Re: COMP refutation paper - finally out
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 Aug 2011, at 14:03, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Aren't you restricting your notion of what is explainable of what your own theory labels explainable with its own assumptions? Yes, but this is due to its TOE aspect: it explains what explanation are, and what we can hope to be 100% explainable, and what we will never be explained (like the numbers). It seems to me what it does is assuming what is explained and then explain that this is so, while not making explicit that it is assumes (see below). In effect, I believe it shows that our efforts to find fundamental explantions are bound to fail, because explanations do not apply to the fundamental thing. Explanations are just relative pointers from one obvious thing to another. This might explain why you don't study the argument. If you believe at the start we cannot do it, I understand the lack of motivation for the hard work. Have you understood the UD Argument: that IF we can survive with a digital brain, then physics is a branch of computer science or number theory. I think that your misunderstanding of the AUDA TOE comes from not having seen this point. I can follow that argument, and it seems valid. Of course I can not be sure I really understood it. My point is that, even if physics is a branch of computer science in the theory, this may just be an result of how the theory reasons, and does not follow if we begin to interpret whether the computer science itself needs something *fundmentally* beyond itself, that is just not mentioned by relying on the assumption that the sense in arithmetic can somehow be seperated from sense in general. I am not sure whether this constitutes a rejection of COMP. It seems amibigous. If one insists that arithmetical truth can be seperated from truth in general, then I think COMP is just false because the premise is meaningless. Otherwise, COMP may be true, but just because it implicitly assumes an ontological fundament that transcends numbers. Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: You have to study to understand by yourself that it explain mind and matter from addition and multiplication, and that the explanation is the unique one maintainable once we say yes to the doctor. The explanation of matter is enough detailed so that we can test the comp theory with observation. If this were true, show me a document just consisting of addition and multplication that tells ANYTHING about mind and matter or even anything beyond numbers and addition and multiplication without your explanation. As long as you can't provide this it seems to me you ask me to study something that doesn't exist. Nu = ((ZUY)^2 + U)^2 + Y ELG^2 + Al = (B - XY)Q^2 Qu = B^(5^60) La + Qu^4 = 1 + LaB^5 Th + 2Z = B^5 L = U + TTh E = Y + MTh N = Q^16 R = [G + EQ^3 + LQ^5 + (2(E - ZLa)(1 + XB^5 + G)^4 + LaB^5 + + LaB^5Q^4)Q^4](N^2 -N) + [Q^3 -BL + L + ThLaQ^3 + (B^5 - 2)Q^5] (N^2 - 1) P = 2W(S^2)(R^2)N^2 (P^2)K^2 - K^2 + 1 = Ta^2 4(c - KSN^2)^2 + Et = K^2 K = R + 1 + HP - H A = (WN^2 + 1)RSN^2 C = 2R + 1 Ph D = BW + CA -2C + 4AGa -5Ga D^2 = (A^2 - 1)C^2 + 1 F^2 = (A^2 - 1)(I^2)C^4 + 1 (D + OF)^2 = ((A + F^2(D^2 - A^2))^2 - 1)(2R + 1 + JC)^2 + 1 Thanks to Jones, Matiyasevitch. Some number Nu verifying that system of diophantine equations (the variables are integers) are Löbian stories, on which the machine's first person indeterminacy will be distributed. We don't even need to go farer than the polynomial equations to describe the ROE. What you ask me is done in good textbook on Mathematical logic. You used more than numbers in this example, namely variables. Statements on numbers can use variable. If you want only numbers, translate those equation into one number, by Gödel's technic. But that would lead to a cumbersome gigantic expression. Yes, OK, this objection is invalid. Bruno Marchal wrote: But even then, I am not convinced this formulas make sense as being löbian stories without an explanation. Surely, I can't prove that. This is like saying that a brain cannot make sense without another brain making sense of it. Indeed I think brains are meaningless without other brains to reflect themselves in (making mutual sense of each other). You won't find a brain floating in outer space, without any other brain to make sense of it. Bruno Marchal wrote: The point is technical: numbers + addition and multiplication does emulate the computational histories. You cannot use a personal feeling to doubt a technical result. There is no such a completly technical result, if we use some technique that is not strictly deducable from the axioms of the system. Bruno Marchal wrote: I am not doing a philosophical point: I assume comp (which assumes both consciousness and physical reality), and I prove from those
Re: bruno list
