince one single member of the species Homo sapiens that uploading was impossible unless they already very much wanted to be convinced. 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: Why do particles decay randomly?
On 5/2/2013 7:29 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, May 1, 2013 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: It maybe that achieving intelligence via the evolutionary paths available to animals on Earth did entail consciousness. MAYBE?! There is quite simply NO way Evolution could have produced consciousness (and you and I know with absolute certainty that it did at least once and possibly twice and perhaps 20 billion times or more) if intelligence and consciousness were unrelated, and there are no ifs ands or buts about it. But evolution always has to work by modifying what exists. It's possible that there can be intelligent behavior, e.g. AI robots, that are not conscious In the one and only example we have of the construction of intelligent and conscious things we note that the intelligent part was much more difficult and took much much longer to achieve than the conscious part; so you believe that in regard to robots the default assumption should be that achieving the conscious part will be much more difficult to achieve than the intelligent part. My friend that simply does not compute. I didn't say anything about default assumption; I said it's possible. In fact my prior estimate would be that any intelligence entails some kind of consciousness. But if consciousness arises from computation, then computationally different ways of implementing intelligent may well produce different kinds of consciousness. 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.
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On 5/2/2013 7:47 AM, Jason Resch wrote: Would anyone here say that a conditional (e.g., if/else) statement (in some program) is conscious? I don't think so. We make if/else choices subconsciously all the time. My introspection tells me that conscious thought is a kind of narrative story I construct. I think the function of this is to condense my experience for memory and future reference when I need to plan or predict based on my past experience. If I were designing an intelligent Mars Rover that had to learn to deal with a wide variety of problems which I cannot anticipate, this sort of selective memory narrative would be one component of it's learning. Of course there are different levels of consciousness. A Mars Rover needs a conception of self as being in certain place, having completed certain tasks, having certain capabilities, etc. But it doesn't need to consider its status among peers or reflect on its own computational methods or its ultimate end. Brent I think such statements may form the atoms of consciousness, as they represent the point at which a program's behavior diverges based on the inspection of some information. Conditional statements are required for any kind of intelligent or responsive behavior, which might be why consciousness correlates with it. Jason -- 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: Numbers
On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 4:09:03 PM UTC-4, JohnM wrote: Bruno asked why I have problems how to figure out *'numbers'*. * * In his texts (as I remember and I have no quotes at hand) the world can be construed from a large enough amount of numbers in simple arithmetical ways (addition-subtraction). Also: numbers do not mean quantities. If his older post with pegs (II=two, =four etc.) is OK, the 'words' two and four DO mean quantities. If not, as 'numbers' they are meaningless combinations of letters (sounds?) we could call the series any way, as well as e.g.: tylba, chuggon, rpais, etc. for 1,2,3 - or take them from any other language (eins,zwei,drei, - egy, kettő, három) as they developed in diverse domains/lifestyles. The 'numbers' would be like Ding an Sich (German) however used as qualifiers for quantities if so applied (see Bruno's 'pegs' above). More reasonably sounds the idea of my wife, Maria, who assigns the primitive development of quantities originally to proportions: larger (amount) - smaller (amount) Yes, I think that is a good place to start. Larger and smaller are aesthetic qualities - feelings which we use to discern objects from one another and changes in objects (the pond is larger after it rains). Craig evolving in some thousand centuries into the process of 'counting' the included units. I published on this list my thought for developing the Roman numbering signs. I started with 2 - a PAIR of hands etc. (not with one, which means only the existence) and branching into 5 (as fingers, as in pentaton music) already as 'many'. I still have no idea what description could fit *'number'* in Bruno's usage (I did not study number - theory - to keep my common sense (agnostic?) thinking free). John Mikes -- 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: Why do particles decay randomly?
