Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 2:52 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/27/2013 3:55 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: From: John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2013 10:08 AM Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test? On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: you cannot prove that things in the brain happen because of some proximate definable and identifiable cause or otherwise they must therefore result by a completely random process. Bullshit. Axioms don't need proof, and the most fundamental axiom in all of logic is that X is Y or X is not Y. Everything else is built on top of that. And only somebody who was absolutely desperate to prove the innate superiority of humans over computers would try to deny it. You seem confused... the brain is not an axiom... it is one of the most complex systems we know about in the observed universe. In a system as layered, massively parallel and highly noisy as the brain your assumptions of how it works are naïve and border on the comical. The brain is not a based on a simple deterministic algorithm in which the chain of cause and effect is always clear. Although reductionism has recently received a lot of bad press from supermarket tabloids and new age gurus the fact remains that if you want to study something complex you've got to break it into simpler parts and then see how the parts fit together. And in the final analysis things happen for a reason or they don't happen for a reason; and if they did then it's deterministic and if they didn't then it's random. Perhaps your final analysis is a bit too shallow and self limiting. Why you cling so tenaciously to this need for definitive causality chains (or else it must be complete randomness) is amusing, but is not misguided. You cannot show definitive causality for most of what goes on in most of the universe. You can hypothesize a causal relationship perhaps, but you cannot prove one for all manner of phenomenon arising out of chaotic systems. The brain is a noisy chaotic system and you are attempting to impose your Newtonian order on it. Your approach does not map well onto the problem domain. And what you say has no predictive value; it does not help unravel how the brain works... or how the mind arises within it. It does help. There's no evidence that the brain can't be understood as a parallel computer plus some randomness. Indeed, there's a huge amount of evidence that the brain can be understood as a parallel computer + randomness. Furthermore, we can even engineer artificial neural networks to perform tasks that were previously only achievable by humans. Of course, Church-Turing tells us that if this things can be done with a recurrent neural network, they can necessarily also be done with any other Turing complete device. The intelligence part is not so mysterious, although we are missing some algorithms. But then there's the hard problem, and I wonder if it's related to randomness. I always had the feeling that it is, but I might be falling trap to the tendency to think that two mysteries must be related (like people also do with consciousness and QM). But they might be. The problem with John's formulation is he insists there is either *a* reason or not *a* reason. Yes, I think John has a blind spot around this. I think causality is just a type of model that might approximate the truth but will never be the whole truth. Furthermore, it's a human thought tool. It has no reality status. Hardly anything can be thought of as having *a* reason. In the case of human behavior, each instance almost certainly has many different causes, some in memory, some in the immediate environment, and some which are random and don't have an effective cause. I think of the person, brain/body/etc, plus immediate environment narrow down the probable actions to a few, e.g. 1 to 20, and then some quantum randomness realizes one of those. So it's not deterministic like Laplace's clockwork world, but it's not anything-is-possible either. Or, putting it another way, the Everything has a structure. That's one of the reasons why I like Bruno's ideas (as far as I understand them). Comp explains why there is a structure and even give it a shape. Meta-physically it's much better than causality, but currently worse at making predictions about the real world. I think John only values the latter and is not willing to listen to things that address the first. Telmo. Brent You can copy the symbols on a sheet of paper , but without understanding Hungarian you will never be impacted by the meaning or sensations that poem is seeking to convey. True but irrelevant. I never claimed we would someday understand how to make an AI more intelligent than ourselves, I only said that someday such an AI would get made. And how are you sure it has not already been achieved. To go
RE: The Nazi History of the Muslim Brotherhood
