Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 3 Oct 2013, at 11:12 am, chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Liz Is there something wrong with quantum indeterminacy? Apart from the fact the MWI removes it? And that that is the point of MWI? And that probability questions in MWI are notoriously thorny? This is why I resort to the Quantum Suicide experiment or better still to Quantum Russian Roulette. The experimenter is 1-p certain of his own survival, not unsure about it. Otherwise, he'ld never take part. And this certainty has nothing to do with the fact that in the other outcome he dies. It doesn't matter what happens in that branch. His certainty is consequent on the fact that all outcomes obtain and being a MWI believer he believes just that. The Stanford Encyclopedia puts it: The quantum state of the Universe at one time specifies the quantum state at all times. If I am going to perform a quantum experiment with two possible outcomes such that standard quantum mechanics predicts probability 1/3 for outcome A and 2/3 for outcome B, then, according to the MWI, both the world with outcome A and the world with outcome B will exist. It is senseless to ask: What is the probability that I will get A instead of B? because I will correspond to both Levs: the one who observes A and the other one who observes B. I agree with that analysis, and disagree with subsequent attempts to smuggle some notion of probability back in. I'll read them again shortly just to see if they are any more convincing but on the face of it MWI has an issue with 1-p indeterminacy. It shouldn't really be there. Nevertheless I assume you follow some notion of probability in everyday life. If it is predicted that there is a 90% chance of rain you take your umbrella. You don't reason that as you will both get wet and not get wet, and it is bullshit to say you will get wet in more worlds or you are more likely to get wet, there is no point in the umbrella. So are you behaving irrationally, or is your behaviour indication that the MWI is false? -- 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: A challenge for Craig
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 01 Oct 2013, at 17:09, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:13 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 30 Sep 2013, at 14:05, Telmo Menezes wrote to Craig: The comp assumption that computations have qualia hidden inside them is not much of an answer either in my view. I have the same problem. The solution is in the fact that all machines have that problem. More exactly: all persons capable of surviving a digital substitution must have that and similar problems. It is a sort of meta-solution explaining that we are indeed confronted to something which is simply totally unexplainable. Note also that the expression computation have qualia can be misleading. A computation has no qualia, strictly speaking. Only a person supported by an infinity of computation can be said to have qualia, or to live qualia. Then the math of self-reference can be used to explain why the qualia have to escape the pure third person type of explanations. Thanks Bruno. Is there some formal proof of this? Can it be followed by a mere mortal? It follows from comp, the classical definition of knowledge (the agreement that the modal logic S4 defines an axiomatic of knowledge) and then from Solovay theorem, and the fact that (Bp - Bp p) belongs to G* minus G. It is explained in details in the long version conscience et mécanisme, and with less detail in the short Lille thesis (that you have). Ok, I'm preparing to start chapter 4, the movie graph argument. It is also explained in the second part of sane04. Formally a key text is the S4 provability chapter in Boolos 79 and 93, and the articles referred too. We can come back on this. It is the heart of the Arithmeticalization of the UDA. It *is¨probably very naive, and I was sure this would be refuted, but it is not, yet. I think it can be understood by mere mortals, having enough times and motivation. For the sigma_1 restriction, you need also a good understanding around Gödel and Mechanism. One of the best good is the book by Judson Webb. Torkel Franzen's two books are quite good also. If you read the french I summarize a big part of the literature on that in conscience mécanisme. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/bxlthesis/consciencemecanisme.html Thanks! Bruno A good exercise consists in trying to think about what could like an explanation of what a qualia is. Even without comp, that will seem impossible, and that explains why some people, like Craig, estimate that we have to take them as primitive. here comp explains, why there are things like qualia, which can emerge only in the frist person points of view, and admit irreductible components. 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. 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. 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. 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: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The origin of the indeterminacies is the random use of personal pronouns with no clear referents by Bruno Marchal such that all questions like what is the probability I will do this or that? become meaningless. ? Which word didn't you understand? We need no more personal identity notion than we need to say I will survive with an artficial brain The origin of the indeterminacies is the random use of personal pronouns with no clear referents by Bruno Marchal such that all questions like what is the probability I will do this or that? become meaningless. Bruno Marchal is simply addicted to personal pronouns because it would be obvious to all that Bruno Marchal's ideas are held together with only spit and scotch tape without the logically inconsistent use of them. You try to evade the indeterminacy by making it into an ambiguity, Personal pronouns with no referent are the cause of the ambiguity, and although it results in clunky prose John Clark can explain John Clark's ideas without using them, Bruno Marchal can not explain Bruno Marchal's ideas without the liberal use of such pronouns. All that can be said is that from ANY point of view there is a 100% chance the Helsinki man will turn into the Washington man, and a 100% chance the Helsinki man will turn into the Moscow man; so if I is the Helsinki man then there is a 0% chance I will see either city because very soon I will turn into something that is not I. That contradicts many posts you sent. BULLSHIT! In particular, this would mean that duplication entails death, BULLSHIT! As you said yourself as you said yourself, we need only the fact that those remembering having been the guy in Helsinki; and in this case both the Washington Man and the Moscow Man remember being the Helsinki Man so the Helsinki Man is not dead. True, the first person point of view of the Helsinki man no longer exists because nobody is in Helsinki anymore, but that is of no more interest than the fact that the first person point of view that Bruno Marchal had yesterday no longer exists. And that is why all this Pov and pee pee stuff is crap. Huh? Uncertainty about what? Uncertainty in Helsinki about which city you You? Bruno Marchal just can't wean Bruno Marchal off the use of personal pronouns even though it causes ambiguity when duplicating chambers are involved; John Clark believes the reason for this is because without ambiguity Bruno Marchal's ideas are obvious nonsense. And although Bruno Marchal says that John Clark is confused between the various types of pee pee, John Clark believes that John Clark knows the difference between pee and crap. will see And John Clark thought John Clark and Bruno Marchal were talking about life and death and the nature of personal identity. People have known since the stone age that people could seldom make good predictions about what people would see next, but good prediction or bad prediction people always felt like the same people. 