On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 3:09 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/2/2013 7:47 AM, Jason Resch wrote: Would anyone here say that a conditional (e.g., if/else) statement (in some program) is conscious? I don't think so. We make if/else choices subconsciously all the time. My introspection tells me that conscious thought is a kind of narrative story I construct. I think the function of this is to condense my experience for memory and future reference when I need to plan or predict based on my past experience. If I were designing an intelligent Mars Rover that had to learn to deal with a wide variety of problems which I cannot anticipate, this sort of selective memory narrative would be one component of it's learning. Of course there are different levels of consciousness. A Mars Rover needs a conception of self as being in certain place, having completed certain tasks, having certain capabilities, etc. But it doesn't need to consider its status among peers or reflect on its own computational methods or its ultimate end. Brent Brent, I think you may be reading my question in the wrong way. I didn't mean to equate your consciousness with that of every if/else decision you make, but rather ask something like, What does the shortest possible program that is conscious look like? I have trouble seeing why some short piece of code like: if (x 0) then do y() else do z(); Is not conscious of some property of x (whether it is positive or negative), at least when the two different functions y() and z() cause the program to enter different states. I find it harder to justify the consciousness of a program that did not do any selection, distinction, or inspection. In most programming languages, this is done using a conditional statement, such as an if statement, a while statement or a switch statement. Jason I think such statements may form the atoms of consciousness, as they represent the point at which a program's behavior diverges based on the inspection of some information. Conditional statements are required for any kind of intelligent or responsive behavior, which might be why consciousness correlates with it. Jason -- 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+unsubscribe@**googlegroups.comeverything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.**comeverything-list@googlegroups.com . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/**group/everything-list?hl=enhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/**groups/opt_outhttps://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: Why do particles decay randomly?
Brent, I think you may be reading my question in the wrong way. I didn't mean to equate your consciousness with that of every if/else decision you make, but rather ask something like, What does the shortest possible program that is conscious look like? I have trouble seeing why some short piece of code like: if (x 0) then do y() else do z(); Is not conscious of some property of x (whether it is positive or negative), at least when the two different functions y() and z() cause the program to enter different states. I find it harder to justify the consciousness of a program that did not do any selection, distinction, or inspection. In most programming languages, this is done using a conditional statement, such as an if statement, a while statement or a switch statement. Jason *** Hi Jason, What plays the role of the abstract/platonic equation if (x 0) then do y() else do z(); such that there is an actual referent to be conscious of? Consciousness is consciousness of ... On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 5:18 PM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 3:09 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/2/2013 7:47 AM, Jason Resch wrote: Would anyone here say that a conditional (e.g., if/else) statement (in some program) is conscious? I don't think so. We make if/else choices subconsciously all the time. My introspection tells me that conscious thought is a kind of narrative story I construct. I think the function of this is to condense my experience for memory and future reference when I need to plan or predict based on my past experience. If I were designing an intelligent Mars Rover that had to learn to deal with a wide variety of problems which I cannot anticipate, this sort of selective memory narrative would be one component of it's learning. Of course there are different levels of consciousness. A Mars Rover needs a conception of self as being in certain place, having completed certain tasks, having certain capabilities, etc. But it doesn't need to consider its status among peers or reflect on its own computational methods or its ultimate end. Brent Brent, I think you may be reading my question in the wrong way. I didn't mean to equate your consciousness with that of every if/else decision you make, but rather ask something like, What does the shortest possible program that is conscious look like? I have trouble seeing why some short piece of code like: if (x 0) then do y() else do z(); Is not conscious of some property of x (whether it is positive or negative), at least when the two different functions y() and z() cause the program to enter different states. I find it harder to justify the consciousness of a program that did not do any selection, distinction, or inspection. In most programming languages, this is done using a conditional statement, such as an if statement, a while statement or a switch statement. Jason I think such statements may form the atoms of consciousness, as they represent the point at which a program's behavior diverges based on the inspection of some information. Conditional statements are required for any kind of intelligent or responsive behavior, which might be why consciousness correlates with it. Jason -- 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+unsubscribe@**googlegroups.comeverything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.**comeverything-list@googlegroups.com . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/** group/everything-list?hl=enhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/**groups/opt_outhttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out . -- 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/K7E-Vfwj4QU/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: Why do particles decay randomly?