Hi Chris, you are saying that: No, Saibal you invoke the moral quality of the act by describing it as a good thing But this is exactly why I want to avoid this whole morality thing, it comes with a baggage that then implies things that I don't support. I can think that 9/11 was a good thing to have happened while at the same time think that 99/11 was motivated by people with very bad motives. A horrible event can also later turn out to have been a very good thing to have happened. It seems to me that framing things in terms of morality, arguing that I support consequentialism is all besides the point. I don't support consequentialism it only looks that way because you are considering what I'm saying in terms of morality when that concept doesn't apply. Look there may well be something useful in philosophy, like what you write about preventing flawed reasoning. But philosophy has been pretty bad at preventing ill defined baggage being inntroduced and made part of arguments. This is why physics and not philosophy is the best way to describe the world. Saibal Citeren chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com: Hi Saibal No I don't need to invoke morality, the price I pay for that is to have to explain explicity what I mean by a good outcome, what measure I choose here to determine this, etc. Saibal, by using the terms 'good'/'bad' and 'right'/'wrong' you can not help but invoke morality because that is the language of morality. And we are able to see what standard of morality you are invoking by examining your justifications. You are a consequentialist. You assess the rightness/wrongness of supporting Nazis by balancing outcomes. You judge 9/11 to have been good or bad because of the outcomes it had for x,y,z. This is consequentialism and it is a moral perspective. You don't escape that fact by also claiming you have no time for morality, all that does is reveal you to be inconsistent. 9/11 was a good thing to have happened, despite the perpetrators not having good intentions, i.e. the perpetrators of 9/11 wanted to achieve something that I would not have preferred. You are invoking the concept of moral quality of an act, not me. No, Saibal you invoke the moral quality of the act by describing it as a good thing. What else do you think your doing by describing something as a 'good'? Having a cup of tea? The fact that the intentions of the perpetrators plays no role in your judgement is paradigmatic of the teleological nature of consequentialism. One of the many reasons so many people find that kind of reasoning unconvincing and shallow. Moral philosophy???. Well, I consider philosophy to be pseudoscience, I already told you what I think about morality, so I don't have to tell you what I think about moral philosophy. I'm assuming that you are using 'pseudoscience' pejoratively here which is silly coming from someone who believes in multiple realities which amount to a bunch of subjectively calculated sums. But the truth is that philosophy isn't even close to being a pseudoscience. Philosophy is all very 'meta' and exists to draw out the flaws in reasoning we all engage in. I'm going to ignore your disdain for philosophy, mate, because it is too embarrassing to watch people who engage in little else besides pseudoscience and metaphysics shoot themselves in the foot. :) Morality in previous centuries has been invoked to justify the burning of people at the Stake for blasphemy, no one at the time argued that this was immoral based on a reading of all those philosophers. Rubbish. Take slavery : for a long time justified by teleological claims that the suffering of the few was outweighed by the benefits for the many it was eventually over thrown by deontological concerns about the sanctity of self determination. And of course people did argue that slavery was immoral. Of course people did argue that burning people at the stake was immoral. And it was precisely because people did engage in moral philosophy and those ideas dissipated into society that we are now at a point where we can argue about the morality of eating a cow and can take it as given that torture is wrong. John is a good example, he doesn't read past the first sentence when I wrote hat 9/11 was a good thing to have happend, Well I did read past the first sentence, but I needn't have. Look, if the gears in your brain are grinding away and delivering up moral statements like '9/11 was a good thing' then its time to visit the brain mechanic for a moral m.o.t. Maybe, if you really fancy yourself as a moral nihilist, then change the gaskets and abandon the use of moral terminology. Compare: Supporting the Nazis was useful for the Arabs way back when with Supporting the Nazis was the right thing to do way back when Do you see the difference? I think having a go at people for taking you at your word is foolish. All the best. Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 03:07:46 +0200
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.comwrote: Bullshit. Axioms don't need proof, and the most fundamental axiom in all of logic is that X is Y or X is not Y. Everything else is built on top of that. And only somebody who was absolutely desperate to prove the innate superiority of humans over computers would try to deny it. You seem confused... the brain is not an axiom... But the fact that X is Y OR X is not Y sure as hell IS A AXIOM, and so is a event happens for a reason OR a event does not happen for a reason. And first you tell me that the above is a tautology that is so obvious that I'm foolish for repeating it so often, but now you're insisting that it isn't true. So Chris, who is really confused around here? Why you cling so tenaciously to this need for definitive causality chains (or else it must be complete randomness) is amusing I'm glad it brought some light to your otherwise drab existence, in fact because you find it so amusing and the fact that X is Y or X is not Y is so ubiquitous from now on you should find yourself in a constant state of hilarity. it [the brain] is one of the most complex systems we know about in the observed universe. Yes, and that is all the more reason to use reductionism if you want to study it. If you had to understand everything about it before you could understand anything about the brain (or anything else for that matter) you would remain in a constant state of complete ignorance about not just the brain but everything. You cannot show definitive causality for most of what goes on in most of the universe. You just figured