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: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: I have always had trouble with the MWI version of this - it's generally hard to believe that the person who is having these experiences will become two people who have had different experiences (to avoid any personal pronouns in those descriptions). LizR branching at that point would certainly be odd, but there is nothing logically inconsistent with the idea and it violates no known experimental result. And whatever the correct interpretation of Quantum Mechanics turns out to be we can be certain of one thing, it will be odd. I am about to perform a measurement that has what I would consider, no doubt naively, to have a 50-50 chance of going either way. Once I have done the measurement, I find that it has result 1, so I would be justified to think, Aha, that was a 50% chance which happened to come out this way, rather than the other way. Meanwhile another version of me has obtained result 2 and thinks the opposite. Do we call this indeterminacy? I'd call it unpredictable. The result of a quantum coin flip will not be indeterminate or vague, it's just unknown right now. And regardless of how the coin falls LizR will still feel like LizR . And does it relate to personal identity? It has nothing to do with personal identity, both would still feel to be LizR , so the entire procedure had zero effect on it. As far as personal identity is concerned nothing has changed, and for both LizR's the future continues to remain unpredictable just as it always has. If I believe the Copenhagen interpretation then I think it is genuine indeterminacy. If I believe the MWI I think it is apparent indeterminacy. I would say that if Copenhagen is correct then probability is a property of the thing itself, but if Everett and the MWI is correct then probability is just a measure of our lack of information. However as far as the nature of personal identity is concerned it doesn't matter if Everett was correct or not because a feeling of self has nothing to do with probability or good predictions or bad predictions. 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: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 , LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: What question about personal identity is indeterminate? There is a 100% chance that the Helsinki man will turn into the Moscow man because the Helsinki Man saw Moscow, and a 100% chance the Helsinki Man will turn into the Washington Man because the Helsinki Man saw Washington, and a 100% chance that the first person view of the Helsinki Man will be a view ONLY of Helsinki because otherwise the first person view of the Helsinki Man would not be the first person view of the Helsinki man. This is uncontraversially, one might say trivially correct, I would have thought so too, but however trivial it may be for reasons I don't understand most on this list are unable to grasp this simple truth. but it doesn't refute anything about the first person indeterminacy, I don't know what indeterminacy you're talking about. LizR may not be able to predict what LizR sees next, but as far as personal identity is concerned that is irrelevant because whatever LizR sees LizR will still feel like LizR. 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: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 6:59 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 , LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: What question about personal identity is indeterminate? There is a 100% chance that the Helsinki man will turn into the Moscow man because the Helsinki Man saw Moscow, and a 100% chance the Helsinki Man will turn into the Washington Man because the Helsinki Man saw Washington, and a 100% chance that the first person view of the Helsinki Man will be a view ONLY of Helsinki because otherwise the first person view of the Helsinki Man would not be the first person view of the Helsinki man. This is uncontraversially, one might say trivially correct, I would have thought so too, but however trivial it may be for reasons I don't understand most on this list are unable to grasp this simple truth. but it doesn't refute anything about the first person indeterminacy, I don't know what indeterminacy you're talking about. LizR may not be able to predict what LizR sees next, but as far as personal identity is concerned that is irrelevant because whatever LizR sees LizR will still feel like LizR. You were kind enough to let the list know, along with Chris Peck, that the flaw in the reasoning concerning step 3 of the UDA is it sucks. Unless you guys backtrack and quit abusing the fact that Bruno's politeness and dedication to critical debate puts him in default mode of taking your points seriously and granting you the benefit of the doubt that you would not in the faintest be inclined to grant in return, these discussions are a one way street into brick walls with you suck infantile graffiti sprayed on them at the end. So unless you can state something more substantial than teenage insults and ruses á la I don't understand THIS AND THAT!!! or the more passive but nonetheless authoritative you're confusing first/third person, everything is first person etc. , I submit you guys are trolling and wasting time on this. Either be open for genuine discussion and finding of flaws or this is pointless as it does a disservice to the readers of this list. It is not difficult to see that refuting computationalism in this form, would be a major result. Your aspirations are lofty gentlemen, but they don't jibe with the infantilization and the mockery masking itself as poised discourse and clear debate. PGC 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. -- 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: A challenge for Craig
On Thursday, October 3, 2013 9:30:13 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: I think that evil continues to flourish, precisely because science has not integrated privacy into an authoritative worldview. As long as subjectivity remains the primary concern of most ordinary people, any view that denies or diminishes it will be held at arms length. I think it secretly erodes support for all forms of progress and inspires fundamentalist politics as well. I agree. Taking privacy literally, this is in fact one of the most creepy consequences of total surveillance: denial of privacy is, in a sense, a denial of the right to existence. Can one truly exist as a human being as an undistinguishable part of some mass? No secrets, no mysteries, what you see is what you get to the extreme. This sounds like hell. Right. I think that it is no coincidence that the major concerns of ubiquitous computing revolve around privacy, propreity, and security. Computers don't know what privacy is, they don't know who we are, and they can't care who owns what. That's all part of private physics and computers can only exploit the