subject:"Intelligence and consciousness"

On Feb 7, 3:08 pm, Quentin Anciaux  wrote:
> 2012/2/7 Craig Weinberg 
>
> > On Feb 6, 11:30 am, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
>
> > > More seriously, in the chinese room experience, Searle's error can be
> > > seen also as a confusion of level. If I can emulate Einstein brain,
> > > "I" can answer all question you ask to Einstein,
>
> > You're assuming that a brain can be emulated in the first place. If
> > that were true, there is no need to have the thought experiment.
>
> You're assuming that a brain can't be emulated in the first place. If that
> were true, there is no need to have the thought experiment.
>
> Stupid thought, stupid conclusion Craig Weinberg as usual.

I'm not assuming that it can't be emulated, I am only assuming an
appropriately skeptical stance - especially since brain emulation has
never occurred in reality. I say that it is not proven that brains can
be emulated, that's all. If the refutation of the Chinese Room is
contingent upon the assumption that brains can be emulated than it's a
religious faith.

My point is that the Chinese Room doesn't require a belief or
disbelief in brain emulation, it only demonstrates the difference
between trivial computation and personal understanding...something
which comp is in pathological denial of.

Craig

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

On Feb 7, 1:41 pm, John Clark  wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 7, 2012  Craig Weinberg  wrote:
>
> > If you are proving that a computer in the position of the man has no
> > understanding then this thought experiment proves it.
>
> How in hell would putting a computer in the position of the man prove
> anything??

Because that is the position a computer is in when it runs a program
based on user inputs and outputs. The man in the room is a CPU.

> The man is just a very very very small part of the Chinese Room,

He and the rule book are the only parts that are relevant to strong
AI.

> all Searle proved is that a tiny part of a system does not have all the
> properties the entire system has. Well duh, the neurotransmitter
> acetylcholine is part of the human brain and would not work without it, but
> acetylcholine does not have all the properties that the entire human brain
> has either.

You are assuming a part/whole relationship rather than form/content
relationship.

>
> > It takes consciousness for granted, like some free floating glow.
>
> Oh now I see the light, literally, consciousness is like some free floating
> glow! Now I understand everything!

Yes, that would solve your problem completely. The rule book and the
man glow a little, and together they make the whole room glow much
more.

>
> > If I understand how to cook and then I walk into a building, does the
> > building, now that it includes me, now know how to cook?
>
> If you didn't know how to cook, if you didn't even know how to boil water
> but the building was now employed at 4 star restaurants preparing delicious
> meals then certainly the building knows how to cook, and you must be a very
> small cog in that operation.

I guess you are talking about a universe where buildings work at
restaurants or something.

>
> > Searle is assuming the common sense of the audience to show them that
> > having a conversation in a language you don't understand cannot constitute
> > understanding
>
> I am having a conversation right now and acetylcholine is in your brain but
> acetylcholine does not understand English, so I am having a conversation in
> English with somebody who does not understand English. Foolish reasoning is
> it not.

Again, you assume a part/whole relation rather than a form/content
relation. A story is not made of pages in a book, it is an experience
which is made possible through the understanding of the symbolic
content of the pages. Anyone can copy the words from one book to
another, or give instructions of which sections of what book to excise
and reproduce, but it doesn't make them a storyteller.

>
> > The organization of my kitchen sink does not change with the temperature
> > of the water coming out of the faucet.
>
> Glad to hear it, now I know who to ask when I need plumbing advice.

Couldn't think of a legitimate counterpoint?

Craig

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-07 Thread Quentin Anciaux

2012/2/7 Craig Weinberg 

> On Feb 6, 11:30 am, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
>
> > More seriously, in the chinese room experience, Searle's error can be
> > seen also as a confusion of level. If I can emulate Einstein brain,
> > "I" can answer all question you ask to Einstein,
>
> You're assuming that a brain can be emulated in the first place. If
> that were true, there is no need to have the thought experiment.
>

You're assuming that a brain can't be emulated in the first place. If that
were true, there is no need to have the thought experiment.

Stupid thought, stupid conclusion Craig Weinberg as usual.


>
> > but the trick is that
> > I emulate Einstein himself, and I provide the answer that Einstein
> > answers me (and I guess I will have to make some work to understand
> > them, or not).
>
> It still doesn't make you Einstein, which is Searle's point.
>
> Craig
>
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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-07 Thread John Clark

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012  Craig Weinberg  wrote:

> If you are proving that a computer in the position of the man has no
> understanding then this thought experiment proves it.
>

How in hell would putting a computer in the position of the man prove
anything?? The man is just a very very very small part of the Chinese Room,
all Searle proved is that a tiny part of a system does not have all the
properties the entire system has. Well duh, the neurotransmitter
acetylcholine is part of the human brain and would not work without it, but
acetylcholine does not have all the properties that the entire human brain
has either.

> It takes consciousness for granted, like some free floating glow.
>

Oh now I see the light, literally, consciousness is like some free floating
glow! Now I understand everything!

> If I understand how to cook and then I walk into a building, does the
> building, now that it includes me, now know how to cook?
>

If you didn't know how to cook, if you didn't even know how to boil water
but the building was now employed at 4 star restaurants preparing delicious
meals then certainly the building knows how to cook, and you must be a very
small cog in that operation.

> Searle is assuming the common sense of the audience to show them that
> having a conversation in a language you don't understand cannot constitute
> understanding
>

I am having a conversation right now and acetylcholine is in your brain but
acetylcholine does not understand English, so I am having a conversation in
English with somebody who does not understand English. Foolish reasoning is
it not.

> The organization of my kitchen sink does not change with the temperature
> of the water coming out of the faucet.
>

Glad to hear it, now I know who to ask when I need plumbing advice.

 John K Clark

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

On Feb 6, 11:30 am, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

> More seriously, in the chinese room experience, Searle's error can be
> seen also as a confusion of level. If I can emulate Einstein brain,
> "I" can answer all question you ask to Einstein,

You're assuming that a brain can be emulated in the first place. If
that were true, there is no need to have the thought experiment.

> but the trick is that
> I emulate Einstein himself, and I provide the answer that Einstein
> answers me (and I guess I will have to make some work to understand
> them, or not).

It still doesn't make you Einstein, which is Searle's point.

Craig

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

On Feb 6, 10:54 am, John Clark  wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 5, 2012  Craig Weinberg  wrote:
>
> > > The only understanding of Chinese going on is by those Chinese speakers
> > outside the room who are carrying on a one-sided conversation with a rule
> > book.
>
> So you say, but Searle says his idiotic thought experiment has PROVEN it;
> and yet one key step in the "proof" is "if there is understanding it can
> only be in the little man but the little man does not understand so there
> is no understanding involved".

If you are proving that a computer in the position of the man has no
understanding then this thought experiment proves it. If you are
trying to prove that there is no understanding in the universe then
the thought experiment does not prove that. The whole idea of there
being 'understanding involved' is a non-sequitur. It takes
consciousness for granted, like some free floating glow. If I
understand how to cook and then I walk into a building, does the
building, now that it includes me, now know how to cook?

> But if you start the thought experiment as
> that as one of the axioms then what the hell is the point of the thought
> experiment in the first place, how can you claim to have proven what you
> just assumed?  I stand by my remarks that Clark's Chinese Room, described
> previously, has just as much profundity (or lack thereof) as Searle's
> Chinese Room.
>
> > > >  OK fine, the man does not understand Chinese, so what? How does that
> >> prove that understanding was not involved in the room/outside-people
> >> conversation?
>
> > > Because there is nobody on the inside end of the conversation.
>
> So what?

So nothing is understanding you on the other end. It's not a live
performance, it's a canned recording.

> The point of the thought experiment was to determine if
> understanding was involved at the room end,

Huh? The point of the thought experiment was to show that AI doesn't
necessarily understand the data it is processing, which it does. I
like my truck carrying a piano over a bumpy road better, but it still
reveals the important point that accounting is not understanding.

> not how many people were inside
> the room, you can write and scream that there was no understanding from now
> to the end of time but you have not proven it, and neither has Searle.

And you can do the same denying it. Searle is assuming the common
sense of the audience to show them that having a conversation in a
language you don't understand cannot constitute understanding, but he
underestimates the power of comp to obscure common sense.

> It's
> not uncommon for a mathematical "proof" to contain a hidden assumption of
> the very thing you're trying to prove, but usually this error is subtle and
> takes some close analysis and digging to find the mistake, but in the case
> of the Chinese Room the blunder is as obvious as a angry elephant in your
> living room and that is why I have no hesitation in saying that John Searle
> is a moron.

I don't think he's a moron, but he may not understand that comp
already denies any distinction between trivial or prosthetic
intelligence and subjective understanding, so it doesn't help to make
examples which highlight that distinction.

>
> > I suspect the use of the man in the room is a device to force people to
> > identify personally with (what would normally be) the computer.
>
> Yes that's exactly what he's doing, and that's what makes Searle a con
> artist, he's like a stage magician who waves his right hand around and
> makes you look at it so you don't notice what his left hand is doing,

No, I think it's an honest device to help people get around their
prejudices. If someone claims that a program is no different than a
person, this is a way that we can imagine what it is actually like to
do what a program does. The result, is that rather than being forced
to accept that yes, AI must be sentient, we see clearly, that no, AI
is appears to be an automatic and unconscious mechanism.

> and
> the thing that makes him a idiot is that he believes his own bullshit. It's
> as if I forced you to identify with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and
> then asked you to derive grand conclusions from the fact that acetylcholine
> doesn't understand much.

If the claim of strong AI was that it functioned exactly like
acetylcholine, then what's wrong with that?

>
> > yes I only have first hand knowledge of consciousness. Because the nature
> > of sense is to fill the
> > gaps, connect the dots, solve the puzzle, etc, we are able to generalize
> > figuratively. We are not limited to solipsism
>
> By "fill in the gaps" you mean we accept certain rules of thumb and axioms
> of existence to be true even though we can not prove them,

No. It means we make sense of patterns. We figure them out. The rules
and axioms are a posteriori.

> like induction
> and that intelligent behavior implies consciousness.

No, it requires sense. When we look at yellow and blue dots from far
away and see gre

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-06 Thread Bruno Marchal

On 06 Feb 2012, at 16:54, John Clark wrote:

Well it had better be! If the outside world could be anything we
wanted it to be then our senses would be of no value and Evolution
would never have had a reason to develop them. In reality if we
project our wishes on how we interpret the information from our
senses too much our life expectancy will be very short; I don't like
that saber toothed tiger over there so I'll think of him as a cute
little bunny rabbit.

Hmm... If you succeed of thinking of the saber toothed tiger as a cute
little bunny rabbit, your body will not send the fear chemicals needed
by the tiger to trigger an attack response. The tiger might be very
impressed, and think twice before eating you, even if hungry.

I agree with your reply with respect to Craig point, though. Logicians
like to joke with not completely relevant counter-example.

More seriously, in the chinese room experience, Searle's error can be
seen also as a confusion of level. If I can emulate Einstein brain,
"I" can answer all question you ask to Einstein, but the trick is that
I emulate Einstein himself, and I provide the answer that Einstein
answers me (and I guess I will have to make some work to understand
them, or not).

That is an interesting error, and I would not judge someone because he
does an error (although I am not sure Searle recognizes it or
understand it).

The confusion between provability and computability is of that type.
RA (arithmetic without induction) can already simulate PA (arithmetic
with induction), yet, like me simulating Einstein, RA remains unable
to prove many theorems that PA can prove. For RA, proving that PA
proves some proposition P might be much easier than proving P. RA can
easily prove that PA and ZF prove the consistency of RA, but RA can
hardly prove that.
RA can emulate PA, ZF, you, and me. (in the comp theory). And this
does not mean that RA will ever believe what PA, ZF, or you, or me
might assert or believe.

Bruno

John K Clark

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-06 Thread John Clark

On Sun, Feb 5, 2012  Craig Weinberg  wrote:

> > The only understanding of Chinese going on is by those Chinese speakers
> outside the room who are carrying on a one-sided conversation with a rule
> book.

So you say, but Searle says his idiotic thought experiment has PROVEN it;
and yet one key step in the "proof" is "if there is understanding it can
only be in the little man but the little man does not understand so there
is no understanding involved". But if you start the thought experiment as
that as one of the axioms then what the hell is the point of the thought
experiment in the first place, how can you claim to have proven what you
just assumed?  I stand by my remarks that Clark's Chinese Room, described
previously, has just as much profundity (or lack thereof) as Searle's
Chinese Room.

> > >  OK fine, the man does not understand Chinese, so what? How does that
>> prove that understanding was not involved in the room/outside-people
>> conversation?
>>
>
> > Because there is nobody on the inside end of the conversation.
>

So what? The point of the thought experiment was to determine if
understanding was involved at the room end, not how many people were inside
the room, you can write and scream that there was no understanding from now
to the end of time but you have not proven it, and neither has Searle. It's
not uncommon for a mathematical "proof" to contain a hidden assumption of
the very thing you're trying to prove, but usually this error is subtle and
takes some close analysis and digging to find the mistake, but in the case
of the Chinese Room the blunder is as obvious as a angry elephant in your
living room and that is why I have no hesitation in saying that John Searle
is a moron.

> I suspect the use of the man in the room is a device to force people to
> identify personally with (what would normally be) the computer.