On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Stephen Paul King kingstephenp...@gmail.com wrote: Brent, I think you may be reading my question in the wrong way. I didn't mean to equate your consciousness with that of every if/else decision you make, but rather ask something like, What does the shortest possible program that is conscious look like? I have trouble seeing why some short piece of code like: if (x 0) then do y() else do z(); Is not conscious of some property of x (whether it is positive or negative), at least when the two different functions y() and z() cause the program to enter different states. I find it harder to justify the consciousness of a program that did not do any selection, distinction, or inspection. In most programming languages, this is done using a conditional statement, such as an if statement, a while statement or a switch statement. Jason *** Hi Jason, What plays the role of the abstract/platonic equation if (x 0) then do y() else do z(); such that there is an actual referent to be conscious of? In my example, I was referring to any implementation of such a program, e.g. your own computer. Consciousness is consciousness of ... There is no infinite regression, the program is conscious of some property of x, not conscious of its own knowledge of the property of x (in this example code). Consider it as consciousness of a raw qualia like seeing one pixel of white instead of one pixel of black. Jason On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 5:18 PM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 3:09 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/2/2013 7:47 AM, Jason Resch wrote: Would anyone here say that a conditional (e.g., if/else) statement (in some program) is conscious? I don't think so. We make if/else choices subconsciously all the time. My introspection tells me that conscious thought is a kind of narrative story I construct. I think the function of this is to condense my experience for memory and future reference when I need to plan or predict based on my past experience. If I were designing an intelligent Mars Rover that had to learn to deal with a wide variety of problems which I cannot anticipate, this sort of selective memory narrative would be one component of it's learning. Of course there are different levels of consciousness. A Mars Rover needs a conception of self as being in certain place, having completed certain tasks, having certain capabilities, etc. But it doesn't need to consider its status among peers or reflect on its own computational methods or its ultimate end. Brent Brent, I think you may be reading my question in the wrong way. I didn't mean to equate your consciousness with that of every if/else decision you make, but rather ask something like, What does the shortest possible program that is conscious look like? I have trouble seeing why some short piece of code like: if (x 0) then do y() else do z(); Is not conscious of some property of x (whether it is positive or negative), at least when the two different functions y() and z() cause the program to enter different states. I find it harder to justify the consciousness of a program that did not do any selection, distinction, or inspection. In most programming languages, this is done using a conditional statement, such as an if statement, a while statement or a switch statement. Jason I think such statements may form the atoms of consciousness, as they represent the point at which a program's behavior diverges based on the inspection of some information. Conditional statements are required for any kind of intelligent or responsive behavior, which might be why consciousness correlates with it. Jason -- 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+unsubscribe@**googlegroups.comeverything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.**comeverything-list@googlegroups.com . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/** group/everything-list?hl=enhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/**groups/opt_outhttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out . -- 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/K7E-Vfwj4QU/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.
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On 5/2/2013 2:18 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 3:09 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/2/2013 7:47 AM, Jason Resch wrote: Would anyone here say that a conditional (e.g., if/else) statement (in some program) is conscious? I don't think so. We make if/else choices subconsciously all the time. My introspection tells me that conscious thought is a kind of narrative story I construct. I think the function of this is to condense my experience for memory and future reference when I need to plan or predict based on my past experience. If I were designing an intelligent Mars Rover that had to learn to deal with a wide variety of problems which I cannot anticipate, this sort of selective memory narrative would be one component of it's learning. Of course there are different levels of consciousness. A Mars Rover needs a conception of self as being in certain place, having completed certain tasks, having certain capabilities, etc. But it doesn't need to consider its status among peers or reflect on its own computational methods or its ultimate end. Brent Brent, I think you may be reading my question in the wrong way. I didn't mean to equate your consciousness with that of every if/else decision you make, but rather ask something like, What does the shortest possible program that is conscious look like? I have trouble seeing why some short piece of code like: if (x 0) then do y() else do z(); Is not conscious of some property of x (whether it is positive or negative), at least when the two different functions y() and z() cause the program to enter different states. I'd be inclined to call that awareness: My thermostat is aware of the temperature. Consciousness is at a different level which is distinguished by being able to report on decisions introspectively. The thermostat can't explain why it switched on the air conditioning five minutes ago. Sometimes I find myself taking the road to work when I intended to drive to the supermarket - I can't explain what I was thinking. It was an unconscious choice. I find it harder to justify the consciousness of a program that did not do any selection, distinction, or inspection. In most programming languages, this is done using a conditional statement, such as an if statement, a while statement or a switch statement. Sure, that's necessary for consciousness, but I think it's less than sufficient. 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.
