RE: The Totally Blind Zombie Homunculus Room
Colin, I think I am missing the main point: is the room + Marvin meant to be a zombie or not? Stathis Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2006 17:20:19 +1100 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: The Totally Blind Zombie Homunculus Room To: everything-list@googlegroups.com This discussion is a hybrid of a number of very famous thought experiments. Unlike those thought experiments, however, this experiment is aimed purely and only at scientists. The intent is to demonstrate clearly and definitively the nature of subjective experience (phenomenal consciousness) and its primal role in a scientist's ability to function as a scientist. Imagine a room. Its walls and celing and floor are matt black. There are no doors or windows. All over the walls are digital displays which announce numbers in warm, friendly colours. Up against all four walls and up to international standard control desk height (roughly 750mm) is a sloping console. Covering the console around all four walls are pushbuttons. The number of displays is equal to the number of sensory nerves entering a typical human brain from the peripheral nervous systems including all sensory input. The number of pushbuttons is equal to the entire set of effector nerves emanating from a typical brain. This total number of displays and pushbuttons is in the millions. There is a comfortable chair upon which is seated the room's sole occupant, Marvin the human. Marvin is normal except for never having been outside the room and having never otherwise acquired any knowledge of anything other than that of the room and its contents. He knows absolutely nothing of any sort of external world or any other people. He has no clue about the external world except for what he can surmise from the displays and buttons. Marvin, like all healthy humans, has an experiential life which is the collection of private phenomenal scenes delivered by his brain material. These are operating normally except that Marvin has been deprived of all the phenomenal content (experiences) that he ever could have received had he been allowed outside the room. He has had a lifetime of experiences, but all of them have been confined to depicting the room. Marvin is a scientist. He studies the science of not-room. His life consists of experiments which involve the pressing of buttons and the recording of patterns in the displays. Over time an enormous volume of data begins to show patterns for which Marvin constructs models. The models are generalisations of the behaviour of the displays after buttons are pushed in a certain way. He tests and refines the models and has developed a form of symbolic representation of the behaviour of the displays. Certain features on the display occur regularly enough that names have been given to notional not-room phenomena. One is called the tronelec. The mathematics of not-room includes a lot of rules about the behaviour of tronelecs. In time Marvin realises that his exploration of not-room can be done according to routine rules and he sets about a systematic, exhaustive assay of the entire range of possible button/display relationships. Everything is going nicely but then one day a well known pattern does not occur the way it used to. After a while the old pattern resumes. The whole mathematics of not-room is undermined. It takes a long time for Marvin to construct a new model that accounts for the novel behaviour. A new entity called gytravi is needed. Then things settle down and routine systematic exploration resumes. In time a massive collection of not-room entities and behavioural rules is constructed and begins to repeat itself. So much so that Marvin, after checking and rechecking, finds that the model seems to have stabilised. At this point we stop to survey the situation. The first thing to note is that the room is an empirically verified physiologically accurate representation of the sensory circumstances of a human brain. Nervous activity effect/affect is replicated by buttons/displays and all signals are standardised. There are no experiential qualities (perceptual sensation qualities) associated with this nervous activity. This is a physiologically verified, well established empirical fact. Indeed the room is a little too kind - If you discarded all the buttons and displays, then that is a more physiologically accurate circumstance . The main point is that this collection of totally sensationless signals is exactly what is available to a human brain and through which all sense measurement arrives. Consider the room without a Marvin in it. Based on what evidence is there any reason to even conceptualise the existence of an external world? Nothing in that room gives any indication of it. There is no a-priori knowledge of not-room. No possible way to interpret any of the signals. All there is is correlated behaviour - the behaviour of
Re: Hypostases (was: Natural Order Belief)
Le 29-nov.-06, à 05:57, Tom Caylor a écrit : Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 24-nov.-06, à 10:03, Tom Caylor a écrit : Have you read Francis Schaeffer's trilogy of books: The God Who Is There, Escape From Reason, and He Is There And He Is Not Silent. He talks about the consequences of the belief in the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. No. But if you want to send a little summary, please do. If by uniformity of natural causes in a closed system you mean something describable by a total computable function, I can understand the point (but recall I don't assume neither the notion of Nature nor of Cause). Now, the computerland is closed for diagonalization only. That is something quite different, making computerland much open than anything describable by total computable functions. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ There is no way that I can give a little summary, but I'll try anyway. I think this will also go towards addressing Stathis' allusion to faith. One thing Schaeffer did was remind us that the assumptions of nature and cause were foundational to modern science. We have to assume that there is a nature to reality in order to study it and use our reason to make sense of it. Reality has to make sense inherently, i.e. it has to have an order to it, in order for us to make sense of it. Our reason (rationality) makes use of antithesis, to induce cause and effect. Perhaps nature and cause do not appear as formal assumptions in comp, but do you not make use of a belief in them in the process of thinking and talking about comp, and surely in the process of empirically verifying/falsifying it? Sure. Schaeffer maintained that the basis for antithesis is not that it was an invention of Aristotle or anyone, but that the basis for antithesis is reality itself, based on the God who is there (as opposed to not being there). I agree with this a priori. At this stage making a difference between reality, nature and god seems to me to be 1004 fallacies. In order to have the motivation for doing science you have to believe in some reality. The existence of the personal God answers the questions: 1) Why is there something rather than nothing? i.e. the question of the origin of the form of the universe, why does it make sense? What is the basis for the nature of reality and beauty? Here I disagree. The existence of God does not explain why is there something rather than nothing. It could be a promise for such an explanation but using god or reality as an explanation does not work, indeed such belief are related to faith. There is a difference between believing or trusting God, and using badly the God notion for explaining genuine problem away. 2) Why is man the way he/she is? Why is man able to have language and do science, and make sense of the world? Why is man able to love and figure out what is right? What is the basis for meaning? What is the basis for mind? How can persons know one another? 3) Why is man able to know anything, and know that he knows what he knows? What is the basis for truth? What is truth? Here the comp hyp provides genuine answers including testable predictions. Of course the comp hyp presuppose a reality (number's reality, truth about numbers). Then it can explain why we have to have some faith in numbers in the sense that we cannot explain numbers from something simpler. However, from the birth of modern science, we have taken a journey to dispense with any kind of faith Let us define faith by belief in unproved or unprovable truth. The idea that science dispense with faith is a myth. A lot of physicists have faith in a primitive physical reality (I lost *that* faith unless you enlarge the sense of physics). and try to be exhaustive in our automony and control. Ironically we have abandoned rationality (including antithesis), I agree. We have abandoned rationality in theology (the science of the fundamental reality whatever it is, say) since a long time, and this made us partially abandoning rationality in the study of nature, appearances, etc. as well. For some reason many scientist just abandon the scientific attitude when they talk in fields in which they are not expert, instead of remaining silent. And this is doubly true when the field in which they are not expert is related to fundamental question. and we have abandoned ourselves to ourselves. That is a poetical way to put the things, but remember that if we are machine there are at least about 2 * 8 utterly different (and interacting, sometimes conflicting) sense for ourselves, some including notions of faith. So some care is needed here. We are lost in a silent sea of meaningless 0's and 1's, and man is a machine. ??? You talk like if you were subscribing to some pre-godelian reductionist conception of machine (like so many materialist). This is why I said that when we put ourselves
RE: Hypostases (was: Natural Order Belief)
Tom Caylor writes: Have you read Francis Schaeffer's trilogy of books: The God Who Is There, Escape From Reason, and He Is There And He Is Not Silent. He talks about the consequences of the belief in the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. There is no way that I can give a little summary, but I'll try anyway. I think this will also go towards addressing Stathis' allusion to faith. One thing Schaeffer did was remind us that the assumptions of nature and cause were foundational to modern science. We have to assume that there is a nature to reality in order to study it and use our reason to make sense of it. Reality has to make sense inherently, i.e. it has to have an order to it, in order for us to make sense of it. Our reason (rationality) makes use of antithesis, to induce cause and effect. Perhaps nature and cause do not appear as formal assumptions in comp, but do you not make use of a belief in them in the process of thinking and talking about comp, and surely in the process of empirically verifying/falsifying it? Who said nature has to make sense? We make sense of it to the extent that it is ordered, but it goes: we can make sense of nature, therefore it must be ordered, not, nature must be ordered, therefore we should be able to make sense of it. You didn't exactly say the latter, I know, but my assumption is that the universe doesn't care in the slightest what I think or what happens to me, which is not something theists are generally comfortable with. Schaeffer maintained that the basis for antithesis is not that it was an invention of Aristotle or anyone, but that the basis for antithesis is reality itself, based on the God who is there (as opposed to not being there). The existence of the personal God answers the questions: 1) Why is there something rather than nothing? i.e. the question of the origin of the form of the universe, why does it make sense? What is the basis for the nature of reality and beauty? 