Yes that's exactly what he's doing, and that's what makes Searle a con
artist, he's like a stage magician who waves his right hand around and
makes you look at it so you don't notice what his left hand is doing, and
the thing that makes him a idiot is that he believes his own bullshit. It's
as if I forced you to identify with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and
then asked you to derive grand conclusions from the fact that acetylcholine
doesn't understand much.

> yes I only have first hand knowledge of consciousness. Because the nature
> of sense is to fill the
> gaps, connect the dots, solve the puzzle, etc, we are able to generalize
> figuratively. We are not limited to solipsism

By "fill in the gaps" you mean we accept certain rules of thumb and axioms
of existence to be true even though we can not prove them, like induction
and that intelligent behavior implies consciousness. That is the only way
to avoid solipsism.

> >>  Take a sleeping pill and your brain organization, its chemistry,
>> changes and your consciousness goes away; take a pep pill and the
>> organization reverses itself and your consciousness comes back.
>>
>

>  > The organization of the brain is still the same in either case.
>

Bullshit.

> > the brain retains the capacity for consciousness the whole time.

As long as the drug is in your brain consciousness is not possible, it is
only when chemical processes break down the drug and the concentration of
it is reduced (it wares off in other words) does consciousness return.

> If the pill killed you, a pep pill would not bring you back.

And if the pill did kill you that would certainly change brain
organization. And by the way, why do you believe that dead people are not
conscious? Because they no longer behave intelligently.

> What we sense is not imposed from the outside,
>

Well it had better be! If the outside world could be anything we wanted it
to be then our senses would be of no value and Evolution would never have
had a reason to develop them. In reality if we project our wishes on how we
interpret the information from our senses too much our life expectancy will
be very short; I don't like that saber toothed tiger over there so I'll
think of him as a cute little bunny rabbit.

 John K Clark

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-06 Thread Bruno Marchal


Evgenii,


On 05 Feb 2012, at 14:41, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:


I would agree that profit should be a tool. On the other hand it is  
working this way. There are rules of a game that are adjusted by the  
government accordingly and then what is not not forbidden is  
allowed. In such a setup, if a new idea allows us to increase  
profit, then it might be a good idea.


Only if the good idea is based on real work, or reasonable (founded)  
speculation. But if the idea is a lie (like the idea that drugs are  
very dangerous and should be prohibited) then the profit will be  
equivalent to stealing, and everybody will get poorer, except locally  
for some bandits.
Few years of prohibition of alcohol has created Al Capone, you can  
guess what has brought 70 years of planetary marijuana prohibition ...
Once the bandits have the power, as in the USA since Nixon, I would  
say, the notion of honest and dishonest profit blurs completely, the  
money becomes gray, and we become all hostages of the special interest  
of a minority. The economy becomes a big pyramidal game, where the top  
steal the money of the bottom, until the system crashes.






I would say that the statement "Emotions are ineffable" excludes  
them from scientific considerations.


I don't see why. "emotions are ineffable" is a perfect scientific  
statement about the emotions.
What is true is that emotions cannot be used *in* the scientific  
statement, but you can do scientific statement *about* emotions.
Indeed, nothing escape the domain on which we can develop a scientific  
attitude, from emotions to the big one ineffable.
What is forbidden (or invalid) is the use of emotion in scientific  
discourse. You cannot say "the lemma is correct because I feel so", or  
"1+1=2 because God told me".




Then we should not mention emotions at all. This however leads to a  
practical problem. For a mass product, for example electronics,  
emotions of customers are very important to get/keep/increase the  
market share. Hence if you do not consider emotions at all, you do  
not get paid.


I can agree. Emotions is part of the panorama, and we can deal with  
them, with or without emotions.
But emotions can also be misused, like in the fear selling business of  
the bandits.


Bruno




On 04.02.2012 22:42 Bruno Marchal said the following:

Hi Evgenyi,

On 04 Feb 2012, at 18:09, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:


Also, if your theory is that we (in the 3-sense) are not Turing
emulable, you have to explain us why, and what it adds to the
explanation.


Bruno,

I do not have a theory.


That's OK. Technically, me neither. I am a logician. All what I
assert is that two (weak) theories, mechanism and materialism are
incompatible. I don't hide that my heart invites my brain to listen
to what some rich universal machine can already prove, and guess by
themselves, about themselves.





As for comp, my only note that I have made recently was that if to
look at the current state-of-art of computer architectures and
algorithms, then it is clear that any practical implementation is
out of reach.


Well, OK. We disagree here. AUDA is the illustration that many simple
machine, basically any first order specification of a universal
system (machine, programming language) extended with the
corresponding induction axioms, Those are the one I call the Löbian
machine, they are already as clever as you and me. By lacking our
layers of historical and prehistorical prejudices, they seems even
rather wiser, too. (In my opinion). AUDA is the theology of the
self-introspecting LUM. It gives an octuple of hypostases (inside
views of arithmetic by locally arithmetical being) which mirrors
rather well the discourse of the Platonists, neoplatonists and
mystics in all cultures (as well argued by Aldous Huxley, for
example).

You laptop is one inch close to Löbianity, but why would you want
that humans make Löbian machines when Introspection is not even in
the human curriculum. I begin to think that each time a human become
Löbian, he got banned, exiled, burned, imprizonned, ignored, sent in
asylum, or a perhaps become a big artist, musician or something.







Whether comp is true of false in principle, frankly speaking I have
no idea.


Me neither. Practically, mechanism is more a right (to say yes or no
to the doctor).



I guess that my subconsciousness still believes in primitive
materialism, as consciously I experience a question Why it is bad
to say that math is mind dependent.


Human math is human mind dependent. This does not imply that math, or
a "metaphysically clean" part of math (like arithmetic or computer
science) might not be the "cause/reason" of the stable persistent
beliefs in a physical reality. The physical reality would be a
projective view of arithmetic from inside.




Yet, I should confess that after following discussions at this list
I see some problems with such a statement and pass doubts back to
my subconsciousness. Let us see what happens.

I still listen to th

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-05 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Feb 5, 11:55 am, John Clark  wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at Craig Weinberg  wrote:
>
> > You don't understand Searle's thought experiment.
>
> I understand it one hell of a lot better than Searle did, but that's not
> really much of a boast.
>
> > The whole point is to reveal the absurdity of taking understanding for
> > granted in data manipulation processes.
>
> And Searle takes it for granted that if the little man doing a trivial task
> does not understand Chinese then Chinese is not understood, and that
> assumption simply is not bright.

No, I can see clearly that Searle is correct.You are applying a
figurative sense of understanding when a literal sense is required.
The only understanding of Chinese going on is by those Chinese
speakers outside the room who are carrying on a one-sided conversation
with a rule book. To say that Chinese is understood by the Chinese
Room system is to say that the entire universe understands Chinese.

>
> > None of the descriptions of the argument I find online make any mention
> > of infinite books, paper, or ink.
>
> Just how big do you think a book would need to be to contain every possible
> question and every possible answer to those questions?

It doesn't need to be able to answer every possible question, it only
needs to approximate a typical conversational capacity. It can ask
'what do you mean by that?'

>
> > All I find is a clear and simple experiment:
>
> Yes simple, as in stupid.

It seems like you take it's contradiction of your position personally.
I assume that you don't mean that literally though, right? You don't
think that the thought experiment has a low I.Q., right? Thinking that
would be entirely consistent with what you are saying though.

>
> > The fact that he can use the book to make the people outside think they
> > are carrying on a conversation with them in Chinese reveals that it is only
> > necessary for the man to be trained to use the book, not to understand
> > Chinese or communication in general.
>
> OK fine, the man does not understand Chinese, so what? How does that prove
> that understanding was not involved in the room/outside-people
> conversation?

Because there is nobody on the inside end of the conversation.

> You maintain that only humans can have understanding while I
> maintain that other things can have it too.

No, I don't limit understanding to humans, I just limit human quality
understanding to humans. Not that it's the highest quality
understanding, but it is the only human understanding.

>To determine which of us is
> correct Searle sets up a cosmically impractical and complex thought
> experiment in which a human is a trivial part. Searle says that if
> understanding exists anywhere it must be concentrated in the human and
> nowhere else, but the little man does not understand Chinese so Searle
> concludes that understanding is not involved. What makes Searle such an
> idiot is that determining if humans are the only thing that can have
> understanding or not is the entire point of the thought experiment, he's
> assuming the very thing he's trying to prove. If Siri or Watson had behaved
> as stupidly as Searle did their programers would hang their heads in shame!

I'm not sure if Searle maintains that understanding is forever limited
to humans, but I suspect the use of the man in the room is a device to
force people to identify personally with (what would normally be) the
computer. This way he makes you confront the reality that looking up
reactions in a rule book is not the same thing as reacting
authentically and generating responses personally.

>
> > Makes sense to me.
>
> I know, that's the problem.

No, because I understand why the way you are looking at it misses the
point, and I understand that you aren't willing to entertain my way of
looking at it.

>
> > We know for a fact that human consciousness is associated with human
> > brains
>
> That should be "with a human brain" not "with human brains"; you only know
> for a fact that one human brain is conscious, your own.

Again, there are literal and figurative senses. In the most literal
sense of 'you only know for a fact', yes I only have first hand
knowledge of consciousness. Because the nature of sense is to fill the
gaps, connect the dots, solve the puzzle, etc, we are able to
generalize figuratively. We are not limited to solipsism or formal
proofs that other people are conscious, we have a multi-contextual
human commonality. We share many common senses and can create new
senses through the existing sense channels we share. Knowing whether a
person is conscious or not therefore, is only an issue under very
unusual conditions.

>
> > but we do not have much reason to suspect the rooms can become conscious
>
> Because up to now rooms have not behaved very intelligently, but the room
> containing the Watson supercomputer is getting close.

Close to letting us use it to fool ourselves is all. It's still only a
room with a large, fast rulebook.

>
> > Or

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-05 Thread John Clark

On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at Craig Weinberg  wrote:

> You don't understand Searle's thought experiment.
>

I understand it one hell of a lot better than Searle did, but that's not
really much of a boast.

> The whole point is to reveal the absurdity of taking understanding for
> granted in data manipulation processes.
>

And Searle takes it for granted that if the little man doing a trivial task
does not understand Chinese then Chinese is not understood, and that
assumption simply is not bright.

> None of the descriptions of the argument I find online make any mention
> of infinite books, paper, or ink.
>

Just how big do you think a book would need to be to contain every possible
question and every possible answer to those questions?

> All I find is a clear and simple experiment:
>

Yes simple, as in stupid.

> The fact that he can use the book to make the people outside think they
> are carrying on a conversation with them in Chinese reveals that it is only
> necessary for the man to be trained to use the book, not to understand
> Chinese or communication in general.
>

OK fine, the man does not understand Chinese, so what? How does that prove
that understanding was not involved in the room/outside-people
conversation? You maintain that only humans can have understanding while I
maintain that other things can have it too. To determine which of us is
correct Searle sets up a cosmically impractical and complex thought
experiment in which a human is a trivial part. Searle says that if
understanding exists anywhere it must be concentrated in the human and
nowhere else, but the little man does not understand Chinese so Searle
concludes that understanding is not involved. What makes Searle such an
idiot is that determining if humans are the only thing that can have
understanding or not is the entire point of the thought experiment, he's
assuming the very thing he's trying to prove. If Siri or Watson had behaved
as stupidly as Searle did their programers would hang their heads in shame!

> Makes sense to me.
>

I know, that's the problem.

> We know for a fact that human consciousness is associated with human
> brains
>

That should be "with a human brain" not "with human brains"; you only know
for a fact that one human brain is conscious, your own.

> but we do not have much reason to suspect the rooms can become conscious
>

Because up to now rooms have not behaved very intelligently, but the room
containing the Watson supercomputer is getting close.

> Organization of the brain does not make the difference between being
> awake and being unconscious.
>

Don't be ridiculous! Take a sleeping pill and your brain organization, its
chemistry, changes and your consciousness goes away; take a pep pill and
the organization reverses itself and your consciousness comes back.

> Organization is certainly important, but only if it arises organically.
>

Electricity is not organic but it will change your organization and
dramatically change your consciousness if that electricity is applied to
your brain, or any other part of your body for that matter.

> Organization imposed from the outside doesn't cause that organization to
> become internalized as awareness.
>

So the light entering your eye and other inputs from your senses about the
outside world has no effect on your awareness. How unfortunate for you,
your nose must be sore by now from walking into so many walls that you were
not aware of.

> Yet if someone pulls the plug on a coma patient, they can go to prison,
but iPhones can be disposed of at will.

Good heavens, do you really expect to understand the nature of reality by
studying the legal system?!

  John K Clark

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-05 Thread Evgenii Rudnyi


Bruno,

I would agree that profit should be a tool. On the other hand it is 
working this way. There are rules of a game that are adjusted by the 
government accordingly and then what is not not forbidden is allowed. In 
such a setup, if a new idea allows us to increase profit, then it might 
be a good idea.


I would say that the statement "Emotions are ineffable" excludes them 
from scientific considerations. Then we should not mention emotions at 
all. This however leads to a practical problem. For a mass product, for 
example electronics, emotions of customers are very important to 
get/keep/increase the market share. Hence if you do not consider 
emotions at all, you do not get paid.


Evgenii


On 04.02.2012 22:42 Bruno Marchal said the following:

Hi Evgenyi,

On 04 Feb 2012, at 18:09, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:


Also, if your theory is that we (in the 3-sense) are not Turing
emulable, you have to explain us why, and what it adds to the
explanation.


Bruno,

I do not have a theory.