lowest common denominator of privacy - that level which refers only to itself as a digitally quantified object. Once we have a worldview which makes sense of all phenomena and experience, even the mystical and personal, then we can move forward in a more mature and sensible way. Right now, what is being offered is 'you can know the truth about the universe, but only if you agree that you aren't really part of it'. I believe more than this is being offered in this mailing list. I feel your objections apply mostly to mainstream views, and to that degree I agree with you. I agree, I wasn't really talking about specialized groups like this. Why would MWI or evolution place a high value on leadership or success? It seems just the opposite. What difference does it make if you succeed here and now, if you implicitly fail elsewhere? MWI doesn't seem to describe any universe that could ever matter to anyone. It's the Occam's catastrophe factor. Highly speculative and non-rigorous: You can see it differently if you can assume self-sampling. Let's assume everything is conscious, even rocks. A rock is so simple that, for it, a millennia probably feels like a second. It does not contain a variety of conscious states like humans do. Then, you would expect to find yourself as a complex being. Certain branches of the multiverse contain such complex beings, and this would make evolution appear more effective/purposeful than it really is, from the vantage point of these branches. Even so, why would uniqueness or firstness be of value in a universe based on such immense and inescapable redundancy as MWI suggests? Thanks, Craig Cheers, Telmo. -- 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: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 4 October 2013 05:59, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 , LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: What question about personal identity is indeterminate? There is a 100% chance that the Helsinki man will turn into the Moscow man because the Helsinki Man saw Moscow, and a 100% chance the Helsinki Man will turn into the Washington Man because the Helsinki Man saw Washington, and a 100% chance that the first person view of the Helsinki Man will be a view ONLY of Helsinki because otherwise the first person view of the Helsinki Man would not be the first person view of the Helsinki man. This is uncontraversially, one might say trivially correct, I would have thought so too, but however trivial it may be for reasons I don't understand most on this list are unable to grasp this simple truth. but it doesn't refute anything about the first person indeterminacy, I don't know what indeterminacy you're talking about. LizR may not be able to predict what LizR sees next, but as far as personal identity is concerned that is irrelevant because whatever LizR sees LizR will still feel like LizR. Sorry, I'm using indeterminacy because that's the term that was first introduced into quantum mechanics when it was believed that's what it was, and which I guess is still used even though if the MWI is correct it isn't the right word (for the subject the comp teleporter is directly parallel to MWI splitting, though it might in practice operate at a different level). However you can't call it uncertainty either - if you're being strictly accurate, you can only call it something like global determinism which gives the false appearance of first person indeterminacy / uncertainty / probability / whatever ! Bruno calls it first person indeterminacy and I can see why he uses that term. From the point of view of Moscow man, say, it appears (retrospectively, at least) that he had a 50-50 chance of going to either place. And for an experimenter it would appear that a photon has a 50-50 chance of being transmitted or reflected, especially after multiple measurements, and they might also still call that indeterminacy / uncertainty / probability / whatever even if they believe the MWI to be the correct interpretation of QM. As I said, this is just a semantic quibble. All Bruno is showing in step 3 is that *if *consciousness is a computation, *then* in principle it could be treated as we already treat other digital processes - forking into two separate address spaces is, I think, the computational parallel for the teleporter. As I said earlier, if you imagine consciousness instantiated in a computer (as according to comp it could be) then it will perhap be clearer what's going on. Personally I can't see any problem with step 3, given the assumptions. I certainly can't see why you couldn't teleport HAL9000 via radio waves to two separate spaceships. -- 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: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 4 October 2013 06:28, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.comwrote: You were kind enough to let the list know, along with Chris Peck, that the flaw in the reasoning concerning step 3 of the UDA is it sucks. Unless you guys backtrack and quit abusing the fact that Bruno's politeness and dedication to critical debate puts him in default mode of taking your points seriously and granting you the benefit of the doubt that you would not in the faintest be inclined to grant in return, these discussions are a one way street into brick walls with you suck infantile graffiti sprayed on them at the end. So unless you can state something more substantial than teenage insults and ruses á la I don't understand THIS AND THAT!!! or the more passive but nonetheless authoritative you're confusing first/third person, everything is first person etc. , I submit you guys are trolling and wasting time on this. Either be open for genuine discussion and finding of flaws or this is pointless as it does a disservice to the readers of this list. It is not difficult to see that refuting computationalism in this form, would be a major result. Your aspirations are lofty gentlemen, but they don't jibe with the infantilization and the mockery masking itself as poised discourse and clear debate. PGC I would like to frame this post and bring it whenever necessary :) In fact I will keep a copy, just in case it's ever needed again. Thank you, PGC. -- 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: The confluence of cosmology and biology
Does anyone know any phenomena in nature or science that duplicates
the behavior of Cellular Automata? Does cell biology do the tasks of
CA, orbis this merely, a mathematical abstraction? Does anything in
physics come to mind, when refering to CA?
-Original Message-
From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be
To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wed, Oct 2, 2013 10:18 am
Subject: Re: The confluence of cosmology and biology
On 02 Oct 2013, at 03:56, Russell Standish wrote:
On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 02:54:51PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 01 Oct 2013, at 01:30, Russell Standish wrote:
The real universe is likely to be 11 dimensional, nonlocal with
around
10^{122} states, or 2^{10^{122}} possible universes, if indeed it
is a
CA at all. Needles in haystacks is a walk in the park by comparison.
CA are local. The universe cannot be a CA if comp is correct, and
the empirical violation of Bell's inequality confirms this comp
feature.
Bruno
There is no particular requirement for CAs to be local, although local
CAs are by far easier to study than nonlocal ones, so in practice they
usually are (cue obligatory lamp post analogy).