2) Why is man the way he/she is? Why is man able to have language and do science, and make sense of the world? Why is man able to love and figure out what is right? What is the basis for meaning? What is the basis for mind? How can persons know one another? 3) Why is man able to know anything, and know that he knows what he knows? What is the basis for truth? What is truth? The first two questions are difficult, but they apply to God as much as the universe, despite ontological argument trickery whereby God is just defined as existing necessarily (Gaunilo's answer to Anselm was that you can also just define a perfect island as an island which exists necessarily, and therefore cannot not exist). The other questions are easy: blind evolution made us this way. However, from the birth of modern science, we have taken a journey to dispense with any kind of faith and try to be exhaustive in our automony and control. Ironically we have abandoned rationality (including antithesis), and we have abandoned ourselves to ourselves. We are lost in a silent sea of meaningless 0's and 1's, and man is a machine. This is why I said that when we put ourselves at the center of our worldview, it is a prison. Er, science is usually taken as more concerned with rationality than religion and less anthropocentric than religion. Turning it around seems more a rhetorical ploy than a defensible position. Stathis Papaioannou _ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: UDA revisited
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: David Nyman writes: You're right - it's muddled, but as you imply there is the glimmer of an idea trying to break through. What I'm saying is that the 'functional' - i.e. 3-person description - not only of the PZ, but of *anything* - fails to capture the information necessary for PC. Now, this isn't intended as a statement of belief in magic, but rather that the 'uninstantiated' 3-person level (i.e. when considered abstractly) is simply a set of *transactions*. But - beyond the abstract - the instantiation or substrate of these transactions is itself an information 'domain' - the 1-person level - that in principle must be inaccessible via the transactions alone - i.e. you can't see it 'out there'. But by the same token it is directly accessible via instantiation - i.e. you can see it 'in here' For this to be what is producing PC, the instantiating, or constitutive, level must be providing whatever information is necessary to 'animate' 3-person transactional 'data' in phenomenal form, and in addition whatever processes are contingent on phenomenally-animated perception must be causally effective at the 3-person level (if we are to believe that possessing PC actually makes a difference). This seems a bit worrying in terms of the supposed inadmissability of 'hidden variables' in QM (i.e the transactional theory of reality). Notwithstanding this, if what I'm saying is true (which no doubt it isn't), then it would appear that information over and above what is manifested transactionally would be required to account for PC, and for whatever transactional consequences are contingent on the possession of PC. Just to be clear about PZs, it would be a consequence of the foregoing that a functionally-equivalent analog of a PC entity *might* possess PC, but that this would depend critically on the functional *substitution level*. We could be confident that physical cloning (duplication) would find the right level, but in the absence of this, and without a theory of instantiation, we would be forced to rely on the *behaviour* of the analog in assessing whether it possessed PC. But, on reflection, this seems right. You seem to be implying that there is something in the instantiation which cannot be captured in the 3rd person description. Could this something just be identified as the raw feeling of PC from the inside, generated by perfectly well understood physics, with no causal effects of its own? Let me give a much simpler example than human consciousness. Suppose that when a hammer hits a nail, it groks the nail. Grokking is not something that can be explained to a non-hammer. There is no special underlying physics: whenever momentum is transferred from the hammer to the nail, grokking necessarily occurs. It is no more possible for a hammer to hit a nail without grokking it than it is possible for a hammer to hit a nail without hitting it. Because of this, it doesn't really make sense to say that grokking causes anything: the 3rd person describable physics completely defines all hammer-nail interactions, which is why we have all gone through life never suspecting that hammers grok. The idea of a zombie (non-grokking) hammer is philosophically problematic. We would have to invoke magic to explain how of two physically identical hammers doing identical things, one is a zombie and the other is normal. (There is no evidence that there is anything magic about grokking. Mysterious though it may seem, it's just a natural part of being a hammer). Still, we can imagine that God has created a zombie hammer, indistinguishable from normal hammers no matter what test we put it through. This would imply that there is some non-third person describable aspect of hammers responsible for their ability to grok nails. OK: we knew that already, didn't we? It is what makes grokking special, private, and causally irrelevant from a third person perspective. Stathis Papaioannou Very well put, Stathis. And an apt example since to grok actually is an english word meaning to understand intuitively. So when you understand that A and B entails A, it is because you grok and. Intuitive understanding is not communicable directly. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Hypostases
Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 29-nov.-06, à 05:57, Tom Caylor a écrit : However, from the birth of modern science, we have taken a journey to dispense with any kind of faith Let us define faith by belief in unproved or unprovable truth. The idea that science dispense with faith is a myth. A lot of physicists have faith in a primitive physical reality (I lost *that* faith unless you enlarge the sense of physics). This is a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of faith. It makes my belief that I'm married to a woman named Marsha a matter of faith, since that is unprovable in the logical or mathematical sense of proof. On the other hand if you accept the commonsense or legal standard of proof, then belief in physical reality is very well proven. I'd say let us continue to define faith as a belief in the absence of evidence or contrary to the weight of evidence. All that is needed to pursue comp and AR is an hypothesis - not a belief. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Hypostases (was: Natural Order Belief)
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Tom Caylor writes: Have you read Francis Schaeffer's trilogy of books: The God Who Is There, Escape From Reason, and He Is There And He Is Not Silent. He talks about the consequences of the belief in the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. There is no way that I can give a little summary, but I'll try anyway. I think this will also go towards addressing Stathis' allusion to faith. One thing Schaeffer did was remind us that the assumptions of nature and cause were foundational to modern science. We have to assume that there is a nature to reality in order to study it and use our reason to make sense of it. Reality has to make sense inherently, i.e. it has to have an order to it, in order for us to make sense of it. Our reason (rationality) makes use of antithesis, to induce cause and effect. Perhaps nature and cause do not appear as formal assumptions in comp, but do you not make use of a belief in them in the process of thinking and talking about comp, and surely in the process of empirically verifying/falsifying it? Who said nature has to make sense? We make sense of it to the extent that it is ordered, but it goes: we can make sense of nature, therefore it must be ordered, not, nature must be ordered, therefore we should be able to make sense of it. You didn't exactly say the latter, I know, but my assumption is that the universe doesn't care in the slightest what I think or what happens to me, which is not something theists are generally comfortable with. Schaeffer maintained that the basis for antithesis is not that it was an invention of Aristotle or anyone, but that the basis for antithesis is reality itself, based on the God who is there (as opposed to not being there). The existence of the personal God answers the questions: 1) Why is there something rather than nothing? Why should nothing be the default. Or to paraphase Quine, Nothing is what doesn't exist. So what is there? Everything. i.e. the question of the origin of the form of the universe, The reason that there is Something rather than Nothing is that Nothing is unstable. -- Frank Wilczek, Nobel Laureate Physics 2004. why does it make sense? Part of it makes sense to us because we evolved to make sense of it. Quantum mechanics doesn't really make sense, it's just an inference from what does make sense. What is the basis for the nature of reality and beauty? Why does reality need a basis? Beauty is, famously, in the eye of the beholder. 2) Why is man the way he/she is? Why is man able to have language and do science, and make sense of the world? Why is man able to love and figure out what is right? What is the basis for meaning? What is the basis for mind? How can persons know one another? Evolution. The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 3) Why is man able to know anything, and know that he knows what he knows? Because he evolved to make decisions, see William S. Cooper, The Evolution of Reason. What is the basis for truth? What is truth? True (and false) are abstract values we assign to sentences for the purpose of making inferences. In application we usually try to assign true to those sentences that express facts supported by evidence - unless we are religious, in which case we may ignore evidence and go with revelation. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Grok
I was fascinated by this word, and have used it on occasions since reading the novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, where Heinlein introduced the word into English. I see from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok that the word is considered very much part of the English vocabulary these days, my dictionaries are just too old and fuddy duddy to recognise it yet. Cheers On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 11:20:07AM -0800, Brent Meeker wrote: And an apt example since to grok actually is an english word meaning to understand intuitively. So when you understand that A and B entails A, it is because you grok and. Intuitive understanding is not communicable directly. Brent Meeker -- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
MIT debate (Making Marvins or Zombie Rooms?)
I thought I'd pass this on from another group Maybe one of us who is local can go along? Damn I wish I was there... :-) -- Here is a debate this Thursday at MIT on a really big question: Creativity: the mind, machines, and mathematics A Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of Alan Turing's Seminal Paper On Computable Numbers featuring a debate on the limits of intelligent machines and a lecture on Turing's contributions. In Celebration of: 100 years anniversary of the birth of Kurt Gödel 70 years since Alan Turing’s seminal paper “On computable numbers” 50 years since the start of Artificial Intelligence research at Dartmouth College 4:30-5:30pm Public Debate David Gelernter vs. Ray Kurzweil Moderated by Rodney Brooks Are we limited to building super-intelligent robotic 'zombies' or will it be possible and desirable for us to build conscious, creative, volitional, perhaps even 'spritual' machines? http://www.mitpublicevent.org/program.html --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