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 5:26 PM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Stephen Paul King kingstephenp...@gmail.com wrote: Brent, I think you may be reading my question in the wrong way. I didn't mean to equate your consciousness with that of every if/else decision you make, but rather ask something like, What does the shortest possible program that is conscious look like? I have trouble seeing why some short piece of code like: if (x 0) then do y() else do z(); Is not conscious of some property of x (whether it is positive or negative), at least when the two different functions y() and z() cause the program to enter different states. I find it harder to justify the consciousness of a program that did not do any selection, distinction, or inspection. In most programming languages, this is done using a conditional statement, such as an if statement, a while statement or a switch statement. Jason *** Hi Jason, What plays the role of the abstract/platonic equation if (x 0) then do y() else do z(); such that there is an actual referent to be conscious of? In my example, I was referring to any implementation of such a program, e.g. your own computer. Right, but that goes against Bruno's Platonism (but it is consistent with my own anti-Platonism). The hardware that is implementing the program has (up to the Bekenstein bound) some specifiable properties that can act as the ersatz 'self'. Consciousness is consciousness of ... There is no infinite regression, the program is conscious of some property of x, not conscious of its own knowledge of the property of x (in this example code). Consider it as consciousness of a raw qualia like seeing one pixel of white instead of one pixel of black. Exactly, no infinite regress!! But there can be some finite regress of 'I am conscious of being conscious of..., just enough to get some approximation of a fixed point, ala Kleene. This is why Descartes was almost right with his Theater idea. Jason On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 5:18 PM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 3:09 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/2/2013 7:47 AM, Jason Resch wrote: Would anyone here say that a conditional (e.g., if/else) statement (in some program) is conscious? I don't think so. We make if/else choices subconsciously all the time. My introspection tells me that conscious thought is a kind of narrative story I construct. I think the function of this is to condense my experience for memory and future reference when I need to plan or predict based on my past experience. If I were designing an intelligent Mars Rover that had to learn to deal with a wide variety of problems which I cannot anticipate, this sort of selective memory narrative would be one component of it's learning. Of course there are different levels of consciousness. A Mars Rover needs a conception of self as being in certain place, having completed certain tasks, having certain capabilities, etc. But it doesn't need to consider its status among peers or reflect on its own computational methods or its ultimate end. Brent Brent, I think you may be reading my question in the wrong way. I didn't mean to equate your consciousness with that of every if/else decision you make, but rather ask something like, What does the shortest possible program that is conscious look like? I have trouble seeing why some short piece of code like: if (x 0) then do y() else do z(); Is not conscious of some property of x (whether it is positive or negative), at least when the two different functions y() and z() cause the program to enter different states. I find it harder to justify the consciousness of a program that did not do any selection, distinction, or inspection. In most programming languages, this is done using a conditional statement, such as an if statement, a while statement or a switch statement. Jason I think such statements may form the atoms of consciousness, as they represent the point at which a program's behavior diverges based on the inspection of some information. Conditional statements are required for any kind of intelligent or responsive behavior, which might be why consciousness correlates with it. Jason -- 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+unsubscribe@**googlegroups.comeverything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.**comeverything-list@googlegroups.com . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/** group/everything-list?hl=enhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 5:27 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 02 May 2013, at 15:11, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 01 May 2013, at 17:33, Telmo Menezes wrote to John Clark: At this point I'm not even talking about Science but logic and a distaste for cheerfully and strongly believing in 2 contradictory things. I believe that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution and I'm agnostic on consciousness. There is nothing contradictory about this, but I can't think of any further way to make my point. We'll have to disagree to disagree. You shouldn't, perhaps. May be it would be enough to just ask John Clark to push his logic a bit further. I agree that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian evolution, but this