We can easily conceive quantum CA.
But those are not what is named simply CA (which locality is quite
typical).
You will not find quantum CA in Wolfram (well, in my edition).
Unless you mean something else by locality. I mean that there is some
neighbourhood radius such that the update function for a given cell
only access the states of cells within the given radius.
Having said that - I notice that Wikipedia, Wolfram.com and also Andy
Wuensche's article on Discrete Dynamical Networks
(http://www.complexity.org.au/ci/vol06/wuensche/) all state that the
update function must be local in the manner described above in their
definitions of cellular automata. In which case, you are correct.
OK.
I am clearly taking about a more general subset of discrete dynamical
networks in which the cells are still tiling an n-dimensional space,
but that the update function does not depend on a local neighbourhood
of the cell to be updated.
Better not to call them CA, but quantum CA, or why not comp-CA, as
comp entails non locality, non cloning, indeterminacy, etc.
I don't know what Wolfram was talking about though - I just assumed he
wouldn't be thinking in terms of local update functions for his CA of
the universe.
Alas, that is what he does, or did.
At the time he wrote his books, he put all the QM weirdness under the
rug. He said that if non-locality is a real consequence of QM, it
means that QM is false.
There are just very few people who grasp those three things at once:
- the mind-body problem
- the conceptual QM astonishing features (non locality, non cloning,
indeterminacy, etc)
- Church thesis and the non triviality of the discovery of the
universal machine and its fundamental creative limitations.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Re: The confluence of cosmology and biology
On 4 October 2013 10:38, spudboy...@aol.com wrote: Does anyone know any phenomena in nature or science that duplicates the behavior of Cellular Automata? Does cell biology do the tasks of CA, orbis this merely, a mathematical abstraction? Does anything in physics come to mind, when refering to CA? I think some chemical reactions are similar? (By the way I love the orbis - immediately made me think of Borges - but I'm guessing it was just a typo :) -- 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: What gives philosophers a bad name?
Hi Liz / pgc If I have been abusive to you or Bruno then I apologize without hesitation. If you would show where I have been abusive though I would appreciate that, because at the moment I regard the suggestion as low and mean spirited. I have made my points and been misrepresented, misunderstood and disagreed with. I have clarified as far as I could. No doubt I have misrepresented and misunderstood people in return. In what way is that out of the ordinary in debate? In what way is that a disservice to anyone? The points under debate may seem obvious to you, well I apologise for my stupidity but they are not obvious to me. I find it stunning that people find anything in the realm of theoretical physics remotely obvious. Bruno should be happy that people are still reading his papers. What more respect can anyone give him? I do not follow his argument. I do not follow his or your attempts to clarify them. I see flaws in what you say. Does that really insult you? --- Original Message --- From: LizR lizj...@gmail.com Sent: 4 October 2013 7:20 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com, Charles Goodwin charlesrobertgood...@gmail.com Subject: Re: What gives philosophers a bad name? On 4 October 2013 06:28, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.comwrote: You were kind enough to let the list know, along with Chris Peck, that the flaw in the reasoning concerning step 3 of the UDA is it sucks. Unless you guys backtrack and quit abusing the fact that Bruno's politeness and dedication to critical debate puts him in default mode of taking your points seriously and granting you the benefit of the doubt that you would not in the faintest be inclined to grant in return, these discussions are a one way street into brick walls with you suck infantile graffiti sprayed on them at the end. So unless you can state something more substantial than teenage insults and ruses á la I don't understand THIS AND THAT!!! or the more passive but nonetheless authoritative you're confusing first/third person, everything is first person etc. , I submit you guys are trolling and wasting time on this. Either be open for genuine discussion and finding of flaws or this is pointless as it does a disservice to the readers of this list. It is not difficult to see that refuting computationalism in this form, would be a major result. Your aspirations are lofty gentlemen, but they don't jibe with the infantilization and the mockery masking itself as poised discourse and clear debate. PGC I would like to frame this post and bring it whenever necessary :) In fact I will keep a copy, just in case it's ever needed again. Thank you, PGC. -- 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: A challenge for Craig
On Friday, October 4, 2013 4:10:02 AM UTC+10, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, October 3, 2013 9:30:13 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: I think that evil continues to flourish, precisely because science has not integrated privacy into an authoritative worldview. As long as subjectivity remains the primary concern of most ordinary people, any view that denies or diminishes it will be held at arms length. I think it secretly erodes support for all forms of progress and inspires fundamentalist politics as well. I agree. Taking privacy literally, this is in fact one of the most creepy consequences of total surveillance: denial of privacy is, in a sense, a denial of the right to existence. Can one truly exist as a human being as an undistinguishable part of some mass? No secrets, no mysteries, what you see is what you get to the extreme. This sounds like hell. Right. I think that it is no coincidence that the major concerns of ubiquitous computing revolve around privacy, propreity, and security. Computers don't know what privacy is, they don't know who we are, and they can't care who owns what. That's all part of private physics and computers can only exploit the lowest common denominator of privacy - that level which refers only to itself as a digitally quantified object. Once we have a worldview which makes sense of all phenomena and experience, even the mystical and personal, then we can move forward in a more mature and sensible way. Right now, what is being offered is 'you can know the truth about the universe, but only if you agree that you aren't really part of it'. I believe more than this is being offered in this mailing list. I feel your objections apply mostly to mainstream views, and to that degree I agree with you. I agree, I wasn't really talking about specialized groups like this. Why would MWI or evolution place a high value on leadership or success? It seems just the opposite. What difference does it make if you succeed here and now, if you implicitly fail elsewhere? MWI doesn't seem to describe any universe that could ever matter to anyone. It's the Occam's catastrophe factor. Highly speculative and non-rigorous: You can see it differently if you can assume self-sampling. Let's assume everything is conscious, even rocks. A rock is so simple that, for it, a millennia probably feels like a second. It does not contain a variety of conscious states like humans do. Then, you would expect to find yourself as a complex being. Certain branches of the multiverse contain such complex beings, and this would make evolution appear more effective/purposeful than it really is, from the vantage point of these branches. Even so, why would uniqueness or firstness be of value in a universe based on such immense and inescapable redundancy as MWI suggests? The universe doesn't seem to be too fussed about immense and inescapable redundancy. Have you noticed all the *space* out there?? The progress of scientific knowledge has proceeded so far in the same direction: the revelation of a context ever vaster and more impersonal. MWI does strike me as quite horrifying too. But that is based on a false perspective in which one imagine occupying all the branches of the universe and feels naturally appalled. But nobody experiences the multiverse as such thank god. As for what has value, again that is a matter for the first person perspective, the limited horizon of thoughts and feelings of the individual. From the god's eye view, any individual entity is utterly insignificant. You can't look to a cosmological theory for validation of personal significance. You're posing the same argument against MWI as Christians posed against Darwinism and before that the Copernican revolution. What is *my*significance in this picture of the world? Well sorry bud, but the news ain't good... Thanks, Craig Cheers, Telmo. -- 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: A challenge for Craig