That's OK. Technically, me neither. I am a logician. All what I
assert is that two (weak) theories, mechanism and materialism are
incompatible. I don't hide that my heart invites my brain to listen
to what some rich universal machine can already prove, and guess by
themselves, about themselves.





As for comp, my only note that I have made recently was that if to
 look at the current state-of-art of computer architectures and
algorithms, then it is clear that any practical implementation is
out of reach.


Well, OK. We disagree here. AUDA is the illustration that many simple
 machine, basically any first order specification of a universal
system (machine, programming language) extended with the
corresponding induction axioms, Those are the one I call the Löbian
machine, they are already as clever as you and me. By lacking our
layers of historical and prehistorical prejudices, they seems even
rather wiser, too. (In my opinion). AUDA is the theology of the
self-introspecting LUM. It gives an octuple of hypostases (inside
views of arithmetic by locally arithmetical being) which mirrors
rather well the discourse of the Platonists, neoplatonists and
mystics in all cultures (as well argued by Aldous Huxley, for
example).

You laptop is one inch close to Löbianity, but why would you want
that humans make Löbian machines when Introspection is not even in
the human curriculum. I begin to think that each time a human become
Löbian, he got banned, exiled, burned, imprizonned, ignored, sent in
asylum, or a perhaps become a big artist, musician or something.







Whether comp is true of false in principle, frankly speaking I have
no idea.


Me neither. Practically, mechanism is more a right (to say yes or no
to the doctor).



I guess that my subconsciousness still believes in primitive
materialism, as consciously I experience a question Why it is bad
to say that math is mind dependent.


Human math is human mind dependent. This does not imply that math, or
a "metaphysically clean" part of math (like arithmetic or computer
science) might not be the "cause/reason" of the stable persistent
beliefs in a physical reality. The physical reality would be a
projective view of arithmetic from inside.




Yet, I should confess that after following discussions at this list
I see some problems with such a statement and pass doubts back to
my subconsciousness. Let us see what happens.

I still listen to the lectures of Prof Hoenen. Recently I have
finished Theorien der Wahrheit and right now I am at
Beweistheorien. When I am done with Prof Hoenen, as promised I will
go through your The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations. Yet, I
do not know when it happens, as it takes more time as I thought
originally.

As for computers having emotions, I am a practitioner and I am
working right now closely with engineers. I should say that the
modern market would love electronics with emotions. Just imagine
such a slogan

Smartphone with Emotions* (*scientifically proved)


This will never happen. Never. More exactly, if this happens, it
means you are in front of a con crackpot. Emotion are ineffable,
although a range of the corresponding behavior is easy to simulate.
To have genuine emotion, you need to be entangled to genuine complex
long computation. But their outputs are easy to simulate. A friend of
mine made a piece of theater with a little robot-dog, emulating
emotions, and the public reacted correspondingly. In comp there is no
philosophical zombies, but there are plenty of local zombies
possible, like cartoon cops on the roads which makes their effect, or
 that emotive robot-dog. But an emotion, by its very nature cannot be
scientifically proved. All what happens is that a person succeeds in
being recognize as such by other persons. Computers might already be
conscious. It might be our lack of civility which prevents us to
listen to them.

But you were probably joking with the "*scientifically proved".

Concerning reality, science never proves. I

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-05 Thread Evgenii Rudnyi

On 04.02.2012 21:05 meekerdb said the following:
> On 2/4/2012 9:09 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

...

>> As for computers having emotions, I am a practitioner and I am
>> working right now closely with engineers. I should say that the
>> modern market would love electronics with emotions. Just imagine
>> such a slogan
>>
>> Smartphone with Emotions* (*scientifically proved)
>>
>> It would be a killer application.
>
> So if you miss a turn your driving direction app will get mad and
> scold you? I you use your calculator to find the square root of 121
> it will mock you for forgetting your 8th grade mathematics? Emotions
> imply having values and being able to act on them -- why would you
> want your computer to have it's own values and act on them? Don't you
> want it to just have the values you have, i.e. answer the questions
> you ask?
>
> Brent
>

You should talk with marketing guys. A quick search reveals that this is 
already a reality

Hercules Dualpix Emotion Webcam

There is also a term emotional AI that is discussed by game makers.

Yet, I do not get your point in general. For example recently there was 
an article in Die Zeit

Die Roboter kommen (Robots are coming)
http://www.zeit.de/2012/04/T-Roboter

Among other things, they discuss an issue of a potential collision 
between a moving robot and a human being. To this end, there is 
experimental study to research on what pain in what part of a body can a 
human being sustain. This experimental database will be used by 
engineering developing robots.

Pain is not exactly emotion but I guess it is not that far away. This 
shows that pain could be experimentally researched by people. Could it 
be experimentally researched by computers and robots?

On the other hand, engineers design computers and robots. Can science 
give engineers guidelines to control emotions by computers or robots? Or 
emotions are some kind of emergent phenomena that will appear in 
computers and robots independently and uncontrollable from engineers?

Finally, if you already has discovered emotions among computers, why 
then it is impossible to research this effect on how it has emerged 
independent from engineers?

Evgenii

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-04 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Feb 4, 1:13 pm, John Clark  wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 4, 2012  Craig Weinberg  wrote:
>
> >> I hope you're not talking about Searle's Chinese room, the stupidest
> >> thought experiment in history.
>
> > > I don't see what is stupid about that thought experiment.
>
> And that tells us a great deal about you.
>
> > > Please explain exactly what you mean.
>
> You already know about Searle's room, now I want to tell you about Clark's
> Chinese Room. You are a professor of Chinese Literature and are in a room
> with me and the great Chinese Philosopher and Poet Laotse. Laotse writes
> something in his native language on a paper and hands it to me. I walk 10
> feet and give it to you. You read the paper and are impressed with the
> wisdom of the message and the beauty of its language. Now I tell you that I
> don't know a word of Chinese, can you find any deep implications from that
> fact? I believe Clark's Chinese Room is just as profound as Searle's
> Chinese Room. Not very.

You don't understand Searle's thought experiment. The whole point is
to reveal the absurdity of taking understanding for granted in data
manipulation processes. Since you take it for granted from the
beginning, it seems stupid to you.

>
> All Searle did was come up with a wildly impractical model (the Chinese
> Room) of an intelligence in which a human being happens to play a trivial
> part. Consider what's in Searle's model:
>
> 1) An incredible book, larger than the observable universe even if the
> writing was microfilm sized.
>
> 2) An equally large or larger book of blank paper.
>
> 3) A pen, several trillion galaxies of ink, and oh yes I almost forgot,
> your little man.

Is there an original document you are getting this from? None of the
descriptions of the argument I find online make any mention of
infinite books, paper, or ink. All I find is a clear and simple
experiment: A man sits in a locked room and receives notes in Chinese
through a slot. He has a rule book (size is irrelevant and not
mentioned) with which contains instructions for what to do in response
to receiving these Characters. The fact that he can use the book to
make the people outside think they are carrying on a conversation with
them in Chinese reveals that it is only necessary for the man to be
trained to use the book, not to understand Chinese or communication in
general.

Makes sense to me. The refutations I've read aren't persuasive. They
have to do with claiming that the room as a whole is intelligent or
that neurons cannot be intelligent either, etc.

>
> Searle claims to have proven something profound when he shows that a
> trivial part does not have all the properties that the whole system does.

The whole point is to show that in an AI system, the machine is the
trivial part of a system which invariably includes a human user to
understand anything.

> In his example the man could be replaced with a simple machine made with a
> few vacuum tubes or even mechanical relays, and it would do a better job.

No because he's trying to bring it to a human level so there is no
silly speculation about whether vacuum tubes can understand anything
or not.

> It's like saying the synaptic transmitter dopamine does not understand how
> to solve differential equations, dopamine is a small part of the human
> brain thus the human brain does not understand how to solve differential
> equations.

The human brain doesn't understand, any more than the baseball diamond
plays baseball. The diamond and the experiences shown through the
playing of the game are two aspects of a single whole.

>
> Yes, it does seem strange that consciousness is somehow hanging around the
> room as a whole, even if slowed down by a factor of a billion trillion or
> so, but no stranger than the fact that consciousness is hanging around 3
> pounds of gray goo in our head,

We know for a fact that human consciousness is associated with human
brains, but we do not have much reason to suspect the rooms can become
conscious (Amityville notwithstanding).

> and yet we know that it does. It's time to
> just face the fact that consciousness is what matter does when it is
> organized in certain complex ways.

Not at all. Organization of the brain does not make the difference
between being awake and being unconscious. Organization is certainly
important, but only if it arises organically. Organization imposed
from the outside doesn't cause that organization to become
internalized as awareness.

>
> > > I understand why an audioanimatronic pirate at Disneyland feels nothing.
>
> That is incorrect, you don't understand. I agree it probably feels nothing
> but unlike you I can logically explain exactly why I have that opinion and
> I don't need semantic batteries or flux capacitors or dilithhium crystals
> or any other new age bilge to do so.

Yes, I've heard you logical explanation..."because it doesn't behave
intelligently". It's circular reasoning. My understanding is not
predicated on a schema of literal ru

Re: Intelligence and consciousness



On 04 Feb 2012, at 17:38, meekerdb wrote:


On 2/4/2012 1:17 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


The emotion of your laptot is unknown, and unmanifested, because  
your laptop has no deep persistant self-reference ability to share  
with you.  We want a slave, and would be anxious in front of a  
machine taking too much independence.


Bruno


Yes, that's exactly why John McCarthy wrote that we should not  
provide AI programs with self-reflection and emotions, because it  
would create ethical problems in using them.


He is right. But doing babies does already the same, and for  
economical reason we will often get some rewards from letting some  
degree of autonomy in machines. The time needed for hand made machine  
descendent to be as free as us and as entangled as us in the local  
computational histories, we will already be machines ourselves. Things  
will be different. The shadow of the measure problem solution  
indicates that we might, in some sense, be already there. I'm not sure.



Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

Hi Evgenyi,

On 04 Feb 2012, at 18:09, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

> Also,
> if your theory is that we (in the 3-sense) are not Turing emulable,
> you have to explain us why, and what it adds to the explanation.

Bruno,

I do not have a theory.

That's OK. Technically, me neither. I am a logician. All what I assert  
is that two (weak) theories, mechanism and materialism are incompatible.
I don't hide that my heart invites my brain to listen to what some  
rich universal machine can already prove, and guess by themselves,  
about themselves.

As for comp, my only note that I have made recently was that if to  
look at the current state-of-art of computer architectures and  
algorithms, then it is clear that any practical implementation is  
out of reach.

Well, OK. We disagree here. AUDA is the illustration that many simple  
machine, basically any first order specification of a universal system  
(machine, programming language) extended with the corresponding  
induction axioms, Those are the one I call the Löbian machine, they  
are already as clever as you and me. By lacking our layers of  
historical and prehistorical prejudices, they seems even rather wiser,  
too. (In my opinion).
AUDA is the theology of the self-introspecting LUM. It gives an  
octuple of hypostases (inside views of arithmetic by locally  
arithmetical being) which mirrors rather well the discourse of the  
Platonists, neoplatonists and mystics in all cultures (as well argued  
by Aldous Huxley, for example).

You laptop is one inch close to Löbianity, but why would you want that  
humans make Löbian machines when Introspection is not even in the  
human curriculum. I begin to think that each time a human become  
Löbian, he got banned, exiled, burned, imprizonned, ignored, sent in  
asylum, or a perhaps become a big artist, musician or something.

Whether comp is true of false in principle, frankly speaking I have  
no idea.

Me neither. Practically, mechanism is more a right (to say yes or no  
to the doctor).

I guess that my subconsciousness still believes in primitive  
materialism, as consciously I experience a question Why it is bad to  
say that math is mind dependent.

Human math is human mind dependent. This does not imply that math, or  
a "metaphysically clean" part of math (like arithmetic or computer  
science) might not be the "cause/reason" of the stable persistent  
beliefs in a physical reality.
The physical reality would be a projective view of arithmetic from  
inside.

Yet, I should confess that after following discussions at this list  
I see some problems with such a statement and pass doubts back to my  
subconsciousness. Let us see what happens.

I still listen to the lectures of Prof Hoenen. Recently I have  
finished Theorien der Wahrheit and right now I am at Beweistheorien.  
When I am done with Prof Hoenen, as promised I will go through your  
The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations. Yet, I do not know when  
it happens, as it takes more time as I thought originally.

As for computers having emotions, I am a practitioner and I am  
working right now closely with engineers. I should say that the  
modern market would love electronics with emotions. Just imagine  
such a slogan

Smartphone with Emotions* (*scientifically proved)

This will never happen. Never.
More exactly, if this happens, it means you are in front of a con  
crackpot. Emotion are ineffable, although a range of the corresponding  
behavior is easy to simulate. To have genuine emotion, you need to be  
entangled to genuine complex long computation. But their outputs are  
easy to simulate.
A friend of mine made a piece of theater with a little robot-dog,  
emulating emotions, and the public reacted correspondingly. In comp  
there is no philosophical zombies, but there are plenty of local  
zombies possible, like cartoon cops on the roads which makes their  
effect, or that emotive robot-dog.
But an emotion, by its very nature cannot be scientifically proved.  
All what happens is that a person succeeds in being recognize as such  
by other persons.
Computers might already be conscious. It might be our lack of civility  
which prevents us to listen to them.

But you were probably joking with the "*scientifically proved".

Concerning reality, science never proves. It only suggests  
interrogatively. If not, it is pseudo science or pseudo religion.