assumes some mechanism, and thus Mechanism. Then the discovery of the universal machine shows that machine intelligence is a (logical) product of the elementary operations in arithmetic. Then machine can see their own limit, and are statistically forced to guess in something which can't be a machine, as arithmetical truth, for example. We don't need to know what consciousness is. If we can agree that consciousness is 1) undoubtable 2) incommunicable 3) invariant for digital substitution at some level. I believe in 3) but not with 100% certainty. You don't need to believe anything, just to agree 'for the sake of the argument. And there is no certainties. Ok. Isn't it possible that, in fact, I was created just a couple of hours ago by adding the molecules of the food I had for lunch to my body, and that before I was someone else and we just happen to share the same (now fake) memories. I don't think this is the case, but can I be sure? Yes that's an arithmetical computational history. It exists, and so you have to take it into account in all experience/experiment of physics you can do. But if the normal measure behaves a bit, you might need to take into account that and similar rare history only to get the 10^1000 billionth correct decimal. Ok. In arithmetic you have all computational histories, and by the FPI you are distributed in all of them. Physics get statistical at the start. Ok. Memories are not really fake of not fake. They are appropriate, or not, relatively to probable histories. Yes, fake was a bad choice of word. Then we can understand that the mind body problem becomes a body statistical-appearance problem in the whole of arithmetic (not just the computable sigma_1, but the non computable pi_1, sigma_2, pi_2, . up to arithmetical truth). This generalizes both Darwin and Everett on arithmetic. It shows a non negligible part of what the physical reality is the border of. Machines cannot not be religious. It is unavoidable, unless you deliberately program them to not look deep enough, ... of course. I like your ideas, but I still lack the technical knowledge in some of the steps to feel confortable using them. I appreciate you tell me. Normally UDA is understandable with only a passive knowledge of what a computer is, Yes, UDA is easier to follow. but AUDA, where the religion aspect is clearer, needs a good familiarity with the gaps between computability, provability and truth, coming from the incompleteness phenomenon in arithmetical logics and above. And, btw, you are right with the 'artificial nets'. We will not make intelligent machines, we will fish in the arithmetical ocean and sometimes we get the chance to meet some-one, in some recognizable ways. We might learn deep lessons in the exploration, though. Nice. Well, we can hope the best, but we can fear the worst. Even the bitcoin has made a little crack due to exaggerate speculation. The exaggerate speculation phase was to be expected. Not long ago, people where saying that nobody would even trust such a concept. Maybe it will survive. Universal Machines, like brain, computers and cells, are really doors to the Unknown. It may be that lies plays some part in the exploration, like with the mimicking ants jumping spider which make the birds believing that they are non edible ants, when actually they are edible spider. Even Peano Arithmetic get some more provability power when the false axiom PA is inconsistent is added. Lies can run deep. Bruno 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. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 4:02 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 1, 2013, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Artificial neural networks have been trained to fly planes, invest in the stock market, converts speech to text, recognise handwriting and so on and so on. True. For most of these cases, nobody understands how the network works, they only understand how they created the necessary conditions for a certain behaviour to emerge. Also true. So you know that under certain circumstances shit happens, and that's all that you need to know if you're just interested in how, but not if you also want to know why. Things like Hebbian learning and artificial models of neurons have explanatory power (even if too simple when compared to reality). This is the sort of thing that is plausibly encoded in the DNA, not the precise wiring. For our monkey brains to be able to even grasp the why, we need to understand the interplay between different levels of abstraction from the molecular to the social level. The explanation is transversal to these layers. Trying to figure out the precise wiring has less explanatory power. We can try to understand how a dozen neurons can self-organise into some useful behaviour, and how that algorithm can be encoded in something like DNA, and how the dozen neurons can be transformed into a human brain by iterative improvement at the genotypical level. So if you just wanted to know how to make a AI you could reverse engineer a human brain, you might not understand why your creation worked but that wouldn't stop it from working. I think it's more feasible to try to reverse-engineer the morphogenetic algorithms encoded in the DNA. We would still not understand the creation, but would have a greater chance of success, and