On Thursday, October 3, 2013 4:59:17 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 10/1/2013 11:49 PM, Pierz wrote: On Wednesday, October 2, 2013 3:15:01 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 10/1/2013 9:56 PM, Pierz wrote: Yes, I understand that to be Chalmer's main point. Although, if the qualia can be different, it does present issues - how much and in what way can it vary? Yes, that's a question that interests me because I want to be able to build intelligent machines and so I need to know what qualia they will have, if any. I think it will depend on their sensors and on their values/goals. If I build a very intelligent Mars Rover, capable of learning and reasoning, with a goal of discovering whether there was once life on Mars; then I expect it will experience pleasure in finding evidence regarding this. But no matter how smart I make it, it won't experience lust. Reasoning being what exactly? The ability to circumnavigate an obstacle for instance? There are no rewards in an algorithm. There are just paths which do or don't get followed depending on inputs. Sure, the argument that there must be qualia in a sufficiently sophisticated computer seems compelling. But the argument that there can't be seems equally so. As a programmer I have zero expectation that the computer I am programming will feel pleasure or suffering. It's just as happy to throw an exception as it is to complete its assigned task. *I* am the one who experiences pain when it hits an error! I just can't conceive of the magical point at which the computer goes from total indifference to giving a damn. That's the point Craig keeps pushing and which I agree with. Something is missing from our understanding. What's missing is you're considering a computer, not a robot. As robot has to have values and goals in order to act and react in the world. It has complex systems and subsystems that may have conflicting subgoals, and in order to learn from experience it keeps a narrative history about what it considers significant events. At that level it may have the consciousness of a mouse. If it's a social robot, one that needs to cooperate and compete in a society of other persons, then it will need a self-image and model of other people. In that case it's quite reasonable to suppose it also has qualia. Really? You believe that a robot can experience qualia but a computer can't? Well that just makes no sense at all. A robot is a computer with peripherals. When I write the code to represent its self image, I will probably write a class called Self. But once compiled, the name of the class will be just another string of bits, and only the programmer will understand that it is supposed to represent the position, attitude and other states of the physical robot. Do the peripherals need to be real or can they just be simulated? Does a brain in a Futurama-style jar lose its qualia because it's now a computer not a robot? Come on. I'm curious what the literature has to say about that. And if functionalism means reproducing more than the mere functional output of a system, if it potentially means replication down to the elementary particles and possibly their quantum entanglements, then duplication becomes impossible, not merely technically but in principle. That seems against the whole point of functionalism - as the idea of function is reduced to something almost meaningless. I think functionalism must be confined to the classical functions, discounting the quantum level effects. But it must include some behavior that is almost entirely internal - e.g. planning, imagining. Excluding quantum entanglements isn't arbitrary; there cannot have been any evolution of goals and values based on quantum entanglement (beyond the statistical effects that produce decoherence and quasi-classical behavior). But what do planning and imagining mean except their functional outputs? It shouldn't matter to you how the planning occurs - it's an implementation detail in development speak. You can ask a person about plans and imaginings, and speech in response is an action. Your argument may be valid regarding quantum entanglement, but it is still an argument based on what seems to make sense rather than on genuine understanding of the relationship between functions and their putative qualia. But I suspect that there is no understanding that would satisfy Craig as genuine. Do we have a genuine understanding of electrodynamics? of computation? What we have is the ability to manipulate them for our purposes. So when we can make an intelligent robot that interacts with people AS IF it experiences qualia and we can manipulate and anticipate that behavior, then we'll have just as genuine an understanding of qualia as we do of electrodynamics. Well if my daughter has a doll that cries until it's
Re: A challenge for Craig
On 3 October 2013 10:33, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 10/2/2013 5:15 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On 1 October 2013 23:31, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: Maybe. It would be a lot more profound if we definitely *could* reproduce the brain's behaviour. The devil is in the detail as they say. But a challenge to Chalmer's position has occurred to me. It seems to me that Bruno has convincingly argued that *if* comp holds, then consciousness supervenes on the computation, not on the physical matter. When I say comp holds I mean in the first instance that my physical brain could be replaced with an appropriate computer and I would still be me. But this assumption leads to the conclusion that the computer is not actually needed, just the computation as platonic object. But what if you were just slightly different or different only in some rare circumstances (like being in an MRI), which seems very likely? If the replacement were slightly different then under particular circumstances the consciousness would be different. It's like any other prosthesis that might function well in most situations but fail if pushed beyond a certain limit. So if it's true that my brain could be replaced with a physical computer then my brain and the computer were not physical in a fundamental sense in the first place! But this depends on the MGA or Olympia argument, which find suspect. Yes, but the point I wanted to make was that the case for functionalism is not destroyed even if this argument is valid. While this is circular-sounding I don't think that it's actually contradictory. It is not a necessary premise of Chalmer's argument (or indeed, for most scientific arguments) that there be a fundamental physical reality. As for reproducing the brain's behaviour, it comes down to whether brain physics is computable. It probably *is* computable, since we have not found evidence of non-computable physics of which I am aware. Suppose it was not Turing computable, but was computable in some other sense (e.g. hypercomputable). Aren't you just setting up a