It would be a killer application. Hence I do not understand why  
people here that state "a computer has already emotions" do not  
explore such a wonderful opportunity. After all, whether it is comp,  
physicalism, monism, dualism or whatever does not matter. What is  
really important is to make profit.

Hmm... I am not sure. What is important is to be able to eat when  
hungry, and to drink when thirsty and some amount of heat. What is  
hoped for is the larger freedom spectrum for the exploratory  
opportunities.

Profit might be a tool, hardly a goal by its

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-04 Thread meekerdb

On 2/4/2012 9:09 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

> Also,
> if your theory is that we (in the 3-sense) are not Turing emulable,
> you have to explain us why, and what it adds to the explanation.

Bruno,

I do not have a theory.

As for comp, my only note that I have made recently was that if to look at the current
state-of-art of computer architectures and algorithms, then it is clear that any
practical implementation is out of reach.

Whether comp is true of false in principle, frankly speaking I have no idea. I guess
that my subconsciousness still believes in primitive materialism, as consciously I
experience a question Why it is bad to say that math is mind dependent. Yet, I should
confess that after following discussions at this list I see some problems with such a
statement and pass doubts back to my subconsciousness. Let us see what happens.

I still listen to the lectures of Prof Hoenen. Recently I have finished Theorien der
Wahrheit and right now I am at Beweistheorien. When I am done with Prof Hoenen, as
promised I will go through your The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations. Yet, I do
not know when it happens, as it takes more time as I thought originally.

As for computers having emotions, I am a practitioner and I am working right now closely
with engineers. I should say that the modern market would love electronics with
emotions. Just imagine such a slogan

Smartphone with Emotions* (*scientifically proved)

It would be a killer application.

So if you miss a turn your driving direction app will get mad and scold you? I you use
your calculator to find the square root of 121 it will mock you for forgetting your 8th
grade mathematics? Emotions imply having values and being able to act on them -- why would
you want your computer to have it's own values and act on them? Don't you want it to just
have the values you have, i.e. answer the questions you ask?

Brent

Hence I do not understand why people here that state "a computer has already emotions"
do not explore such a wonderful opportunity. After all, whether it is comp, physicalism,
monism, dualism or whatever does not matter. What is really important is to make profit.

Evgenii

On 04.02.2012 10:17 Bruno Marchal said the following:

On 03 Feb 2012, at 21:23, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 02.02.2012 21:49 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/2/2012 12:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:54 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: So kind of
you to inform us of your unsupported opinion.

I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.

Except that my opinion is supported by the fact that within
the context of chess the machine acts just like a person who
had those emotions. So it had at least the functional
equivalent of those emotions. Whereas your opinion is simple
prejudice.

I agree my opinion would be simple prejudice had we not
already been over this issue a dozen times. My view is that the
whole idea that there can be a 'functional equivalent of
emotions' is completely unsupported. I give examples of
puppets, movies, trashcans that say THANK YOU, voicemail...all
of these things demonstrate that there need not be any
connection at all between function and interior experience.

Except that in every case there is an emotion in your
examples...it's just the emotion of the puppeter, the
screenwriter, the trashcan painter. But in the case of the chess
playing computer, there is no person providing the 'emotion'
because the 'emotion' depends on complex and unforeseeable
events. Hence it is appropriate to attribute the 'emotion' to the
computer/program.

Brent

Craig's position that computers in the present form do not have
emotions is not unique, as emotions belong to consciousness. A
quote from my favorite book

Jeffrey A. Gray, Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem.

The last sentence from the chapter "10.2 Conscious computers?"

p. 128 "Our further discussion here, however, will take it as
established that his can never happen."

Now the last paragraph from the chapter "10.3 Conscious robots?"

p. 130. "So, while we may grant robots the power to form meaningful
categorical representations at a level reached by the unconscious
brain and by the behaviour controlled by the unconscious brain, we
should remain doubtful whether they are likely to experience
conscious percepts. This conclusion should not, however, be
over-interpreted. It does not necessarily imply that human beings
will never be able to build artefacts with conscious experience.
That will depend on how the trick of consciousness is done. If and
when we know the trick, it may be possible to duplicate it. But the
mere provision of behavioural dispositions is unlikely to be up to
the mark."

If we say that computers right now have emotions, then we must be
able exactly define the difference between unconscious and
conscious experience in th

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-04 Thread John Clark

On Sat, Feb 4, 2012  Craig Weinberg  wrote:

>> I hope you're not talking about Searle's Chinese room, the stupidest
>> thought experiment in history.
>>
>
> > I don't see what is stupid about that thought experiment.

And that tells us a great deal about you.

> > Please explain exactly what you mean.
>

You already know about Searle's room, now I want to tell you about Clark's
Chinese Room. You are a professor of Chinese Literature and are in a room
with me and the great Chinese Philosopher and Poet Laotse. Laotse writes
something in his native language on a paper and hands it to me. I walk 10
feet and give it to you. You read the paper and are impressed with the
wisdom of the message and the beauty of its language. Now I tell you that I
don't know a word of Chinese, can you find any deep implications from that
fact? I believe Clark's Chinese Room is just as profound as Searle's
Chinese Room. Not very.

All Searle did was come up with a wildly impractical model (the Chinese
Room) of an intelligence in which a human being happens to play a trivial
part. Consider what's in Searle's model:

1) An incredible book, larger than the observable universe even if the
writing was microfilm sized.

2) An equally large or larger book of blank paper.

3) A pen, several trillion galaxies of ink, and oh yes I almost forgot,
your little man.

Searle claims to have proven something profound when he shows that a
trivial part does not have all the properties that the whole system does.
In his example the man could be replaced with a simple machine made with a
few vacuum tubes or even mechanical relays, and it would do a better job.
It's like saying the synaptic transmitter dopamine does not understand how
to solve differential equations, dopamine is a small part of the human
brain thus the human brain does not understand how to solve differential
equations.

Yes, it does seem strange that consciousness is somehow hanging around the
room as a whole, even if slowed down by a factor of a billion trillion or
so, but no stranger than the fact that consciousness is hanging around 3
pounds of gray goo in our head, and yet we know that it does. It's time to
just face the fact that consciousness is what matter does when it is
organized in certain complex ways.

> > I understand why an audioanimatronic pirate at Disneyland feels nothing.
>

That is incorrect, you don't understand. I agree it probably feels nothing
but unlike you I can logically explain exactly why I have that opinion and
I don't need semantic batteries or flux capacitors or dilithhium crystals
or any other new age bilge to do so.

> > No. Computers have never learned anything.

I could give examples dating back to the 1950's that computers can indeed
learn but there would be no point in me doing  so, you would say it didn't
"really" learn it "just" behaved like it learned, and Einstein wasn't
"really" smart he "just" behaved like he was smart, and the guy who filed a
complaint with the police that somebody stole his cocaine was not "really"
stupid he "just" behaved stupidly.
**

> >>  Machines are made of atoms just like you and me.
>>
>
> > And atoms are unconscious, are they not?
>

Atoms don't behave intelligently so my very very strong hunch is that they
are not conscious, but there is no way I can know for certain. On the other
hand you are even more posative than I about this matter and as  always
happens whenever somebody is absolutely positively 100% certain about
anything they can almost never produce any logical reason for their belief.
There seems to be a inverse relationship, the stronger the belief the
weaker the evidence.

>>  One binary logic operation is pretty straightforward but 20,000
>> trillion of them every second is not, *and that's what today's
>> supercomputers can do, and they are doubling in power every 18 months.
>>
>
> > You could stop the program at any given point and understand every
>> thread of every process.
>
>
Yes, you can understand ANY thread but you cannot understand EVERY thread.
And that 20,000 trillion a second figure that I used was really a big
understatement, it's the number of floating point operations (FLOPS) not
the far simpler binary operations. A typical man on the street might take
the better part of one minute to do one flop with pencil and paper, and
today's  supercomputers can do 20,000 million million a second and they
double in power every 18 months.
**

> >They come out of comas and communicate with other human beings

You think the noises coming out of ex-coma patient's mouths give us
profound insight into their inner life, but noises produced by Siri tell us
absolutely nothing, why the difference? Because Siri is not squishy and
does not smell bad. I don't think your philosophy is one bit more
sophisticated than that.

  John K Clark

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-04 Thread Evgenii Rudnyi

> Also,
> if your theory is that we (in the 3-sense) are not Turing emulable,
> you have to explain us why, and what it adds to the explanation.

Bruno,

I do not have a theory.

As for comp, my only note that I have made recently was that if to look 
at the current state-of-art of computer architectures and algorithms, 
then it is clear that any practical implementation is out of reach.

Whether comp is true of false in principle, frankly speaking I have no 
idea. I guess that my subconsciousness still believes in primitive 
materialism, as consciously I experience a question Why it is bad to say 
that math is mind dependent. Yet, I should confess that after following 
discussions at this list I see some problems with such a statement and 
pass doubts back to my subconsciousness. Let us see what happens.

I still listen to the lectures of Prof Hoenen. Recently I have finished 
Theorien der Wahrheit and right now I am at Beweistheorien. When I am 
done with Prof Hoenen, as promised I will go through your The Origin of 
Physical Laws and Sensations. Yet, I do not know when it happens, as it 
takes more time as I thought originally.

As for computers having emotions, I am a practitioner and I am working 
right now closely with engineers. I should say that the modern market 
would love electronics with emotions. Just imagine such a slogan

Smartphone with Emotions* (*scientifically proved)

It would be a killer application. Hence I do not understand why people 
here that state "a computer has already emotions" do not explore such a 
wonderful opportunity. After all, whether it is comp, physicalism, 
monism, dualism or whatever does not matter. What is really important is 
to make profit.

Evgenii

On 04.02.2012 10:17 Bruno Marchal said the following:

On 03 Feb 2012, at 21:23, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 02.02.2012 21:49 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/2/2012 12:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:54 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: So kind of
you to inform us of your unsupported opinion.

I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.

Except that my opinion is supported by the fact that within
the context of chess the machine acts just like a person who
had those emotions. So it had at least the functional
equivalent of those emotions. Whereas your opinion is simple
prejudice.

I agree my opinion would be simple prejudice had we not
already been over this issue a dozen times. My view is that the
whole idea that there can be a 'functional equivalent of
emotions' is completely unsupported. I give examples of
puppets, movies, trashcans that say THANK YOU, voicemail...all
of these things demonstrate that there need not be any
connection at all between function and interior experience.

Except that in every case there is an emotion in your
examples...it's just the emotion of the puppeter, the
screenwriter, the trashcan painter. But in the case of the chess
playing computer, there is no person providing the 'emotion'
because the 'emotion' depends on complex and unforeseeable
events. Hence it is appropriate to attribute the 'emotion' to the
computer/program.

Brent

Craig's position that computers in the present form do not have
emotions is not unique, as emotions belong to consciousness. A
quote from my favorite book

Jeffrey A. Gray, Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem.

The last sentence from the chapter "10.2 Conscious computers?"

p. 128 "Our further discussion here, however, will take it as
established that his can never happen."

Now the last paragraph from the chapter "10.3 Conscious robots?"

p. 130. "So, while we may grant robots the power to form meaningful
 categorical representations at a level reached by the unconscious
 brain and by the behaviour controlled by the unconscious brain, we
 should remain doubtful whether they are likely to experience
conscious percepts. This conclusion should not, however, be
over-interpreted. It does not necessarily imply that human beings
will never be able to build artefacts with conscious experience.
That will depend on how the trick of consciousness is done. If and
when we know the trick, it may be possible to duplicate it. But the
mere provision of behavioural dispositions is unlikely to be up to
the mark."

If we say that computers right now have emotions, then we must be
able exactly define the difference between unconscious and
conscious experience in the computer (for example in that computer
that has won Kasparov). Can you do it?

Yes. It is the point of AUDA. We can do it in the theoretical
framework, once we accept some theory (axiomatic) of knowledge. Also,
if your theory is that we (in the 3-sense) are not Turing emulable,
you have to explain us why, and what it adds to the explanation. With
comp, the trick of both consciousness and matter is not entirely
computable. You have to resist to a reductionist conception

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-04 Thread meekerdb


On 2/4/2012 1:17 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
The emotion of your laptot is unknown, and unmanifested, because your laptop has no deep 
persistant self-reference ability to share with you.  We want a slave, and would be 
anxious in front of a machine taking too much independence.


Bruno 


Yes, that's exactly why John McCarthy wrote that we should not provide AI programs with 
self-reflection and emotions, because it would create ethical problems in using them.


Brent

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-04 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Feb 4, 7:29 am, Bruno Marchal  wrote:
> On 03 Feb 2012, at 23:58, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> >  Consciousness and mechanism are
> > mutually exclusive by definition and always will be.
>
> I think you confuse mechanism before and after Gödel, and you miss the
> 1-indeterminacy.

I don't think that I do. I only miss the link between the validity of
the mathematical form of 1-indeterminacy and the logical necessity of
the content: the qualitative experience associated with it.

>You confuse Turing emulable, and Turing recoverable
> (by 1-indeterminacy on non computable domain).

That's probably true since I can't find any definition for Turing
recoverable online. Are you saying that consciousness is not Turing
emulable but merely Turing recoverable (which I am imagining is about
addressing non-comp records to play or record)?

Craig

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-04 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Feb 4, 2:23 am, John Clark  wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012  Craig Weinberg  wrote:
>
> > Huge abacuses are a really good way to look at this, although it's pretty
> > much the same as the China Brain.
>
> I hope you're not talking about Searle's Chinese room, the stupidest
> thought experiment in history.