we would understand how to create the conditions for our creation to grow. Fully understanding a developed human brain would require understanding an absurdly huge graph of interactions that extends in space across the planet and in time all the way back to the first organisms. The first activity [science] offers public rewards It helps you figure out how the world actually works not how you wish it works. There is an internal world that is only accessible to me and that only I can observe. And because what you've discovered is not just true for you but for the external world too I'd be interested to hear what you've found out. I guess that's the appeal of art. Some is interesting, some is boring, according to taste. I, for example, love David Lynch's films, which are produced precisely by a process of diving inside and trying to bring something to show for it. the second only offers private rewards. Well, I suppose navel gazing might lower the blood pressure in some people, but don't expect it to teach you anything important about the complexities of reality, otherwise you'll be as disappointed as the last hundred generation of navel gazers have been. I haven't been disappointed so far. Maybe frustrated sometimes. And navel gazers turn into total bores as soon as they open their mouth because even if they really have found something it is only true for them. That's a risk of course. David Lynch agrees and preferes not to talk about his films. Some people are good with words and are able to produce interesting art in that medium. You freed yourself from the dogmas of Christianity but not from its morality. Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12. I'm simply pointing out that you may be under the influence of christian morality even though you reject christianity. This is not surprising, we grew in a western civilisation that was greatly influenced by christianity. In this case I believe you are being puritanical because you believe that certain pursuits are not worthy because they do not contribute to the material common good. This moral value is not exclusive to christianity, of course, but given that your name is John Clark I would bet that that is where it originates from, in your case. if you are a logical man then your doubts about the consciousness of a intelligent robot would be no greater than your doubts about the consciousness of your fellow intelligent human beings; and lets face it as a practical matter those doubts must be very very very very small. From a Bayesian standpoint, we are disagreeing on the value of a prior. This has nothing to do with logic, we just place different bets on an unknown. I don't understand, are you saying that you actually believe that it is likely that you are the only conscious being in the universe?? I believe it is likely that consciousness is the fundamental stuff, and that this stuff is the same for me and for you. If you believe that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated then logically there is no
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On 5/2/2013 3:32 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: I'm simply pointing out that you may be under the influence of christian morality even though you reject christianity. This is not surprising, we grew in a western civilisation that was greatly influenced by christianity. In this case I believe you are being puritanical because you believe that certain pursuits are not worthy because they do not contribute to the material common good. This moral value is not exclusive to christianity, of course, but given that your name is John Clark I would bet that that is where it originates from, in your case. It's not only not exclusive to Christianity it's not exclusive to religion. It has been part of every human (and probably hominid) tribe since the beginning of the species. 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.
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 12:56 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/2/2013 3:32 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: I'm simply pointing out that you may be under the influence of christian morality even though you reject christianity. This is not surprising, we grew in a western civilisation that was greatly influenced by christianity. In this case I believe you are being puritanical because you believe that certain pursuits are not worthy because they do not contribute to the material common good. This moral value is not exclusive to christianity, of course, but given that your name is John Clark I would bet that that is where it originates from, in your case. It's not only not exclusive to Christianity it's not exclusive to religion. It has been part of every human (and probably hominid) tribe since the beginning of the species. Not at all, humans are not social insects. We have a strong drive for art, introspection and self-expression. Asian cultures have placed a high value on meditation for millennia. Many tribes developed their religions and proto-religions around entheogens. People smoke and watch porn. Western puritanism either rejects or highly regulates all of these things. 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. -- 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: Why do particles decay randomly?