tautology in which whatever the brain does, whatever the universe does, we'll call it X-computable. Already we have one good model of the universe, Copenhagen QM, that says it's not Turing computable. I think the usual meaning of computable is Turing computable. If it is not, then computationalism is false. But even if computationalism is false, Chalmer's argument still shows that *functionalism* is true. Computationalism is a subset of functionalism. But functionalism suggests that what counts is the output, not the manner in which it as arrived at. That is to say, the brain or whatever neural subunit or computer is doing the processing is a black box. You input something and then read the output, but the intervening steps don't matter. Consider what this might mean in terms of a brain. Let's say a vastly advanced alien species comes to earth. It looks at our puny little brains and decides to make one to fool us. This constructed person/brain receives normal conversational input and outputs conversation that it knows will perfectly mimic a human being. But in fact the computer doing this processing is vastly superior to the human brain. It's like a modern PC emulating a TRS-80, except much more so. When it computes/thinks up a response, it draws on a vast amount of knowledge, intelligence and creativity and accesses qualia undreamed of by a human. Yet its response will completely fool any normal human and will pass Turing tests till the cows come home. What this thought experiment shows is that, while half-qualia may be absurd, it most certainly is possible to reproduce the outputs of a brain without replicating its qualia. It might have completely different qualia, just as a very good actor's emotions can't be distinguished from the real thing, even though his or her internal experience is quite different. And if qualia can be quite different even though the functional outputs are the same, this does seem to leave functionalism in something of a quandary. All we can say is that there must be some kind of qualia occurring, rather a different result from what Chalmers is claiming. When we extend this type of scenario to artificial neurons or partial brain prostheses as in Chamer's paper, we quickly run up against perplexing problems. Imagine the advanced alien provides these prostheses. It takes the same inputs and generates the same correct outputs, but it processes those inputs within a much vaster, more complex system. Does the brain utilizing this advanced prosthesis experience a kind of expanded consciousness because of this, without that difference being detectable? Or do the qualia remain somehow confined to the prosthesis (whatever that means)? These crazy quandaries suggest to me that basically, we don't know shit. Essentially, I think that if the alien computer reproduces human
Re: A challenge for Craig
On Thursday, October 3, 2013 7:36:10 PM UTC-4, Pierz wrote: On Friday, October 4, 2013 4:10:02 AM UTC+10, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, October 3, 2013 9:30:13 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: I think that evil continues to flourish, precisely because science has not integrated privacy into an authoritative worldview. As long as subjectivity remains the primary concern of most ordinary people, any view that denies or diminishes it will be held at arms length. I think it secretly erodes support for all forms of progress and inspires fundamentalist politics as well. I agree. Taking privacy literally, this is in fact one of the most creepy consequences of total surveillance: denial of privacy is, in a sense, a denial of the right to existence. Can one truly exist as a human being as an undistinguishable part of some mass? No secrets, no mysteries, what you see is what you get to the extreme. This sounds like hell. Right. I think that it is no coincidence that the major concerns of ubiquitous computing revolve around privacy, propreity, and security. Computers don't know what privacy is, they don't know who we are, and they can't care who owns what. That's all part of private physics and computers can only exploit the lowest common denominator of privacy - that level which refers only to itself as a digitally quantified object. Once we have a worldview which makes sense of all phenomena and experience, even the mystical and personal, then we can move forward in a more mature and sensible way. Right now, what is being offered is 'you can know the truth about the universe, but only if you agree that you aren't really part of it'. I believe more than this is being offered in this mailing list. I feel your objections apply mostly to mainstream views, and to that degree I agree with you. I agree, I wasn't really talking about specialized groups like this. Why would MWI or evolution place a high value on leadership or success? It seems just the opposite. What difference does it make if you succeed here and now, if you implicitly fail elsewhere? MWI doesn't seem to describe any universe that could ever matter to anyone. It's the Occam's catastrophe factor. Highly speculative and non-rigorous: You can see it differently if you can assume self-sampling. Let's assume everything is conscious, even rocks. A rock is so simple that, for it, a millennia probably feels like a second. It does not contain a variety of conscious states like humans do. Then, you would expect to find yourself as a complex being. Certain branches of the multiverse contain such complex beings, and this would make evolution appear more effective/purposeful than it really is, from the vantage point of these branches. Even so, why would uniqueness or firstness be of value in a universe based on such immense and inescapable redundancy as MWI suggests? The universe doesn't seem to be too fussed about immense and inescapable redundancy. Have you noticed all the *space* out there?? Sure, there's a ridiculous amount of most things, but even so, the idea that every step that every boson or fermion needs its own collection of universes for every interaction it has seems to be really bending over backward. It seems to me like an excuse for your teacher I need to be excused from having to explain the universe, because the universe could just be one of a fantastic number of universes being created constantly, none of which I can explain either. The progress of scientific knowledge has proceeded so far in the same direction: the revelation of a context ever vaster and more impersonal. Statistically that pattern is no more likely to continue than it is to be reversed. I think that Relativity gave us the chance to reverse, but since that time we have overshot the mark and pursued a path of unrealism and arithmetic supremacy that has already become dysfunctional but we are in denial about it. MWI does strike me as quite horrifying too. But that is based on a false perspective in which one imagine occupying all the branches of the universe and feels naturally appalled. But nobody experiences the multiverse as such thank god. In my understanding, if nobody can ever experience the multiverse, then the multiverse is identical to that which can never exist. The idea of a context which simply 'is' without being described as an experience is just the default image of a God that is inverted to become the Absolute object. It's a confirmation bias rooted in how soothing it is for us to imagine that there is a reliable universal machine which we can learn to exist within using intelligence. As for what has value, again that is a matter for the first person perspective, the limited horizon
Re: The confluence of cosmology and biology
There are plenty of examples, but it will take too long to extract the
literature. For example, the Navier-Stokes equations describing fluid
flow can be simulated via an appropriate hex tiling (close packed
spheres) CA (or generalised CA). I've seen people give examples of CAs
simulating the reaction-diffusion equations that Turing used for his
famous morphogenesis study.