I don't see what is stupid about that thought experiment. Please
explain exactly what you mean.

>
> > > Your position is [...] The abacus could literally be made to think
>
> Yes.
>
> > Do you see why I am incredulous about this?
>
> No.
>
> >  > I am crystal clear in my own understanding that no matter how good the
> > program seems, Siri 5000 will feel exactly the same thing as Siri. Nothing.
>
> I accept that you are absolutely positively 100% certain of the above, but
> I do NOT accept that you are correct. I'm not a religious man so I don't
> believe in divine revelation and that's the only way you could know what it
> feels like to be Siri, hell you don't even know what it feels like to be me
> and we are of the same species (I presume); all you can do is observe how
> Siri and I behave and try to make conclusions about our inner life or like
> of same from that.

That isn't 'all I can do'. I don't need to do anything special to
understand exactly what Siri is and exactly why it feels nothing any
more than I understand why an audioanimatronic pirate at Disneyland
feels nothing.

>
> > As I continue to try to explain, awareness is not a function of objects,
> > it is the symmetrically anomalous counterpart of objects.
>
> Bafflegab.

Translation: "I don't understand and I don't care, but it makes me
feel superior to dismiss your position arbitrarily'.

>
> > Experiences accumulate semantic charge
>
> Semantic charge? Poetic crapola of that sort may impress some but not me.
> If you can't express your ideas clearer than that they are not worth
> expressing at all.

See above.

>
> > > The beads will never learn anything. They are only beads.
>
> Computers can and do learn things

No. Computers have never learned anything. We learn things using
computers. Computers store, retrieve, and process data. Nothing more.
The human mind does much more. It feels, sees, knows, believes,
understands, wants, tries, opposes, speculates, creates, imagines,
etc.

> and a Turing Machine can simulate any
> computer and you can make a Turing Machine from beads. I won't insult your
> intelligence by spelling out the obvious conclusion from that fact.

Why not? You insult my intelligence in most of your other replies to
me?

>
> > Machines are made of unconsciousness.
>
>  Machines are made of atoms just like you and me.

And atoms are unconscious, are they not?

>
> > All machines are unconscious. That is how we can control them.
>
> A argument that is already very weak and will become DRAMATICALLY weaker in
> the future.

Promissory mechanism is religious faith to me.

> In the long run there is no way we can control computers, they
> are our slave right now but that circumstance will not continue.

So you say. I say we are already the slaves of computers now. It's
called economics.

>
> > That would not be necessary if the machine had any capacity to learn.
>
> I don't know what you're talking about, machines have been able to learn
> for decades.

If I fill a file cabinet with files, do you say that the cabinet has
learned something?

>
> >> at a fundamental level no human being could write a computer program
> >> like Siri and nobody knows how it works.
>
> I wouldn't say we don't know how it works. Binary logic is pretty
>
> > straightforward.
>
> One binary logic operation is pretty straightforward but *20,000 trillion
> of them every second is not, *and that's what today's supercomputers can
> do, and they are doubling in power every 18 months.

It's more numerous but no less straightforward. You could stop the
program at any given point and understand every thread of every
process. It's big and it's fast, sure, but it's still not mysterious.

>
> > That's the theory. Meanwhile, in reality, we are using the same basic
> > interface for computers since 1995.
>
> What are you talking about? Siri is a computer interface as is Google and
> even supercomputers didn't have them or anything close to it in 1995.

There were web search engines before Google. They weren't quite as
good but there has been no improvement in searches since then. Siri is
a new branding and improved implementation of voice recognition that
we have had in other devices for a while. It's progress, but hardly
Einstein, Edison, Tesla, or Wright brothers progress.

>
> >>>  people in a vegetative state do sometimes have an inner life despite
> >> their behavior.
>
> >> In the course of our conversations you have made declarative statements
> > like the above dozens if not hundreds of times but you never seriously ask
> > yourself "HOW DO I KNOW THIS?".
>
>  >There is a lot of anecdotal evidence. People come out of comas.
>
>
>
> So people come out

Re: Intelligence and consciousness



On 03 Feb 2012, at 23:58, Craig Weinberg wrote:


 Consciousness and mechanism are
mutually exclusive by definition and always will be.


I think you confuse mechanism before and after Gödel, and you miss the  
1-indeterminacy. You confuse Turing emulable, and Turing recoverable  
(by 1-indeterminacy on non computable domain).


Bruno



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Intelligence and consciousness



On 03 Feb 2012, at 21:23, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:


On 02.02.2012 21:49 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/2/2012 12:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:54 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: So kind of you to
inform us of your unsupported opinion.

I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.

Except that my opinion is supported by the fact that within the
context of chess the machine acts just like a person who had
those emotions. So it had at least the functional equivalent of
those emotions. Whereas your opinion is simple prejudice.

I agree my opinion would be simple prejudice had we not already
been over this issue a dozen times. My view is that the whole idea
that there can be a 'functional equivalent of emotions' is
completely unsupported. I give examples of puppets, movies,
trashcans that say THANK YOU, voicemail...all of these things
demonstrate that there need not be any connection at all between
function and interior experience.


Except that in every case there is an emotion in your examples...it's
just the emotion of the puppeter, the screenwriter, the trashcan
painter. But in the case of the chess playing computer, there is no
person providing the 'emotion' because the 'emotion' depends on
complex and unforeseeable events. Hence it is appropriate to
attribute the 'emotion' to the computer/program.

Brent


Craig's position that computers in the present form do not have  
emotions is not unique, as emotions belong to consciousness. A quote  
from my favorite book


Jeffrey A. Gray, Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem.

The last sentence from the chapter "10.2 Conscious computers?"

p. 128 "Our further discussion here, however, will take it as  
established that his can never happen."


Now the last paragraph from the chapter "10.3 Conscious robots?"

p. 130. "So, while we may grant robots the power to form meaningful  
categorical representations at a level reached by the unconscious  
brain and by the behaviour controlled by the unconscious brain, we  
should remain doubtful whether they are likely to experience  
conscious percepts. This conclusion should not, however, be over- 
interpreted. It does not necessarily imply that human beings will  
never be able to build artefacts with conscious experience. That  
will depend on how the trick of consciousness is done. If and when  
we know the trick, it may be possible to duplicate it. But the mere  
provision of behavioural dispositions is unlikely to be up to the  
mark."


If we say that computers right now have emotions, then we must be  
able exactly define the difference between unconscious and conscious  
experience in the computer (for example in that computer that has  
won Kasparov). Can you do it?


Yes. It is the point of AUDA. We can do it in the theoretical  
framework, once we accept some theory (axiomatic) of knowledge.
Also, if your theory is that we (in the 3-sense) are not Turing  
emulable, you have to explain us why, and what it adds to the  
explanation.
With comp, the trick of both consciousness and matter is not entirely  
computable. You have to resist to a reductionist conception of numbers  
and machines.


No computers has ever emotion "right now", they have *always* "right  
now emotions". With comp, the mind-body link is a bit tricky. Real  
consciousness is better seen to be associated to an infinity of  
computations instead of one, as we are programmed to do by years of  
local evolution.





Hence I personally find this particular Craig's position as supported.


You might miss the discovery of the universal machine and its self- 
reference logic.


Clark is right on this, emotion are easy, despite being able to run  
very deep, and to govern us. Esay but not so easy, you need the  
sensible matter non communicable hyposases.


The emotion of your laptot is unknown, and unmanifested, because your  
laptop has no deep persistant self-reference ability to share with  
you.  We want a slave, and would be anxious in front of a machine  
taking too much independence.


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-04 Thread Evgenii Rudnyi


On 04.02.2012 01:10 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/3/2012 1:50 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 03.02.2012 22:07 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/3/2012 12:23 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 02.02.2012 21:49 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/2/2012 12:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:54 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb
wrote:

On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: So kind
of you to inform us of your unsupported opinion.

I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.

Except that my opinion is supported by the fact that
within the context of chess the machine acts just like a
person who had those emotions. So it had at least the
functional equivalent of those emotions. Whereas your
opinion is simple prejudice.

I agree my opinion would be simple prejudice had we not
already been over this issue a dozen times. My view is that
the whole idea that there can be a 'functional equivalent
of emotions' is completely unsupported. I give examples of
puppets, movies, trashcans that say THANK YOU,
voicemail...all of these things demonstrate that there need
not be any connection at all between function and interior
experience.


Except that in every case there is an emotion in your
examples...it's just the emotion of the puppeter, the
screenwriter, the trashcan painter. But in the case of the
chess playing computer, there is no person providing the
'emotion' because the 'emotion' depends on complex and
unforeseeable events. Hence it is appropriate to attribute
the 'emotion' to the computer/program.

Brent


Craig's position that computers in the present form do not
have emotions is not unique, as emotions belong to
consciousness. A quote from my favorite book

Jeffrey A. Gray, Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard
Problem.

The last sentence from the chapter "10.2 Conscious computers?"

p. 128 "Our further discussion here, however, will take it as
established that his can never happen."

Now the last paragraph from the chapter "10.3 Conscious
robots?"

p. 130. "So, while we may grant robots the power to form
meaningful categorical representations at a level reached by
the unconscious brain and by the behaviour controlled by the
unconscious brain, we should remain doubtful whether they are
likely to experience conscious percepts. This conclusion should
not, however, be over-interpreted. It does not necessarily
imply that human beings will never be able to build artefacts
with conscious experience. That will depend on how the trick of
consciousness is done. If and when we know the trick, it may be
possible to duplicate it. But the mere provision of behavioural
dispositions is unlikely to be up to the mark."

If we say that computers right now have emotions, then we must
be able exactly define the difference between unconscious and
conscious experience in the computer (for example in that
computer that has won Kasparov). Can you do it?


Can you do it for people? For yourself? No. Experiments show
that people confuse the source of their own emotions. So your
requirement that we be able to "exactly define" is just something
you've invented.

Brent


I believe that there is at least a small difference. Presumably we
 know everything about the computer that has played chess. Then it
 seems that a hypothesis about emotions in that computer could be
verified without a problem - hence my notion on "exactly define".
On the other hand, consciousness remains to be a hard problem and
here "exactly define" does not work.

However, the latter does not mean that consciousness does not exist
as a phenomenon. Let us take for example life. I would say that
there is not good definition what life is ("exactly define" does
not work), yet this does not prevent science to research it. This
should be the same for conscious experience.

Evgenii


So you've reversed your theory? If computers have emotions like
people we must *not* be able to exactly define them. And if we can
exactly define them, that must prove they are not like people?


No, I do not. My point was that we can check the statement "a computer 
have emotions" exactly. Then it would be possible to check if such a 
definition applies to people. I have nothing against of such a way - 
make a hypothesis what emotion in a computer is, research it, and then 
try to apply this concept to people.


Yet, if we know in another direction, from people to computers, then 
first we should research what emotion in a human being is. Here is the 
difference with the computer, we cannot right now make a strict 
definition. We can though still research emotions in people.



Actually, if we've made an intelligent chess playing computer, one
that learns from experience, we probably don't know everything about
it. We might be able to find out - but only in the sense that in
principle we could find out all the neural connections and functions
in a human brain. It's probably easier and more certain to just watch
behavior.

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-03 Thread John Clark

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012  Craig Weinberg  wrote:

> Huge abacuses are a really good way to look at this, although it's pretty
> much the same as the China Brain.

I hope you're not talking about Searle's Chinese room, the stupidest
thought experiment in history.

> > Your position is [...] The abacus could literally be made to think
>

Yes.

> Do you see why I am incredulous about this?

No.

>  > I am crystal clear in my own understanding that no matter how good the
> program seems, Siri 5000 will feel exactly the same thing as Siri. Nothing.

I accept that you are absolutely positively 100% certain of the above, but
I do NOT accept that you are correct. I'm not a religious man so I don't
believe in divine revelation and that's the only way you could know what it
feels like to be Siri, hell you don't even know what it feels like to be me
and we are of the same species (I presume); all you can do is observe how
Siri and I behave and try to make conclusions about our inner life or like
of same from that.

> As I continue to try to explain, awareness is not a function of objects,
> it is the symmetrically anomalous counterpart of objects.

Bafflegab.

> Experiences accumulate semantic charge

Semantic charge? Poetic crapola of that sort may impress some but not me.
If you can't express your ideas clearer than that they are not worth
expressing at all.

> > The beads will never learn anything. They are only beads.
>

Computers can and do learn things and a Turing Machine can simulate any
computer and you can make a Turing Machine from beads. I won't insult your
intelligence by spelling out the obvious conclusion from that fact.

> Machines are made of unconsciousness.

 Machines are made of atoms just like you and me.

> All machines are unconscious. That is how we can control them.

A argument that is already very weak and will become DRAMATICALLY weaker in
the future. In the long run there is no way we can control computers, they
are our slave right now but that circumstance will not continue.

> That would not be necessary if the machine had any capacity to learn.
>

I don't know what you're talking about, machines have been able to learn
for decades.

>> at a fundamental level no human being could write a computer program
>> like Siri and nobody knows how it works.
>>
>
I wouldn't say we don't know how it works. Binary logic is pretty
> straightforward.
>

One binary logic operation is pretty straightforward but *20,000 trillion
of them every second is not, *and that's what today's supercomputers can
do, and they are doubling in power every 18 months.

> That's the theory. Meanwhile, in reality, we are using the same basic
> interface for computers since 1995.
>

What are you talking about? Siri is a computer interface as is Google and
even supercomputers didn't have them or anything close to it in 1995.