think it's more feasible to try to reverse-engineer the morphogenetic algorithms encoded in the DNA. We would still not understand the creation, but would have a greater chance of success, and we would understand how to create the conditions for our creation to grow. Fully understanding a developed human brain would require understanding an absurdly huge graph of interactions that extends in space across the planet and in time all the way back to the first organisms. Has any thought been given that the DNA code is something like the code of a von Neumann replicator uses. The base of 4 may indicate a form of error correction built into the language as the 'machine code' level... I think that treating the DNA directly as a Turing machine tape might be missing a few connecting steps. On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 4:02 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 1, 2013, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Artificial neural networks have been trained to fly planes, invest in the stock market, converts speech to text, recognise handwriting and so on and so on. True. For most of these cases, nobody understands how the network works, they only understand how they created the necessary conditions for a certain behaviour to emerge. Also true. So you know that under certain circumstances shit happens, and that's all that you need to know if you're just interested in how, but not if you also want to know why. Things like Hebbian learning and artificial models of neurons have explanatory power (even if too simple when compared to reality). This is the sort of thing that is plausibly encoded in the DNA, not the precise wiring. For our monkey brains to be able to even grasp the why, we need to understand the interplay between different levels of abstraction from the molecular to the social level. The explanation is transversal to these layers. Trying to figure out the precise wiring has less explanatory power. We can try to understand how a dozen neurons can self-organise into some useful behaviour, and how that algorithm can be encoded in something like DNA, and how the dozen neurons can be transformed into a human brain by iterative improvement at the genotypical level. So if you just wanted to know how to make a AI you could reverse engineer a human brain, you might not understand why your creation worked but that wouldn't stop it from working. I think it's more feasible to try to reverse-engineer the morphogenetic algorithms encoded in the DNA. We would still not understand the creation, but would have a greater chance of success, and we would understand how to create the conditions for our creation to grow. Fully understanding a developed human brain would require understanding an absurdly huge graph of interactions that extends in space across the planet and in time all the way back to the first organisms. The first activity [science] offers public rewards It helps you figure out how the world actually works not how you wish it works. There is an internal world that is only accessible to me and that only I can observe. And because what you've discovered is not just true for you but for the external world too I'd be interested to hear what you've found out. I guess that's the appeal of art. Some is interesting, some is boring, according to taste. I, for example, love David Lynch's films, which are produced precisely by a process of diving inside and trying to bring something to show for it. the second only offers private rewards. Well, I suppose navel gazing might lower the blood pressure in some people, but don't expect it to teach you anything important about the complexities of reality, otherwise you'll be as disappointed as the last hundred generation of navel gazers have been. I haven't been disappointed so far. Maybe frustrated sometimes. And navel gazers turn into total bores as soon as they open their mouth because even if they really have found something it is only true for them. That's a risk of course. David Lynch agrees and preferes not to talk about his films. Some people are good with words and are able to produce interesting art in that medium. You freed yourself from the dogmas of Christianity but not from its morality. Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12. I'm simply pointing out that you may be under the influence of christian morality even though you reject christianity. This is not surprising, we grew in a western civilisation that was greatly influenced by christianity. In this case I believe you are being puritanical because you believe that certain pursuits are not worthy because they do not contribute to the material common good. This moral
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On 5/2/2013 4:12 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 12:56 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/2/2013 3:32 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: I'm simply pointing out that you may be under the influence of christian morality even though you reject christianity. This is not surprising, we grew in a western civilisation that was greatly influenced by christianity. In this case I believe you are being puritanical because you believe that certain pursuits are not worthy because they do not contribute to the material common good. This moral value is not exclusive to christianity, of course, but given that your name is John Clark I would bet that that is where it originates from, in your case. It's not only not exclusive to Christianity it's not exclusive to religion. It has been part of every human (and probably hominid) tribe since the beginning of the species. Not at all, humans are not social insects. We have a strong drive for art, introspection and self-expression. Asian cultures have placed a high value on meditation for millennia. So did some Christian ones. But long before Christianity and even the development of Asian cultures I'm pretty sure that many hunter/gatherers considered time spent in contemplation that did not contribute to the tribe to be frivolous and unworthy. To say it's a Christian influence is as silly as saying the Golden Rule is a Christian idea, even though it was around for millenia before Christianity. Many tribes developed their religions and proto-religions around entheogens. People smoke and watch porn. Western puritanism either rejects or highly regulates all of these things. Western puritanism also rejects murder. That doesn't mean that people against murder have fallen under the influence of Western puritanism. 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.
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
On 5/2/2013 4:39 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote: think it's more feasible to try to reverse-engineer the morphogenetic algorithms encoded in the DNA. We would still not understand the creation, but would have a greater chance of success, and we would understand how to create the conditions for our creation to grow. Fully understanding a developed human brain would require understanding an absurdly huge graph of interactions that extends in space across the planet and in time all the way back to the first organisms. Has any thought been given that the DNA code is something like the code of a von Neumann replicator uses. The base of 4 may indicate a form of error correction built into the language as the 'machine code' level... I think that treating the DNA directly as a Turing machine tape might be missing a few connecting steps. I don't think it's at all like a Turing machine tape. It isn't written to, only read and copied. The whole organism might be compared to a Turing machine in that it grows by producing more structure and by learning. But even that doesn't account for the environment and culture that provides a lot of the information that is learned and processed. 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.