that out? Physicists have been telling us that some things happen for no reason (are random) for nearly a century. You can hypothesize a causal relationship perhaps, but you cannot prove one for all manner of phenomenon arising out of chaotic systems. The brain is a noisy chaotic system and you are attempting to impose your Newtonian order on it. If you're a fan of chaos computers are perfectly capable of producing it, in fact the very first computer program I ever wrote used chaos to produce the Mandelbrot set, a object of quite literally infinite complexity, although of course there was a limit to how much magnification my little computer could produce. Your approach does not map well onto the problem domain. And what you say has no predictive value; it does not help unravel how the brain works... or how the mind arises within it. That approach produced Watson! No doubt you will counter by saying that Watson has nothing to do with mind, and that is exactly why I don't believe you when you claim to be emotionally neutral and are judging the human-computer superiority issue strictly on the merits of the case. I never claimed we would someday understand how to make an AI more intelligent than ourselves, I only said that someday such an AI would get made. And how are you sure it has not already been achieved. Because computers don't rule the world. Yet. What I said about needing to understand that which you are studying in order to be able to really be able to manipulate, extend, emulate, simulate etc. is not only true -- as you admit I don't admit that at all! it is sufficient but not necessary. With no understanding of the symbol stream you have no knowledge of what to do with the symbol stream passing across your view And that is why even now we often don't understand what machines are doing or why; we let them keep on doing it however because whatever mysterious thing they're doing we figure it's probably important and don't dare stop it. This applies to understanding the brain as well.. it is and will remain a mystery until we go in and figure out its fine grained workings. It is entirely possible that we will never understand the fine grained workings of the brain, but that won't matter because the computers will understand it. 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Re: Leibniz's final causation as the Self, the active agent of change
Hi spudboy100 Anything that moves according to rules, a program, regulations, a control, etc. is not mind. Mind has to be free and unconstrained, at least in principle. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough - Receiving the following content - From: spudboy100 Receiver: everything-list,rclough Time: 2013-08-27, 13:14:57 Subject: Re: Leibniz's final causation as the Self, the active agent of change My B in law posited, what moves the cursor, using a pc as an analogy of mind? Of course the cursor can be programmed to move and act, by a program, but then who made the programmer? Leibniz and other thinkers may have asked, who made God? Terrific question. My sense of things is the use of an old fashioned or a new fashioned map. One is paper and you use your eyes and fingers, another map is you punch in the destination, and a women's voice speaks Turn right in 5 miles! Both are maps. Similarly asking who created God is akin to asking your maps, where is the next alien intelligent civilization in the Galaxy? Our little maps cannot tell us, because we're out of range. Having said this, where are the space aliens, or where is God, may not be detectable on our maps, simply because we haven't explored the universe sufficiently. Physicist, Freeman Dyson, has written that to know more things we have to have increasingly better observation, and to do this, we have to have improved tools for better experimentation and observation. The Self may be detectable or comprehendible through better tools, and one of these tools is assuredly mathematics. Mitch -Original Message- From: Roger Clough To: - Roger Clough Sent: Mon, Aug 26, 2013 3:31 am Subject: Leibniz's final causation as the Self, the active agent of change Leibniz's final causation as the Self, the active agent of change So far, materialistic models of the mind, such as Dennett's, are essentially passive. There is no internal active agent of change, which one might call the Self. The internal active agent of change is desire, which we might define as a mismatch between the current state and a goal. In other words, the internal active agent of change is final causation, which has been discussed by Leibniz as typical of life, and also by Aristotle in his four basic causes of change. This desire to achieve a personal goal appears mentally as an intention, which is the active agent of change. This is what we call the Self, and is the missing element of AI as well as current models of the mind. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.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-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. 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