>>>  people in a vegetative state do sometimes have an inner life despite
>> their behavior.
>>
>
>> In the course of our conversations you have made declarative statements
> like the above dozens if not hundreds of times but you never seriously ask
> yourself "HOW DO I KNOW THIS?".
>

 >There is a lot of anecdotal evidence. People come out of comas.
>

So people come out of comas and you observe that they make certain sounds
with their mouth then you make guesses about their inner life based on
those sounds. Siri can make sounds too.

> Recently a study proved it with MRI scans where the comatose patient was
> able to stimulate areas of their brain associated with coordinated physical
> activity in response to the scientists request for them to imagine playing
> tennis.
>

And how do you know that stimulated brain areas have anything to do with
consciousness? By observing behavior when that happens and making guesses
that seem reasonable to you.

> Why doesn't it [ a trash can] behave intelligently though?

We don't know exactly why people behave intelligently so we can't give a
definitive answer why a trash can doesn't, at least not yet, but in general
I can say that unlike a computer or a brain a trash can is not organized as
a Turing Machine.

> >> Just exactly like human beings that are manufactured out of stable,
> uniform, inanimate materials like amino acids.
>
> > I disagree. Organic chemistry is volatile. It reeks.
>

Oh for God's sake, now consciousness must stink! Well when selenium
rectifiers fail they reek to high heaven!

> Molecules may be too primitive to be described as part of us.
>

Primitive or not you are made of molecules and molecules are made of atoms
and if you've seen one atom you've seen them all.

> I like how you start out grandstanding against prejudice and superficial
> assumptions and end with completely blowing off Mr. Joe Blow.

Thank you, I thought it was rather good myself.

 John K Clark

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-03 Thread meekerdb

On 2/3/2012 1:50 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 03.02.2012 22:07 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/3/2012 12:23 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 02.02.2012 21:49 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/2/2012 12:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:54 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: So kind of
you to inform us of your unsupported opinion.

I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.

Brent

Craig's position that computers in the present form do not have
emotions is not unique, as emotions belong to consciousness. A
quote from my favorite book

Jeffrey A. Gray, Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem.

The last sentence from the chapter "10.2 Conscious computers?"

p. 128 "Our further discussion here, however, will take it as
established that his can never happen."

Now the last paragraph from the chapter "10.3 Conscious robots?"

If we say that computers right now have emotions, then we must be
able exactly define the difference between unconscious and
conscious experience in the computer (for example in that computer
that has won Kasparov). Can you do it?

Can you do it for people? For yourself? No. Experiments show that
people confuse the source of their own emotions. So your requirement
that we be able to "exactly define" is just something you've
invented.

Brent

I believe that there is at least a small difference. Presumably we know everything about
the computer that has played chess. Then it seems that a hypothesis about emotions in
that computer could be verified without a problem - hence my notion on "exactly define".
On the other hand, consciousness remains to be a hard problem and here "exactly define"
does not work.

However, the latter does not mean that consciousness does not exist as a phenomenon. Let
us take for example life. I would say that there is not good definition what life is
("exactly define" does not work), yet this does not prevent science to research it. This
should be the same for conscious experience.

Evgenii

So you've reversed your theory? If computers have emotions like people we must *not* be
able to exactly define them. And if we can exactly define them, that must prove they are
not like people?

Actually, if we've made an intelligent chess playing computer, one that learns from
experience, we probably don't know everything about it. We might be able to find out -
but only in the sense that in principle we could find out all the neural connections and
functions in a human brain. It's probably easier and more certain to just watch behavior.

Brent

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-03 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Feb 3, 11:22 am, John Clark  wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 Craig Weinberg  wrote:
>
>
>
> > > An abacus is a computer. Left to it's own devices it's just a rectangle
> > of wood and bamboo or whatever.
>
> That is true so although it certainly needs to be huge we can't just make
> our very very big abacuses even bigger and expect them to be intelligent,
> its not just a hardware problem of wiring together more microchips, we must
> teach (program) the abacus to learn on its own.

Huge abacuses are a really good way to look at this, although it's
pretty much the same as the China Brain. Your position is that if we
made a gigantic abacus the size of our solar system, and had a person
manning each sliding bead, that there would be a possibility that even
though each person could only slide their bead to the left or right
according and tell others or be told by others to slide their beads
left or right, that with a well crafted enough sequences of
instructions, the abacus itself would begin to have a conscious
experience. The abacus could literally be made to think that it had
been born and come to life as a human being, a turtle, a fictional
character...anything we choose to convert into a sequence we feels
reflects the functionality of these beings will actually cause the
abacus to experience being that thing.

Do you see why I am incredulous about this? I understand that if you
assume comp this seems feasible, after all, we can make CleverBot and
Siri, etc. The problem is that CleverBot and Siri live in our very
human minds. They do not have lives and dream of being Siri II. I
understand that you and others here are convinced that logic would
dictate that we can't prove that Siri 5000 won't feel our feelings and
understand what we understand, but I am crystal clear in my own
understanding that no matter how good the program seems, Siri 5000
will feel exactly the same thing as Siri. Nothing. No more than the
instructions being called out on the scaffolds of the Mega Abacus will
begin to feel something some day. It doesn't work that way. Why? As I
continue to try to explain, awareness is not a function of objects, it
is the symmetrically anomalous counterpart of objects. Experiences
accumulate semantic charge - significance - over time, which, in a
natural circumstance, is reflected in the objective shadow, as
external agendas are reflected in the subjective experience. The
abacus and computer's instructions will never be native to them. The
beads will never learn anything. They are only beads.

>That is a very difficult
> task but enormous progress has been made in the last few years; as I said
> before, in 1998 nobody knew how to program even the largest 30 million
> dollar super abacus in the world to perform acts of intelligence that today
> can be done by that $399 iPhone abacus in your pocket.

I know. I've heard. As I say, no version is any closer to awareness of
any kind than the first version.

>
> I admit that it could turn out that humans just aren't smart enough to know
> how to teach a computer to be as smart or smarter than they are,

It's not a matter of being smart enough. You can't turn up into down.
Machines are made of unconsciousness. All machines are unconscious.
That is how we can control them. Consciousness and mechanism are
mutually exclusive by definition and always will be.

> but that
> doesn't mean it won't happen because humans have help, computers
> themselves. In a sense that's already true, a computer program needs to be
> in zeros and ones but nobody could write the Siri program that way, but we
> have computer assemblers and compilers to do that so we can write in a much
> higher level language than zeros and ones.

That would not be necessary if the machine had any capacity to learn.
Like the neurons of our brain, the microprocessors would adapt and
begin to understand natural human language.

> So at a fundamental level no
> human being could write a computer program like Siri and nobody knows how
> it works.

I wouldn't say we don't know how it works. Binary logic is pretty
straightforward.

> But programs like that get written nevertheless. And as computers
> get better the tools for writing programs get better and intelligent
> programs even more complex than Siri will get written with even less human
> understanding of their operation. The process builds on itself and thus
> accelerates.

That's the theory. Meanwhile, in reality, we are using the same basic
interface for computers since 1995.

>
> >  > people in a vegetative state do sometimes have an inner life despite
> > their behavior.
>
> In the course of our conversations you have made declarative statements
> like the above dozens if not hundreds of times but you never seriously ask
> yourself "HOW DO I KNOW THIS?".

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence. People come out of comas.
Recently a study proved it with MRI scans where the comatose patient
was able to stimulate areas of their brain associated with coord

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-03 Thread Evgenii Rudnyi


On 03.02.2012 22:07 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/3/2012 12:23 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 02.02.2012 21:49 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/2/2012 12:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:54 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: So kind of
you to inform us of your unsupported opinion.

I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.

Except that my opinion is supported by the fact that within
the context of chess the machine acts just like a person who
had those emotions. So it had at least the functional
equivalent of those emotions. Whereas your opinion is simple
prejudice.

I agree my opinion would be simple prejudice had we not
already been over this issue a dozen times. My view is that the
whole idea that there can be a 'functional equivalent of
emotions' is completely unsupported. I give examples of
puppets, movies, trashcans that say THANK YOU, voicemail...all
of these things demonstrate that there need not be any
connection at all between function and interior experience.


Except that in every case there is an emotion in your
examples...it's just the emotion of the puppeter, the
screenwriter, the trashcan painter. But in the case of the chess
playing computer, there is no person providing the 'emotion'
because the 'emotion' depends on complex and unforeseeable
events. Hence it is appropriate to attribute the 'emotion' to the
computer/program.

Brent


Craig's position that computers in the present form do not have
emotions is not unique, as emotions belong to consciousness. A
quote from my favorite book

Jeffrey A. Gray, Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem.

The last sentence from the chapter "10.2 Conscious computers?"

p. 128 "Our further discussion here, however, will take it as
established that his can never happen."

Now the last paragraph from the chapter "10.3 Conscious robots?"

p. 130. "So, while we may grant robots the power to form meaningful
 categorical representations at a level reached by the unconscious
 brain and by the behaviour controlled by the unconscious brain, we
 should remain doubtful whether they are likely to experience
conscious percepts. This conclusion should not, however, be
over-interpreted. It does not necessarily imply that human beings
will never be able to build artefacts with conscious experience.
That will depend on how the trick of consciousness is done. If and
when we know the trick, it may be possible to duplicate it. But the
mere provision of behavioural dispositions is unlikely to be up to
the mark."

If we say that computers right now have emotions, then we must be
able exactly define the difference between unconscious and
conscious experience in the computer (for example in that computer
that has won Kasparov). Can you do it?


Can you do it for people? For yourself? No. Experiments show that
people confuse the source of their own emotions. So your requirement
that we be able to "exactly define" is just something you've
invented.

Brent


I believe that there is at least a small difference. Presumably we know 
everything about the computer that has played chess. Then it seems that 
a hypothesis about emotions in that computer could be verified without a 
problem - hence my notion on "exactly define". On the other hand, 
consciousness remains to be a hard problem and here "exactly define" 
does not work.


However, the latter does not mean that consciousness does not exist as a 
phenomenon. Let us take for example life. I would say that there is not 
good definition what life is ("exactly define" does not work), yet this 
does not prevent science to research it. This should be the same for 
conscious experience.


Evgenii






Hence I personally find this particular Craig's position as
supported.

Evgenii





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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-03 Thread meekerdb


On 2/3/2012 12:23 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 02.02.2012 21:49 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/2/2012 12:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:54 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: So kind of you to
inform us of your unsupported opinion.

I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.

Except that my opinion is supported by the fact that within the
context of chess the machine acts just like a person who had
those emotions. So it had at least the functional equivalent of
those emotions. Whereas your opinion is simple prejudice.

I agree my opinion would be simple prejudice had we not already
been over this issue a dozen times. My view is that the whole idea
that there can be a 'functional equivalent of emotions' is
completely unsupported. I give examples of puppets, movies,
trashcans that say THANK YOU, voicemail...all of these things
demonstrate that there need not be any connection at all between
function and interior experience.


Except that in every case there is an emotion in your examples...it's
 just the emotion of the puppeter, the screenwriter, the trashcan
painter. But in the case of the chess playing computer, there is no
person providing the 'emotion' because the 'emotion' depends on
complex and unforeseeable events. Hence it is appropriate to
attribute the 'emotion' to the computer/program.

Brent


Craig's position that computers in the present form do not have emotions is not unique, 
as emotions belong to consciousness. A quote from my favorite book


Jeffrey A. Gray, Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem.

The last sentence from the chapter "10.2 Conscious computers?"

p. 128 "Our further discussion here, however, will take it as established that his can 
never happen."


Now the last paragraph from the chapter "10.3 Conscious robots?"

p. 130. "So, while we may grant robots the power to form meaningful categorical 
representations at a level reached by the unconscious brain and by the behaviour 
controlled by the unconscious brain, we should remain doubtful whether they are likely 
to experience conscious percepts. This conclusion should not, however, be 
over-interpreted. It does not necessarily imply that human beings will never be able to 
build artefacts with conscious experience. That will depend on how the trick of 
consciousness is done. If and when we know the trick, it may be possible to duplicate 
it. But the mere provision of behavioural dispositions is unlikely to be up to the mark."


If we say that computers right now have emotions, then we must be able exactly define 
the difference between unconscious and conscious experience in the computer (for example 
in that computer that has won Kasparov). Can you do it?


Can you do it for people? For yourself?  No.  Experiments show that people confuse the 
source of their own emotions.  So your requirement that we be able to "exactly define" is 
just something you've invented.


Brent





Hence I personally find this particular Craig's position as supported.

Evgenii



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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-03 Thread Evgenii Rudnyi


On 02.02.2012 21:49 meekerdb said the following:

On 2/2/2012 12:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:54 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: So kind of you to
inform us of your unsupported opinion.

I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.

Except that my opinion is supported by the fact that within the
context of chess the machine acts just like a person who had
those emotions. So it had at least the functional equivalent of
those emotions. Whereas your opinion is simple prejudice.

I agree my opinion would be simple prejudice had we not already
been over this issue a dozen times. My view is that the whole idea
that there can be a 'functional equivalent of emotions' is
completely unsupported. I give examples of puppets, movies,
trashcans that say THANK YOU, voicemail...all of these things
demonstrate that there need not be any connection at all between
function and interior experience.