Cheers
On Thu, Oct 03, 2013 at 05:38:45PM -0400, spudboy...@aol.com wrote:
Does anyone know any phenomena in nature or science that duplicates
the behavior of Cellular Automata? Does cell biology do the tasks
of CA, orbis this merely, a mathematical abstraction? Does anything
in physics come to mind, when refering to CA?
-Original Message-
From: Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be
To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wed, Oct 2, 2013 10:18 am
Subject: Re: The confluence of cosmology and biology
On 02 Oct 2013, at 03:56, Russell Standish wrote:
On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 02:54:51PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 01 Oct 2013, at 01:30, Russell Standish wrote:
The real universe is likely to be 11 dimensional, nonlocal with
around
10^{122} states, or 2^{10^{122}} possible universes, if indeed it
is a
CA at all. Needles in haystacks is a walk in the park by comparison.
CA are local. The universe cannot be a CA if comp is correct, and
the empirical violation of Bell's inequality confirms this comp
feature.
Bruno
There is no particular requirement for CAs to be local, although local
CAs are by far easier to study than nonlocal ones, so in practice they
usually are (cue obligatory lamp post analogy).
We can easily conceive quantum CA.
But those are not what is named simply CA (which locality is quite
typical).
You will not find quantum CA in Wolfram (well, in my edition).
Unless you mean something else by locality. I mean that there is some
neighbourhood radius such that the update function for a given cell
only access the states of cells within the given radius.
Having said that - I notice that Wikipedia, Wolfram.com and also Andy
Wuensche's article on Discrete Dynamical Networks
(http://www.complexity.org.au/ci/vol06/wuensche/) all state that the
update function must be local in the manner described above in their
definitions of cellular automata. In which case, you are correct.
OK.
I am clearly taking about a more general subset of discrete dynamical
networks in which the cells are still tiling an n-dimensional space,
but that the update function does not depend on a local neighbourhood
of the cell to be updated.
Better not to call them CA, but quantum CA, or why not comp-CA, as
comp entails non locality, non cloning, indeterminacy, etc.
I don't know what Wolfram was talking about though - I just assumed he
wouldn't be thinking in terms of local update functions for his CA of
the universe.
Alas, that is what he does, or did.
At the time he wrote his books, he put all the QM weirdness under the
rug. He said that if non-locality is a real consequence of QM, it
means that QM is false.
There are just very few people who grasp those three things at once:
- the mind-body problem
- the conceptual QM astonishing features (non locality, non cloning,
indeterminacy, etc)
- Church thesis and the non triviality of the discovery of the
universal machine and its fundamental creative limitations.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
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Re: A challenge for Craig
On 3 October 2013 14:40, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: The argument is simply summarised thus: it is impossible even for God to make a brain prosthesis that reproduces the I/O behaviour but has different qualia. This is a proof of comp, provided that brain physics is computable, or functionalism if brain physics is not computable. Non-comp functionalism may entail, for example, that the replacement brain contain a hypercomputer. It's like saying that if the same rent is paid for every apartment in the same building, then the same person must be living there, and that proves that rent payments are people. The hypothesis is that if we replicate the rent then we necessarily replicate the people. But we can think of an experiment where the rent is replicated but the person is not replicated - there is no contradiction here. However, if we can replicate the I/O behaviour of the neurons but not the associated qualia there is a contradiction, since that would allow partial zombies, which you have agreed are absurd. Therefore, it is impossible to replicate the I/O behaviour of the neurons without replicating the qualia. To refute this, you either have to show that 1) replicating the I/O behaviour of the neurons without replicating the qualia does not lead to partial zombies, or 2) that partial zombies are not absurd. A partial zombie is a person whose qualia change, for example he becomes blind, but his behaviour does not change and he does not notice that his qualia change. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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: A challenge for Craig
On 10/3/2013 4:36 PM, Pierz wrote: The universe doesn't seem to be too fussed about immense and inescapable redundancy. Of course the universe doesn't care when the immense and inescapable redundancy is in our model of it. 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: A challenge for Craig
On 10/3/2013 5:07 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: You seem to be agreeing with Craig that each neuron alone is conscious. The experiment relates to replacement of neurons which play some part in consciousness. The 1% remaining neurons are part of a system which will notice that the qualia are different. That assumes that 1% are sufficient to remember all the prior qualia with enough fidelity to notice they are different. 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: A challenge for Craig