From: meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net [snip] Although reductionism has recently received a lot of bad press from supermarket tabloids and new age gurus the fact remains that if you want to study something complex you've got to break it into simpler parts and then see how the parts fit together. And in the final analysis things happen for a reason or they don't happen for a reason; and if they did then it's deterministic and if they didn't then it's random. Perhaps your final analysis is a bit too shallowand self limiting. Why you cling sotenaciously to this need for definitivecausality chains (or else it must be completerandomness) is amusing, but is not misguided. You cannot show definitive causality for most of what goes on in most of the universe. You can hypothesize a causal relationship perhaps, butyou cannot prove one for all manner ofphenomenon arising out of chaotic systems. Thebrain is a noisy chaotic system and you areattempting to impose your Newtonian order on it. Your approach does not map well onto theproblem domain. And what you say has nopredictive value; it does not help unravel howthe brain works... or how the mind arises within it. It does help. There's no evidence that the brain can't beunderstood as a parallel computer plus some randomness. The problemwith John's formulation is he insists there is either *a* reason ornot *a* reason. Hardly anything can be thought of as having *a*reason. In the case of human behavior, each instance almostcertainly has many different causes, some in memory, some in theimmediate environment, and some which are random and don't have aneffective cause. I think of the person, brain/body/etc, plusimmediate environment narrow down the probable actions to a few,e.g. 1 to 20, and then some quantum randomness realizes one ofthose. So it's not deterministic like Laplace's clockwork world, but it's not anything-is-possible either. Sure reductionist approach can gain you a partial understanding; you can slice the brain up; analyze processes and try to classify and drill down to smaller and down into increasingly tightly focused problem domains within the larger problem domain of how the brain works. But this approach fails to capture the holistic dynamic processes and subtle interplays between rapidly forming and also rapidly subsiding synchronized firing networks that pull together coalitions of neurons from many different brain regions. The brain is not only massively parallel -- it is a superbly tight packed one hundred trillion connection machine with 86 billion operating nodes in the network -- it is also incredibly noisy and seemingly chaotic. The simple deterministic causality approach cannot model a vastly parallel and very noisy chaotic system such as the brain. The brain is not operating on deterministic principles -- or at least not completely so. Without modeling the chaos -- and chaos is modeled all the time and predictive statements can be made about chaotic systems (say the chaotic airflow over an air foil for example). But these models and the equations that comprise them account for chaos and often rely on probabilistic and consensus based algorithms. I am not arguing that the brain is beyond study or cannot be understood, analyzed or modeled. What I am arguing is that it is not a simple deterministic system in which state X will always lead to outcome Y; nor can it always be determined based on knowing an outcome Y in the brain what the causational state was that ultimately lead to that outcome. Even if there may be causation the processes by which the brain operates are so distributed and inter-dependent and the system is so incredibly noisy (and it really is a very high noise to signal ratio) that any attempt to work backwards from some outcome down the causal chain of neural activity that resulted in it rapidly breaks down and grows geometrically more difficult with each remove from the final result and back into the densely nested forest of potential network branches. John keeps insisting that X is Y or X is not Y. True, but so what? It does not provide any great insight into how the brain works as a dynamic entity. Basically based on reading his posts on the subject what
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
From: Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2013 11:17 PM Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test? On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 2:52 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/27/2013 3:55 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: From: John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2013 10:08 AM Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test? On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: you cannot prove that things in the brain happen because of some proximate definable and identifiable cause or otherwise they must therefore result by a completely random process. Bullshit. Axioms don't need proof, and the most fundamental axiom in all of logic is that X is Y or X is not Y. Everything else is built on top of that. And only somebody who was absolutely desperate to prove the innate superiority of humans over computers would try to deny it. You seem confused... the brain is not an axiom... it is one of the most complex systems we know about in the observed universe. In a system as layered, massively parallel and highly noisy as the brain your assumptions of how it works are naïve and border on the comical. The brain is not a based on a simple deterministic algorithm in which the chain of cause and effect is always clear. Although reductionism has recently received a lot of bad press from supermarket tabloids and new age gurus the fact remains that if you want to study something complex you've got to break it into simpler parts and then see how the parts fit together. And in the final analysis things happen for a reason or they don't happen for a reason; and if they did then it's deterministic and if they didn't then it's random. Perhaps your final analysis is a bit too shallow and self limiting. Why you cling so tenaciously to this need for definitive causality chains (or else it must be complete randomness) is amusing, but is not misguided. You cannot show definitive causality for most of what goes on in most of the universe. You can hypothesize a causal relationship perhaps, but you