Except that in every case there is an emotion in your examples...it's
 just the emotion of the puppeter, the screenwriter, the trashcan
painter. But in the case of the chess playing computer, there is no
person providing the 'emotion' because the 'emotion' depends on
complex and unforeseeable events. Hence it is appropriate to
attribute the 'emotion' to the computer/program.

Brent


Craig's position that computers in the present form do not have emotions 
is not unique, as emotions belong to consciousness. A quote from my 
favorite book


Jeffrey A. Gray, Consciousness: Creeping up on the Hard Problem.

The last sentence from the chapter "10.2 Conscious computers?"

p. 128 "Our further discussion here, however, will take it as 
established that his can never happen."


Now the last paragraph from the chapter "10.3 Conscious robots?"

p. 130. "So, while we may grant robots the power to form meaningful 
categorical representations at a level reached by the unconscious brain 
and by the behaviour controlled by the unconscious brain, we should 
remain doubtful whether they are likely to experience conscious 
percepts. This conclusion should not, however, be over-interpreted. It 
does not necessarily imply that human beings will never be able to build 
artefacts with conscious experience. That will depend on how the trick 
of consciousness is done. If and when we know the trick, it may be 
possible to duplicate it. But the mere provision of behavioural 
dispositions is unlikely to be up to the mark."


If we say that computers right now have emotions, then we must be able 
exactly define the difference between unconscious and conscious 
experience in the computer (for example in that computer that has won 
Kasparov). Can you do it?


Hence I personally find this particular Craig's position as supported.

Evgenii

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-03 Thread John Clark

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 Craig Weinberg  wrote:

>
> > An abacus is a computer. Left to it's own devices it's just a rectangle
> of wood and bamboo or whatever.

That is true so although it certainly needs to be huge we can't just make
our very very big abacuses even bigger and expect them to be intelligent,
its not just a hardware problem of wiring together more microchips, we must
teach (program) the abacus to learn on its own. That is a very difficult
task but enormous progress has been made in the last few years; as I said
before, in 1998 nobody knew how to program even the largest 30 million
dollar super abacus in the world to perform acts of intelligence that today
can be done by that $399 iPhone abacus in your pocket.

I admit that it could turn out that humans just aren't smart enough to know
how to teach a computer to be as smart or smarter than they are, but that
doesn't mean it won't happen because humans have help, computers
themselves. In a sense that's already true, a computer program needs to be
in zeros and ones but nobody could write the Siri program that way, but we
have computer assemblers and compilers to do that so we can write in a much
higher level language than zeros and ones. So at a fundamental level no
human being could write a computer program like Siri and nobody knows how
it works. But programs like that get written nevertheless. And as computers
get better the tools for writing programs get better and intelligent
programs even more complex than Siri will get written with even less human
understanding of their operation. The process builds on itself and thus
accelerates.

>  > people in a vegetative state do sometimes have an inner life despite
> their behavior.

In the course of our conversations you have made declarative statements
like the above dozens if not hundreds of times but you never seriously ask
yourself "HOW DO I KNOW THIS?".

> > we certainly don't owe a trashcan lid any such benefit of the doubt.

Why "certainly", why are you so certain? I know why I am but I can't figure
out why you are. Like you I also think the idea that a plastic trashcan can
have a inner life is ridiculous but unlike you I can give a clear logical
reason WHY I think it's ridiculous: a trash can does not behave
intelligently.

> Like a computer, it is manufactured out of materials selected
> specifically for their stable, uniform, inanimate properties.

Just exactly like human beings that are manufactured out of stable,
uniform, inanimate materials like amino acids.

> I understand what you mean though, and yes, our perception of something's
> behavior is a primary tool to how we think of it, but not the only one.
> More important is the influence of conventional wisdom in a given society
> or group.

At one time the conventional wisdom in society was that black people didn't
have much of a inner life, certainly nothing like that of white people, so
they could own and do whatever they wanted to people of a darker hue
without guilt. Do you really expect Mr. Joe Blow and his conventional
wisdom can teach us anything about the future of computers?

 John K Clark

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-03 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Feb 2, 4:33 pm, John Clark  wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 2, 2012  Craig Weinberg  wrote:
>
> > Do you have any examples of an intelligent organism which evolved without
> > emotion?
>
> Intelligence is not possible without emotion,

That's what I'm saying. Are you suddenly switching to my argument?

> but emotion is possible
> without intelligence.

Of course.

> And I was surprised you asked me for a example of a
> emotional organism with or without intelligence, how in the world could I
> do that?  You refuse to accept behavior as evidence for emotion or even for
> intelligence, so I can't  tell if anyone or anything is emotional or
> intelligent in the entire universe except for me.

But you can tell if something seems like it is.

>
> > > The whole idea of evolution 'figuring out' anything is not consistent
> > with our understanding of natural selection.
>
> It's a figure of speech.
>
> > > Natural selection is not teleological.
>
> A keen grasp of the obvious.

Sorry, I can't tell the difference here if you are using it as a
figure of speech or positing agency to evolution. Even using that as a
figure of speech suggests an exaggeration of the role of evolution in
the universe.

>
> > The subject was things that influenced my theory. Light, electricity, and
> > electromagnetism are significant influences.
>
> Electromagnetism significantly influences everything as do the other 3
> fundamental physical forces. Tell me something new.

If I yell out 'Tesla' and then get hit by lightning, is that not
associated strongly enough for you to be noticed?

>
> > > What do you think understanding is actually supposed to lead to?
>
> Your ideas lead to navel gazing not understanding.

And your ideas lead to...?

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-03 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Feb 2, 4:05 pm, John Clark  wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 Craig Weinberg  wrote:
>
> > My view is that the whole idea that there can be a 'functional equivalent
> > of emotions' is completely unsupported. I give examples of puppets
>
> A puppet needs a puppeteer, a computer does not.

Yes it does. It needs a user at some point to make any sense at all of
what the computer is doing. An abacus is a computer. Left to it's own
devices it's just a rectangle of wood and bamboo or whatever. Attach a
motor to it that does computations with it, and you still have a
rectangle of wood with a metal motor attached to it clicking out
meaningless non-patterns in the abacus with nothing to recognize the
patterns but the occasional ant getting injured by a rapidly sliding
bead.

>
> > movies, trashcans that say THANK YOU, voicemail...all of these things
> > demonstrate that there need not be any connection at all between function
> > and interior experience.
>
> For all these examples to be effective you would need to know that they do
> not have a inner life, and how do you know they don't have a inner life.
> You know because they don't behave as if they have a inner life. Behavior
> is the only tool we have for detecting such things in others so your
> examples are useless.

No, because people in a vegetative state do sometimes have an inner
life despite their behavior. It is our similarity to and familiarity
with other humans that encourages us to give them the benefit of the
doubt. We go the extra mile to see if we can figure out if they are
still alive. Most of us don't care as much whether a steer is alive
when we are executing it for hamburger patties or a carrot feels
something when we rip it out of the ground. With that in mind, we
certainly don't owe a trashcan lid any such benefit of the doubt. Like
a computer, it is manufactured out of materials selected specifically
for their stable, uniform, inanimate properties. I understand what you
mean though, and yes, our perception of something's behavior is a
primary tool to how we think of it, but not the only one. More
important is the influence of conventional wisdom in a given society
or group. We like to eat beef so most of us rationalize it without
much thought despite the sentient behavior of steer. We like the idea
of AI so we project the possibility of feeling and understanding on it
- we go out of our way to prove that it is possible despite the
automatic and mechanical behavior of the instruments.

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-02 Thread John Clark

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012  Craig Weinberg  wrote:

> Do you have any examples of an intelligent organism which evolved without
> emotion?

Intelligence is not possible without emotion, but emotion is possible
without intelligence. And I was surprised you asked me for a example of a
emotional organism with or without intelligence, how in the world could I
do that?  You refuse to accept behavior as evidence for emotion or even for
intelligence, so I can't  tell if anyone or anything is emotional or
intelligent in the entire universe except for me.

> > The whole idea of evolution 'figuring out' anything is not consistent
> with our understanding of natural selection.

It's a figure of speech.

> > Natural selection is not teleological.

A keen grasp of the obvious.

> The subject was things that influenced my theory. Light, electricity, and
> electromagnetism are significant influences.
>

Electromagnetism significantly influences everything as do the other 3
fundamental physical forces. Tell me something new.

> > What do you think understanding is actually supposed to lead to?
>

Your ideas lead to navel gazing not understanding.

  John K Clark

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-02 Thread John Clark

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 Craig Weinberg  wrote:

> My view is that the whole idea that there can be a 'functional equivalent
> of emotions' is completely unsupported. I give examples of puppets

A puppet needs a puppeteer, a computer does not.

> movies, trashcans that say THANK YOU, voicemail...all of these things
> demonstrate that there need not be any connection at all between function
> and interior experience.
>

For all these examples to be effective you would need to know that they do
not have a inner life, and how do you know they don't have a inner life?
You know because they don't behave as if they have a inner life. Behavior
is the only tool we have for detecting such things in others so your
examples are useless.

   John K Clark

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-02 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Jan 31, 3:25 pm, John Mikes  wrote:
> Craig and Brent:
> would you kindly disclose an opinion that can be
> deemed  "SUPPORTED"
>
> All our 'support' (evidence, verification whatever) comes from mostly
> uninformed information fragments we receive by observation(?) of the
> already accessible details and try to complete them by the available
> 'knowledge' already established as "conventional science" stuff.
> We use instruments, constructed to work on the just described portion of
> observations and evaluate the 'received'(?) data by our flimsy
> (*human?)*mathematical logic ONLY.

Yes! This is a core assumption of multisense realism. I go a step
further to describe that not only do our observations arise entirely
from our the qualities of our observational capacities (senses, sense
making), but that the the nature of our senses are such that what we
observe as being within us 'seems to be' many different ways, but the
more distant observations are understood in terms of facts that
'simply are'. This forms the basis for our human worldviews, with the
far-sighted approaches being overly anthropomorphic and the
mechanistic approaches being the near-sighted view.

> Just compare "opinions" (scientific that is) of different ages before (and
> after) different levels of accepted (and believed!) informational basis
> (like Flat Earth, BEFORE electricity, BEFORE Marie Curie, Watson, etc.)
>
> My "worldview" (and my narrative, of course) is also based on UNSUPPORTED
> OPINION:  "mine".

Exactly. This is the native orientation of the universe. The impulse
to validate that opinion externally is valuable, but it also can
seduce us into a false certainty. This is not an illusion, it is
actually how the universe works. In my unsupported opinion.

Craig

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-02 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Jan 31, 1:33 pm, John Clark  wrote:
>
>
>
> > > The Limbic system predates the Neocortex evolutionarily.
>
> As I've said on this list many times.
>
> > > There is no reason to think that emotion emerged after intelligence.
>
> And as I've said emotion is about 500 million years old but Evolution found
> intelligence much harder to produce, it only figured out how to do it about
> a million years ago, perhaps less.

Do you have any examples of an intelligent organism which evolved
without emotion? The whole idea of evolution 'figuring out' anything
is not consistent with our understanding of natural selection. Natural
selection is not teleological. There is no figuring, only statistical
probabilities related to environmental conditions.
>
> > Evolution doesn't see anything.
>
> Don't be ridiculous.

I'm not. Statistics don't see things.

>
> > Which thoughtless fallacy should I choose? Oh right, I have no free will
> > anyhow so some reason will choose for me.
>
> Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string "free will" means.
>
> > > You asked what influenced my theory. You don't see how Tesla relates to
> > lightning and electromagnetism?
>
> I made a Tesla Coil when I was 14, it was great fun looked great and really
> impressed the rubes, but I don't see the relevance to the subject at hand.

The subject was things that influenced my theory. Light, electricity,
and electromagnetism are significant influences.

>
> > That is exactly what the cosmos is - things happening for a reason and
> > not happening for a
> > reason at the same time.
>
> And you expect this sort of new age crapola to actually lead to something,

What do you think understanding is actually supposed to lead to?

> like a basic understanding of how the world works? Dream on. But then again
> it might work if you're right about logic not existing.

Logic exists, but it's not the only thing that exists.

>
> > Is there anyone noteworthy in the history of human progress who has not
> > been called insane?
>
> Richard Feynman.

http://inspirescience.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/richard-p-feynman1/

Richard P. Feynman – Crazy as he is Genius

"He didn’t do things through conventional or traditional means, but
rather was eccentric, crazy, and went against the norms of society. He
was an explorer of the deepest nature. He adopted at a young age the
philosophy that you should never care what other people think, because
everyone else is most likely wrong."

"When I see equations, I see the letters in colors – I don't know
why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from
Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish
n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it
must look like to the students." - Richard Feynman.

Craig

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-02 Thread meekerdb

On 2/2/2012 12:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:54 pm, meekerdb wrote:

On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdbwrote:

On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
So kind of you to inform us of your unsupported opinion.

I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.

Except that my opinion is supported by the fact that within the context of
chess the
machine acts just like a person who had those emotions. So it had at least the
functional
equivalent of those emotions. Whereas your opinion is simple prejudice.

I agree my opinion would be simple prejudice had we not already been
over this issue a dozen times. My view is that the whole idea that
there can be a 'functional equivalent of emotions' is completely
unsupported. I give examples of puppets, movies, trashcans that say
THANK YOU, voicemail...all of these things demonstrate that there need
not be any connection at all between function and interior experience.

Except that in every case there is an emotion in your examples...it's just the emotion of
the puppeter, the screenwriter, the trashcan painter. But in the case of the chess
playing computer, there is no person providing the 'emotion' because the 'emotion' depends
on complex and unforeseeable events. Hence it is appropriate to attribute the 'emotion'
to the computer/program.