Re: Why do particles decay randomly?
Hi Brent, I agree 99.99% with you here! I only differ in saying that the copy process is not exact and thus is equivalent to a write. On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 7:53 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/2/2013 4:39 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote: think it's more feasible to try to reverse-engineer the morphogenetic algorithms encoded in the DNA. We would still not understand the creation, but would have a greater chance of success, and we would understand how to create the conditions for our creation to grow. Fully understanding a developed human brain would require understanding an absurdly huge graph of interactions that extends in space across the planet and in time all the way back to the first organisms. Has any thought been given that the DNA code is something like the code of a von Neumann replicator uses. The base of 4 may indicate a form of error correction built into the language as the 'machine code' level... I think that treating the DNA directly as a Turing machine tape might be missing a few connecting steps. I don't think it's at all like a Turing machine tape. It isn't written to, only read and copied. The whole organism might be compared to a Turing machine in that it grows by producing more structure and by learning. But even that doesn't account for the environment and culture that provides a lot of the information that is learned and processed. Brent -- 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/K7E-Vfwj4QU/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: Why do particles decay randomly?
Hi Brent, You seem to assume that the read and copy operations are of something immutable. I submit that there is no 3p invariant at all! There is only the potential infinity of 'similar' copies. On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 9:49 PM, Stephen Paul King kingstephenp...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Brent, I agree 99.99% with you here! I only differ in saying that the copy process is not exact and thus is equivalent to a write. On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 7:53 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/2/2013 4:39 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote: think it's more feasible to try to reverse-engineer the morphogenetic algorithms encoded in the DNA. We would still not understand the creation, but would have a greater chance of success, and we would understand how to create the conditions for our creation to grow. Fully understanding a developed human brain would require understanding an absurdly huge graph of interactions that extends in space across the planet and in time all the way back to the first organisms. Has any thought been given that the DNA code is something like the code of a von Neumann replicator uses. The base of 4 may indicate a form of error correction built into the language as the 'machine code' level... I think that treating the DNA directly as a Turing machine tape might be missing a few connecting steps. I don't think it's at all like a Turing machine tape. It isn't written to, only read and copied. The whole organism might be compared to a Turing machine in that it grows by producing more structure and by learning. But even that doesn't account for the environment and culture that provides a lot of the information that is learned and processed. Brent -- 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/K7E-Vfwj4QU/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: Why do particles decay randomly?
On 5/2/2013 6:51 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote: Hi Brent, You seem to assume that the read and copy operations are of something immutable. I submit that there is no 3p invariant at all! There is only the potential infinity of 'similar' copies. No, of course there are mutations. It's estimated that everyone is born with around 300 DNA copies with errors in them. Of course many are harmless and only those that happen to be in a gamete cell have the potential to be passed on. Brent On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 9:49 PM, Stephen Paul King kingstephenp...@gmail.com mailto:kingstephenp...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Brent, I agree 99.99% with you here! I only differ in saying that the copy process is not exact and thus is equivalent to a write. On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 7:53 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 5/2/2013 4:39 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote: think it's more feasible to try to reverse-engineer the morphogenetic algorithms encoded in the DNA. We would still not understand the creation, but would have a greater chance of success, and we would understand how to create the conditions for our creation to grow. Fully understanding a developed human brain would require understanding an absurdly huge graph of interactions that extends in space across the planet and in time all the way back to the first organisms. Has any thought been given that the DNA code is something like the code of a von Neumann replicator uses. The base of 4 may indicate a form of error correction built into the language as the 'machine code' level... I think that treating the DNA directly as a Turing machine tape might be missing a few connecting steps. I don't think it's at all like a Turing machine tape. It isn't written to, only read and copied. The whole organism might be compared to a Turing machine in that it grows by producing more structure and by learning. But even that doesn't account for the environment and culture that provides a lot of the information that is learned and processed. Brent -- 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/K7E-Vfwj4QU/unsubscribe?hl=en. To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto: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. No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.3272 / Virus Database: 3162/6292 - Release Date: 05/02/13 -- 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.