On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 12:31 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Feeling doesn't come from a substance, it's the first person experience of energy itself. Substance is the third person presentation of energy patterns. If you turn it around so that feeling is observed in third person perspective, it looks like determinism or chance, while substance has no first person experience (which is why a machine, as an abstraction, can't feel, but what a machine is made of can feel to the extent that substance can feel.) Whether there are other substances in the brain that we haven't discovered yet is not the point. There might be, but so what. It's not the mechanism of brain chemistry that feels, it's the effect that mechanism has on the cumulatively entangled experience of the brain as a whole, as it experiences with the cumulatively entangled experiences of a human life as a whole. This is a bit hard to understand. Are you agreeing that there is no special consciousness stuff, but that consciousness results from the matter in the brain going about its business? That is more or less the conventional view. Do you think it's possible to reproduce the function of anything at all? It's possible to reproduce functions of everything, but there is no such thing as *the* function of something. To reproduce *all* possible functions of something is to be identical to that thing. If the reproduction even occupies a different space then it is not identical and does not have the same function. Think about it. If you have one ping pong ball in the universe, it has one set of finite states (which would be pretty damn finite). If you have another ping pong ball exactly the same there is a whole other set of states conjured out of thin air - they can smack together, roll over each other, move together and apart, etc. BUT, the original ball loses states that it never could have anticipated. True solitude becomes impossible. Solipsism becomes unlikely as the other ball becomes an object that it cannot not relate to. What you're not factoring in is that 'pattern' is a function of our pattern recognition abilities. Even though you firmly believe that our experience is flawed and illusory, somehow that gets set aside when you want to prove that logic is different. Your faith is that the logical patterns that we understand *are* what actually exists, rather than a particular kind of interpretation contingency. You think that A=A because it must by definition... but I'm pointing out that it's your definition that makes something = something, and has no explanatory power over A. In fact, the defining = can, like the second ping pong ball, obscure the truth of what A is by itself. This is critical when you're looking at this level of ontological comparison. Describing awareness itself cannot be accomplished by taking awareness for granted in the first place. First you have to kill = and start from nothing. The function I am talking about is relatively modest, like making a ping-pong ball out of a new plastic and designing it so that it weighs the same and is just as elastic. If you then put this ping-pong ball in with balls of the older type, the collection of balls will bounce around normally, even though the new ball might be different in colour, reflectivity, flammability etc. There is no need to figure out exactly where all the balls will be after bouncing around for an hour, just the important parameters of a single ball so that it can slot into the community of balls as one of their own. A fire could come along and it will be obvious that the new ball, being less flammable, behaves differently, but we are not interested in what happens in the event of a fire, otherwise we would have included that in the design specifications; we are only interested in balls bouncing around in a room. Similarly with an artificial neuron, for the purposes of this discussion we are interested only in whether it stimulates the other neurons with the same timing and in response to the same inputs as a biological neuron would. If it does, then the network of neurons will respond in the usual way and ultimately make muscles move in the usual way. (Please note that while the artificial neuron can in a thought experiment be said to perform this function exactly the same as its biological equivalent, in practice it would only need to perform it approximately the same, since all biological tissue functions slightly differently from moment to moment anyway.) The question is whether given that the artificial neuron does this job adequately, would it necessarily follow that the qualia of the brain would be unchanged? I think it would, otherwise we would have the situation where you declare that everything is normal (because the neurons driving the muscles of speech are firing normally) while in fact feeling that everything is different. Figuring out the internal dynamics of the neuron will tell you
Re: Unconscious Components