On 10/3/2013 4:53 PM, Pierz wrote: On Thursday, October 3, 2013 4:59:17 AM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 10/1/2013 11:49 PM, Pierz wrote: On Wednesday, October 2, 2013 3:15:01 PM UTC+10, Brent wrote: On 10/1/2013 9:56 PM, Pierz wrote: Yes, I understand that to be Chalmer's main point. Although, if the qualia can be different, it does present issues - how much and in what way can it vary? Yes, that's a question that interests me because I want to be able to build intelligent machines and so I need to know what qualia they will have, if any. I think it will depend on their sensors and on their values/goals. If I build a very intelligent Mars Rover, capable of learning and reasoning, with a goal of discovering whether there was once life on Mars; then I expect it will experience pleasure in finding evidence regarding this. But no matter how smart I make it, it won't experience lust. Reasoning being what exactly? The ability to circumnavigate an obstacle for instance? There are no rewards in an algorithm. There are just paths which do or don't get followed depending on inputs. Sure, the argument that there must be qualia in a sufficiently sophisticated computer seems compelling. But the argument that there can't be seems equally so. As a programmer I have zero expectation that the computer I am programming will feel pleasure or suffering. It's just as happy to throw an exception as it is to complete its assigned task. *I* am the one who experiences pain when it hits an error! I just can't conceive of the magical point at which the computer goes from total indifference to giving a damn. That's the point Craig keeps pushing and which I agree with. Something is missing from our understanding. What's missing is you're considering a computer, not a robot. As robot has to have values and goals in order to act and react in the world. It has complex systems and subsystems that may have conflicting subgoals, and in order to learn from experience it keeps a narrative history about what it considers significant events. At that level it may have the consciousness of a mouse. If it's a social robot, one that needs to cooperate and compete in a society of other persons, then it will need a self-image and model of other people. In that case it's quite reasonable to suppose it also has qualia. Really? You believe that a robot can experience qualia but a computer can't? Well that just makes no sense at all. A robot is a computer with peripherals. When I write the code to represent its self image, I will probably write a class called Self. But once compiled, the name of the class will be just another string of bits, and only the programmer will understand that it is supposed to represent the position, attitude and other states of the physical robot. But does the robot understand the class; i.e. does it use it in it's planning and modeling of actions, in learning, does it reason about itself. Sure it's not enough to just label something self - it has to be something represented just as the robot represents the world in order to interact successfully. Do the peripherals need to be real or can they just be simulated? They can be simulated if they only have to interact with a simulated world. Brent Does a brain in a Futurama-style jar lose its qualia because it's now a computer not a robot? Come on. I'm curious what the literature has to say about that. And if functionalism means reproducing more than the mere functional output of a system, if it potentially means replication down to the elementary particles and possibly their quantum entanglements, then duplication becomes impossible, not merely technically but in principle. That seems against the whole point of functionalism - as the idea of function is reduced to something almost meaningless. I think functionalism must be confined to the classical functions, discounting the quantum level effects. But it must include some behavior that is almost entirely internal - e.g. planning, imagining. Excluding quantum entanglements isn't arbitrary; there cannot have been any evolution of goals and values based on quantum entanglement (beyond the statistical effects that produce decoherence and quasi-classical behavior). But what do planning and imagining mean except their functional outputs? It shouldn't matter to you how the planning occurs - it's an implementation detail in development speak. You can ask a person about plans and imaginings, and speech in response is an action. Your argument may be valid regarding quantum
Re: What gives philosophers a bad name?
On 4 October 2013 11:56, chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Liz / pgc If I have been abusive to you or Bruno then I apologize without hesitation. If you would show where I have been abusive though I would appreciate that, because at the moment I regard the suggestion as low and mean spirited. I have made my points and been misrepresented, misunderstood and disagreed with. I have clarified as far as I could. No doubt I have misrepresented and misunderstood people in return. In what way is that out of the ordinary in debate? In what way is that a disservice to anyone? The points under debate may seem obvious to you, well I apologise for my stupidity but they are not obvious to me. I find it stunning that people find anything in the realm of theoretical physics remotely obvious. Bruno should be happy that people are still reading his papers. What more respect can anyone give him? I do not follow his argument. I do not follow his or your attempts to clarify them. I see flaws in what you say. Does that really insult you? Not at all, but whoever it was who said something like step 3 sucks *was*being rude. However I apologise if I went overboard - when I said I intended to cut out keep PGC's post I didn't mean specifically for you (or specifically for anyone) - it was just the sort of thing that seems to need to be said occasionally on most forums, so having a well-written version to hand struck me as a good idea. It might come in handy on FOAR next time a certain person starts being rude, for example (and this is someone who really *can* be very rude, even though it's a philosophical / scientific discussion forum!) Having cleared the air, could you point out those flaws you mentioned? I don't know if it helps, but I recently tried to clarify matters by pointing out that if we assume comp, then it is theoretically possible to create an AI, and that Bruno's thought experiments could be carried out on an AI without any of the objections that people automatically apply to human beings, which might make it easier to think about. Also, the physical mechanisms involved would definitely *not* require that we worry about the no-cloning theorem (or whatever), because an AI would just be a huge computer programme, no doubt far more bytes than you could shake a current technology disc drive at, but subject to the same principles. -- 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.