cannot prove one for all manner of phenomenon arising out of chaotic systems. The brain is a noisy chaotic system and you are attempting to impose your Newtonian order on it. Your approach does not map well onto the problem domain. And what you say has no predictive value; it does not help unravel how the brain works... or how the mind arises within it. It does help. There's no evidence that the brain can't be understood as a parallel computer plus some randomness. Indeed, there's a huge amount of evidence that the brain can be understood as a parallel computer + randomness. Furthermore, we can even engineer artificial neural networks to perform tasks that were previously only achievable by humans. Of course, Church-Turing tells us that if this things can be done with a recurrent neural network, they can necessarily also be done with any other Turing complete device. The intelligence part is not so mysterious, although we are missing some algorithms. But then there's the hard problem, and I wonder if it's related to randomness. I always had the feeling that it is, but I might be falling trap to the tendency to think that two mysteries must be related (like people also do with consciousness and QM). But they might be. I feel it should be added that the brain is also a very noisy and seemingly chaotic system. It is not just massively parallel, but it is also very noisy and we are discovering -- in fact, just now discovering (and DARPA by the way is very interested in finding out more) -- the algorithms the neocortex seems to use to arrive at -- or focus in and amplify a signal. In order to understand and be able to begin to model the dynamic brain (I prefer at this point to call this the mind -- i.e. the dynamic sensations, experiences, feelings, thoughts and perceptions arising within the physical brain as a result of the dynamic interactions of the many billions -- even many trillions when we examine potential pathways of connection -- of individual neuronal actors and the coalitions of such actors acting in concert with other possibly distant neurons. The problem with John's formulation is he insists there is either *a* reason or not *a* reason. Yes, I think John has a blind spot around this. I think causality is just a type of model that might approximate the truth but will never be the whole truth. Furthermore, it's a human thought tool. It has no reality status. And my argument is that it is not the right tool for the job - -or more precisely cannot be the only tool you bring to this particular job site. Other mental/logic tools are needed including methodologies for dealing with chaotic noisy systems. In a chaotic system -- such as say our planetary atmosphere to
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
From: John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: Bullshit. Axioms don't need proof, and the most fundamental axiom in all of logic is that X is Y or X is not Y. Everything else is built on top of that. And only somebody who was absolutely desperate to prove the innate superiority of humans over computers would try to deny it. You seem confused... the brain is not an axiom... But the fact that X is Y OR X is not Y sure as hell IS A AXIOM, and so is a event happens for a reason OR a event does not happen for a reason. And first you tell me that the above is a tautology that is so obvious that I'm foolish for repeating it so often, but now you're insisting that it isn't true. So Chris, who is really confused around here? X is Y OR X is not Y -- except when that which is being considered exists in a state of superposition :) But sure its true in classic logic. And again I raise your bet with a big SO WHAT? If X = Y AND Y = Z then X = Z This is also logically true, but also has no substantial bearing on how the dynamic processes by which the mind arises from the 86 billion neuron and 100 trillion connection two phase (electro-chemical) network that comprises our brain Why you cling so tenaciously to this need for definitive causality chains (or else it must be complete randomness) is amusing I'm glad it brought some light to your otherwise drab existence, in fact because you find it so amusing and the fact that X is Y or X is not Y is so ubiquitous from now on you should find yourself in a constant state of hilarity. How totally pompous of you. What do you know of my existence, whether it be drab or dangerously on the edge? You have no knowledge of my existence and for you to characterize it -- from your position of gross ignorance reveals a gaping deficiency in your reasoning abilities or else a really bad character flaw. Could you please refrain from this engaging in these kinds of childish attributions and characterizations of someone whom you do not know at all but happen to be arguing with. Since I do not think you are stupid I must conclude you are pompous, which is not something I would be especially proud of if I were you. it [the brain] is one of the most complex systems we know about in the observed universe. Yes, and that is all the more reason to use reductionism if you want to study it. If you had to understand everything about it before you could understand anything about the brain (or anything else for that matter) you would remain in a constant state of complete ignorance about not just the brain but everything. You cannot show definitive causality for most of what goes on in most of the universe. You just figured that out? Physicists have been telling us that some things happen for no reason (are random) for nearly a century. AND when did I say random? I deal with randomness -- or more accurately pseudo randomness and how to account for it and use it -- all the time in my work life. But I am not referring to