On 22 Aug 2011, at 21:54, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Aug 22, 1:30 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 20 Aug 2011, at 23:48, Craig Weinberg wrote: PART I On Aug 20, 12:16 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 20 Aug 2011, at 03:14, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Aug 18, 9:43 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 17 Aug 2011, at 06:47, Craig Weinberg wrote: Not sure I understand. Do I hope for this world and therefore it exists to me in a solipsistic way? I mean you can hope to be true, but you can never know that you are true for sure about anything, except your consciousness. Transcendental realities are transcendental, simply. OK. I thought you were saying something else, like 'thoughts create reality'. Only physical realities. But I don't expect anyone to understand what that means, without grasping it by themselves. The UDA is the explanation. Whenever you say these kinds of things, I assume that you're just talking about the arithmetic Matrix seeming real to us because we're in it. The arithmetic matrix is real, because it is just a collection of true arithmetical facts. It is the physical and theological which seems real (= lived), and are real in higher order senses, epistemological, sensational, etc. True to who? If I make up a Sims world where donkeys fly, do they represent factual truth? It all seems context dependent to me. It makes truth arbitrary. Couldn't I make an arithmetic matrix where the occupants believe in a different arithmetic than our own? What makes you think that senses are higher order? Because sensible device needs a minimal amount of complexity. There are evidence of complex processing and interactions in sensible being, and I have no clue how sense could be made primary without introducing some kind of non Turing emulable magic. I don't think you can make a different matrix with occupant believing in a different arithmetic. I don't think this makes any sense. If they take different axiom, it means they use a different structure. There are plenty sorts of number system, but the laws of arithmetic does not depend of the subject which consider them. 17 is prime or not, for anybody. This is the Perceptual Relativity Inertial Frame or PRIF. A de facto frame of localized coherence which itself takes on a second order nested or holarchic 1p coherence. We are members of a very very very specific club that is exclusive to entities I don't belong to that club. I didn't sign in. You are saying that you are better than human? I was saying that I do no belong to a club that is a priori exclusive to entities, alluding to your carbon vie of a human being. IF mechanism is true, there is no titanium needle, still less an interiority. Only person have interiority views, and person lives in Platonia. Why can't persons live in bodies/houses/cities? All that's missing is to let go of the illusion that 1p is an illusion 1p is not an illusion. We agree on that. and take it at face value as a legitimate physical phenomenon That is physicalism. Physcialism yes, but with expanded sensorimotive physics. That is coherent with your non-comp, view. But then either you have zombie, or you have to introduce or describe those special non Turing emulable magic somewhere. You have not yet succeeded in explaining what is sensorimotive physics, without alluding explicitly to poetry. I'm not ruling it out, because of course we can't tell 1p consciousness from 3p completely, but, the sense of things being more like us and less like us demands more of an explanation. Darwin + computer science (abstract biology, psychology, etc.) So you are saying that there is no legitimate difference between yourself and a sand dune, other than you have been programmed and conditioned to perceive the sand dune as irrelevant to your survival and reproduction? Really the sand dune is quite an interesting chap with a keen interest in early jazz and architecture. Sure, but not relevant. Why the big threshold between what we think is alive and what isn't? I don't see any threshold. So being dead is just as good as being alive for you, your family, friends, pets. It's all the same. It is not because there are no threshold or frontier between two states that there are no clear case. For example the M set has a fuzzy border, and without arbitrary long zoom you can't decide if a point on the border is in or out of the set. But many points are clearly in and clearly out. I would say a pebble is clearly not alive, and a bird is clearly alive, but the question makes no sense (other than conventional) for a virus or a box of cigarette. With my usual definition, they are alive, because they have a sophisticated reproduction cycle. Why do we care so much about not being dead ourselves? Eating is more fun than being eaten, in general. And why should that be the case if
Re: Unconscious Components