Brent

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-02-02 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Jan 30, 6:54 pm, meekerdb  wrote:
> On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> > On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb  wrote:
> >> On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> >> So kind of you to inform us of your unsupported opinion.
> > I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.
>
> Except that my opinion is supported by the fact that within the context of 
> chess the
> machine acts just like a person who had those emotions.  So it had at least 
> the functional
> equivalent of those emotions. Whereas your opinion is simple prejudice.

I agree my opinion would be simple prejudice had we not already been
over this issue a dozen times. My view is that the whole idea that
there can be a 'functional equivalent of emotions' is completely
unsupported. I give examples of puppets, movies, trashcans that say
THANK YOU, voicemail...all of these things demonstrate that there need
not be any connection at all between function and interior experience.

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-01-31 Thread John Mikes

Craig and Brent:
would you kindly disclose an opinion that can be
deemed  "SUPPORTED"

All our 'support' (evidence, verification whatever) comes from mostly
uninformed information fragments we receive by observation(?) of the
already accessible details and try to complete them by the available
'knowledge' already established as "conventional science" stuff.
We use instruments, constructed to work on the just described portion of
observations and evaluate the 'received'(?) data by our flimsy
(*human?)*mathematical logic ONLY.
Just compare "opinions" (scientific that is) of different ages before (and
after) different levels of accepted (and believed!) informational basis
(like Flat Earth, BEFORE electricity, BEFORE Marie Curie, Watson, etc.)

My "worldview" (and my narrative, of course) is also based on UNSUPPORTED
OPINION:  "mine".

John Mikes

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 6:54 PM, meekerdb  wrote:

> On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb   
> wrote:
>
> On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> So kind of you to inform us of your unsupported opinion.
>
> I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.
>
>
>
> Except that my opinion is supported by the fact that within the context of
> chess the machine acts just like a person who had those emotions.  So it
> had at least the functional equivalent of those emotions. Whereas your
> opinion is simple prejudice.
>
> Brent
>
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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-01-31 Thread John Clark

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012  Craig Weinberg  wrote:

>
> > The Limbic system predates the Neocortex evolutionarily.

As I've said on this list many times.

> > There is no reason to think that emotion emerged after intelligence.
>

And as I've said emotion is about 500 million years old but Evolution found
intelligence much harder to produce, it only figured out how to do it about
a million years ago, perhaps less.

> Evolution doesn't see anything.

Don't be ridiculous.

> Which thoughtless fallacy should I choose? Oh right, I have no free will
> anyhow so some reason will choose for me.
>

Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string "free will" means.

> > You asked what influenced my theory. You don't see how Tesla relates to
> lightning and electromagnetism?
>

I made a Tesla Coil when I was 14, it was great fun looked great and really
impressed the rubes, but I don't see the relevance to the subject at hand.

> That is exactly what the cosmos is - things happening for a reason and
> not happening for a
> reason at the same time.
>

And you expect this sort of new age crapola to actually lead to something,
like a basic understanding of how the world works? Dream on. But then again
it might work if you're right about logic not existing.

> Is there anyone noteworthy in the history of human progress who has not
> been called insane?
>

Richard Feynman.

  John K Clark

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness


On 1/30/2012 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb  wrote:

On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
So kind of you to inform us of your unsupported opinion.

I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.



Except that my opinion is supported by the fact that within the context of chess the 
machine acts just like a person who had those emotions.  So it had at least the functional 
equivalent of those emotions. Whereas your opinion is simple prejudice.


Brent

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-01-30 Thread L.W. Sterritt

On Jan 30, 5:16 pm, meekerdb  wrote:

> Sure it did.  If it had been equipped to express them they would have been 
> something like,
> "This position feels good."  "That position feels weak." etc.  Not much 
> range...but
> emotions nevertheless.

You seriously believe that? Wow. That make Santa Claus seem quite
plausible by comparison to me.

What Deep Blue thinks can be expressed directly as a memory dump. It
looks like hex code. It has zero feelings, zero thoughts. It's a
sewing machine that moves chess pieces instead of stitches.

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

On Jan 30, 6:08 pm, meekerdb  wrote:
> On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

> So kind of you to inform us of your unsupported opinion.

I was commenting on your unsupported opinion.

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness


On 1/30/2012 2:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Jan 30, 5:16 pm, meekerdb  wrote:


Sure it did.  If it had been equipped to express them they would have been 
something like,
"This position feels good."  "That position feels weak." etc.  Not much 
range...but
emotions nevertheless.

You seriously believe that? Wow. That make Santa Claus seem quite
plausible by comparison to me.

What Deep Blue thinks can be expressed directly as a memory dump. It
looks like hex code. It has zero feelings, zero thoughts.


So kind of you to inform us of your unsupported opinion.

Brent



It's a
sewing machine that moves chess pieces instead of stitches.



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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

On Jan 30, 5:16 pm, meekerdb  wrote:

> Sure it did.  If it had been equipped to express them they would have been 
> something like,
> "This position feels good."  "That position feels weak." etc.  Not much 
> range...but
> emotions nevertheless.

You seriously believe that? Wow. That make Santa Claus seem quite
plausible by comparison to me.

What Deep Blue thinks can be expressed directly as a memory dump. It
looks like hex code. It has zero feelings, zero thoughts. It's a
sewing machine that moves chess pieces instead of stitches.

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness


On 1/30/2012 10:27 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012  meekerdb mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:

> Of course evolution can't 'see' intelligence either.  As you say 
selection can
only be based on action.  But action takes emotion


OK I have no problem with that, but then Deep Blue had emotions way back in 1996



Sure it did.  If it had been equipped to express them they would have been something like, 
"This position feels good."  "That position feels weak." etc.  Not much range...but 
emotions nevertheless.


Brent

when it beat the best human Chess  player in the world because in the course of that 
game Deep Blue performed actions, very intelligent actions in fact. As I've said many 
times emotion is easy but intelligence is hard.


 John K Clark


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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

On Jan 30, 1:27 pm, John Clark  wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 30, 2012  meekerdb  wrote:
>
> > Of course evolution can't 'see' intelligence either.  As you say
> > selection can only be based on action.  But action takes emotion
>
> OK I have no problem with that, but then Deep Blue had emotions way back in
> 1996 when it beat the best human Chess  player in the world because in the
> course of that game Deep Blue performed actions, very intelligent actions
> in fact. As I've said many times emotion is easy but intelligence is hard.

These are the absurdities that arise from deciding that AI is
literally intelligence. Why stop there, why not say Deep Blue must
have had a stomach and teeth?

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

On Jan 30, 12:47 pm, John Clark  wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 8:53 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>
> > I just understand that intelligence is an evolution of emotion,
>
> There is simply no logical way that could be true.

I think that it's a medical fact. 
http://www.mta.org/eweb/docs/journal/2000/summer/Figure3-1.JPG

The Limbic system predates the Neocortex evolutionarily. There is no
reason to think that emotion emerged after intelligence.

> However important it may
> be to us Evolution can not see emotion or consciousness, Evolution can only
> see actions,

Evolution doesn't see anything. If you live somewhere that gets cold
and you die before you can reproduce then evolution has selected for
your neighbors in warmer climes. There is no action that would have
changed that outcome, unless you could have gotten to a warmer place.
If you happened to be someone who really disliked the cold, if it made
you so upset and cranky that it caused you to migrate sooner, well
then, evolution selected for emotion and consciousness related to cold
weather.

That's not what I'm talking about at all though. I'm talking about the
logic of what emotion is leading to thinking and not the other way
around. If you cannot feel emotion, you never will regardless of your
thought patterns. If you are emotional however, you can develop
thoughts. This is the natural course of development in human infancy.
Sensation first, then emotion, then communication.

> so either emotion and consciousness are a byproduct of
> intelligence or emotion and consciousness do not exist.

Which thoughtless fallacy should I choose? Oh right, I have no free
will anyhow so some reason will choose for me.

Emotion and consciousness are not a byproduct of intelligence. If they
were, then babies would be discussing theories in the womb instead of
crying and crapping all over themselves.

> Perhaps you will
> insist that emotion and consciousness will join the very long list of
> things that you say do not exist  (bits electrons information logic etc)
> but I am of the opinion that consciousness and emotion do in fact exist.

Perhaps you will join the very long list of people who have bothered
to notice how the evolution of the human brain and mind actually
occurs.

>
> > > I also understand that electronic computers use semiconductors which I
> > know have not evolved into organisms and do not seem to be capable of what
> > I would call sensation.
>
> My arguments are based on logic, your argument is that computers just don't
> feel squishy enough for your taste.

What logic is your argument based on? That there's no difference
between life and death so there's no reason that a marionette can't
run for congress?

>
> > Logic plays a part but mainly it's [...]
>
> Not logical.
>
> > My house got struck by lightning right after I really figured out the
> > photon theory. I had left my computer on with a website on the biography of
> > Tesla on the screen while we saw a movie. True 
> > story.http://www.stationlink.com/lightning/IMG_1981.JPG
>
> Interesting, but I don't see the relevance.

You asked what influenced my theory. You don't see how Tesla relates
to lightning and electromagnetism?

>
> > > You don't deny free will, you just deny that it's possible to even
> > conceive of it in the first place. Ohh kayy...
>
> Fortunately I cannot conceive of something happening for a reason and not
> happening for a reason at the same time.

Actually, you have just defined the universe. That is exactly what the
cosmos is - things happening for a reason and not happening for a
reason at the same time.

> I say "fortunately" because there
> is a word to describe people who can conceive of such a contradiction,
> insane.

Is there anyone noteworthy in the history of human progress who has
not been called insane?

>
> > 'Computers' that are in use now have not even improved meaningfully in
> > the last 15 years. Is Windows 7, XP, 2000, really much better then Windows
> > 98?
>
> I don't know a lot about Windows 7 but I do know that my Macintosh is one
> hell of a lot better than my old steam powered Windows 98 boat anchor.

Mac has always been better than Windoze.

> And
> in 1998 the most elite AI researchers on the planet working with 30 million
> dollar supercomputers the size of a small cathedral could not do anything
> that came even close to what Siri can do on that $399 iPhone in your
> pocket, those poor 1998 guys weren't even in the same universe.

Hooray. Siri. Way better than electric lights or movies or cars or
planes.

>
> And it took Evolution 4 billion years to make human level intelligence, but
> humans have only been working on AI for about 50 years. So yes at that rate
> I think computers will be smarter than humans at EVERYTHING in 15 to 65
> years, and I'd be more surprised if it took longer than 65 years than if it
> took less than 15; but even if it took 10 or 100 times that long it would
> still be virtually instantaneous on the geological ti

Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-01-30 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 30 Jan 2012, at 19:36, Bruno Marchal wrote:



On 30 Jan 2012, at 19:13, meekerdb wrote:


On 1/30/2012 9:47 AM, John Clark wrote:



> I just understand that intelligence is an evolution of emotion,

There is simply no logical way that could be true. However  
important it may be to us Evolution can not see emotion or  
consciousness, Evolution can only see actions, so either emotion  
and consciousness are a byproduct of intelligence or emotion and  
consciousness do not exist. Perhaps you will insist that emotion  
and consciousness will join the very long list of things that you  
say do not exist  (bits electrons information logic etc) but I am  
of the opinion that consciousness and emotion do in fact exist.


Of course evolution can't 'see' intelligence either.  As you say  
selection can only be based on action.  But action takes emotion,  
in the general sense of desiring one thing (food, sex,...) and  
disliking another (pain, being eaten,...). So I'd say emotion,  
knowing what you value, is as important as intelligence, knowing  
how to get it.


I can agree more :)

Reason is the servant of the heart.
I think. Arguably in machines' theology. With reasonable definitions.

We are more defined by our value, than by our flesh. I think (that's  
a bit obvious in comp).


I meant "our values".

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-01-30 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 30 Jan 2012, at 19:13, meekerdb wrote:


On 1/30/2012 9:47 AM, John Clark wrote:



> I just understand that intelligence is an evolution of emotion,

There is simply no logical way that could be true. However  
important it may be to us Evolution can not see emotion or  
consciousness, Evolution can only see actions, so either emotion  
and consciousness are a byproduct of intelligence or emotion and  
consciousness do not exist. Perhaps you will insist that emotion  
and consciousness will join the very long list of things that you  
say do not exist  (bits electrons information logic etc) but I am  
of the opinion that consciousness and emotion do in fact exist.


Of course evolution can't 'see' intelligence either.  As you say  
selection can only be based on action.  But action takes emotion, in  
the general sense of desiring one thing (food, sex,...) and  
disliking another (pain, being eaten,...). So I'd say emotion,  
knowing what you value, is as important as intelligence, knowing how  
to get it.


I can agree more :)

Reason is the servant of the heart.
I think. Arguably in machines' theology. With reasonable definitions.

We are more defined by our value, than by our flesh. I think (that's a  
bit obvious in comp).


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Intelligence and consciousness

2012-01-30 Thread John Clark

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012  meekerdb  wrote:

> Of course evolution can't 'see' intelligence either.  As you say
> selection can only be based on action.  But action takes emotion
>

OK I have no problem with that, but then Deep Blue had emotions way back in
1996 when it beat the best human Chess  player in the world because in the
course of that game Deep Blue performed actions, very intelligent actions
in fact. As I've said many times emotion is easy but intelligence is hard.

 John K Clark

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Re: Intelligence and consciousness