random events, I was describing the difficulty in tracing causality back from an outcome state Y to an originating (within the frame of reference) state Y. I was making the statement that because of the chaotic and highly parallelized nature of the brain that very often the attempt to work back and determine the causes is in practice impossible. Now hopefully you will finally figure out what I have being trying to communicate to you and realize that my stating that it is impossible to work back from result X to initial state Y by trying to rewind events and work back step by step is not the same thing as saying that the outcome X is the result of some random process. The brain is not a random state machine, it has a definite direction of flow and we experience a clear and consistent outcome. Clearly there is cause and effect -- as well as a fair degree of randomness that works its way into outcomes along the complex chains of consensus building neuralcortex algorithms that seem to be operating in us -- and which by the way DARPA is highly interested in learning more about. You can hypothesize a causal relationship perhaps, but you cannot prove one for all manner of phenomenon arising out of chaotic systems. The brain is a noisy chaotic system and you are attempting to impose your Newtonian order on it. If you're a fan of chaos computers are perfectly capable of producing it, in fact the very first computer program I ever wrote used chaos to produce the Mandelbrot set, a object of quite literally infinite complexity, although of course there was a limit to how much magnification my little computer could produce. I work with large systems for well known software companies and the spend my work days in computer code that operates them -- when I am not dragged into
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 12:05:27PM -0700, Chris de Morsella wrote: John keeps insisting that X is Y or X is not Y. True, but so what? It does not provide any great insight into how the brain works as a dynamic entity. Basically based on reading his posts on the subject what I am stating is that he would not be hired to help work out the problem based on his views of how the brain can be understood. In fact he would not make it past the initial screening interview -- IMO. I am not calling him stupid -- though he does question my intelligence -- but for some reason (which I know not of) he clings to this simplistic view of what is in fact a highly dynamic, noisy, chaotic and vastly parallelized system. I think John is flogging the dead horse idea that free will involves both causation and not causation (my will causes something to happen, that something cannot be caused by something, as my will is free). Maybe he needs to save that for the theologs who seem to hold the bizarre idea that an omnsicient being could actually exist. (How can our will be free if an omnisicient being already knows what choice we will make?). It is, as always, a confusion of emergence levels. My will is an emergent concept, that has no relevance to the microscopic realm of atoms, molecules and forces, but as an explanation for why I chose to drink a cup of coffee is presumably a good one. The recent discussion initiated by Bill Taylor of FOAR reminds us of David Deutsch's argument along those lines, such as the explanation for why an atom of copper occupies a certain position in a statue of Nelson on Picadilly circus, which really puts the point more forcefully than I have done. Obviously, that the particular arrangement of molecules in my brain this morning may have no precise causation is sufficient to guarantee my will to be free. It is a debatable point whether it is necessary though, and we've been through interminable debates about that on this list an elsewhere without getting anywhere :). -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Proof of Impossibility Sketch For a Consistent Theory of Everything and a Consistent Metasystem of a Theory of Everything
Details on my blog, Radical Computinghttp://radicomp.blogspot.com/2013/08/proof-of-impossibility-sketch-for.html . The summary is this, we can argue that a Theory of Everything is characterized by either syntactic, negation, or deductive completeness or universal closure. A *theory of everything* (*ToE*) or *final theory* is atheory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and predicts the outcome of *any* experiment that could be carried out *in principle*. (Wikipedia: Theory of Everythinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything ) Either definition excludes strictly consistent theories from consideration. Universal closure is achieved almost exclusively by the axiom of unrestricted comprehension and universal sets which in general entail Russell's paradox. Completeness is a more tractable property, but as I've sketched, necessitates that a neither a Theory of Everything nor its metasystem is strictly consistent. This sketch is for the first part of a two part thesis on proof by contradiction methods examining proofs by contradiction intolerance and proofs by contradiction tolerance towards the development of paraconsistent metasystems and methods in metamathematics and the scientific method. Rather than argue for the impossibility of a theory of everything whatsoever, I argue that this necessitates that a Theory of Everything and its metasystem will be paraconsistent in a stronger sense than Zizzi's Lq and Lnq qubit languages. The second part of the paper will re-examine Gödel's proofs, Russell's paradox, and diagonalization proofs with contradiction tolerant methods. I appreciate any feedback--especially constructive criticism, -Ian D.L.N. Mclean -- 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