On 22 Aug 2011, at 22:20, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Aug 22, 1:56 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 21 Aug 2011, at 15:28, Craig Weinberg wrote: My point is that, by definition of philosophical zombie, they behave like normal and sane human being. It is not walking coma, or catatonic behavior. It is full human behavior. A zombie might write a book on consciousness, or have a diary of his dreams reports. A movie can feature an actress writing a book on consciousness or doing anything else that can be demonstrated audiovisually. How is that not a zombie? The movie lack the counterfactual. If the public shout don't go the cave! to the heroine in a thriller, she will not listen. That can be obscured by making the movie ambiguous. Having the actors suddenly look in the camera and say something like Did you say something? We can't hear you very well in here. When the tension builds the heroine could say to the camera I know what you're thinking, but I'm going in anyways. I think if you give the movie anywhere near the latitude you are giving to arithmetic, you'll see that the threshold between a movie and a UM is much less than between a living organism and a silicon chip. You can make movies interactive with alternate story lines that an audience can vote on, or just pseudointeractive: http://listverse.com/2011/05/24/top-10-william-castle-film-gimmicks/ (#1) If the movie is so much interactive then, it is no more a movie, but a virtual reality. If the entities behave like humans for a long time enough, I will attribute them consciousness. Zombie are different, they behave like you and me. By definition of philosophical zombie, you can't distinguish it from a real human. You can distinguish a human from filmed human, all right? Not without breaking the frame of reference. I can't distinguish a live TV broadcast from a recorded broadcast. It's an audiovisual only frame of reference. To postulate a philosophical zombie, you are saying that nothing about them can be distinguished from a genuine person, which is tautological. If nothing can be distinguished by anyone or any thing at any time, then it is the genuine person, by definition. Not at all. I can conceptually imagine them without having consciousness by definition. Of course with comp this lead to non sense, given that consciousness is not attached to any body, but only to soul living in Platonia. In comp we don't have a mind body problem, only a problem of illusion of bodies. You're just saying 'an apple that is genuine in every possible way, except that it's an orange' and using that argument to say 'then apples can be no different than oranges in any meaningful way and there is no reason why apples cannot be used to make an orange as long as the substitution level is low enough.' The fallacy is that it uses semantics of false exclusion to justify false inclusion. By insisting that my protests that apples and oranges are both fruit but oranges can never be made of apples is just an appeal to the false assumption of substitution level, you disregard any possibility of seeing the simple truth of the relation. I don't disregard that possibility, but comp explains much more. You need the applen and the orange, and non comprehensible link. I need only the apple (to change a bit your analogy). If you make it a 3D-hologram of an actress, with odorama and VR touchback tactile interfaces, then is it a zombie? If you connect this thing up to a GPS instead of a cinematically scripted liturgy and put it in an information kiosk, does it become a zombie then? I don't see much of a difference. Behaviorally they have no difference with human. Conceptually they are quite different, because they lack consciousness and any private experiences. With comp, such zombies are non sensical, or trivial. Consciousness is related to the abstract relations involved in the most probable computations leading to your actual 3-states. Yes, zombies are non sensical or trivial. It's still just a facade which reflects our human sense rather than the sense of an autonomous logic which transcends programming. Even if it's really fancy programming, it's experience has no connection with us. It's a cypher that only intersects our awareness through it's rear end, upon which we have drawn a face. That is an advantage. Precise and hypothetical. Refutable. True, but it has disadvantages as well. Dissociated and clinical. So you say. Meaningless. (cue 'Supertramp - The Logical Song') So you say. Right. These qualities cannot be proved from 3-p. Meaning and feeling are not literal and existential. If they don't insist for you, then you don't feel them. Sense contingent upon the theoretical existence of numbers (or the concrete existence of what unknowable phenomenon is represented theoretically as numbers) Mathematician can study the effect of set of unknowable things. That is the
Re: bruno list
On Aug 26, 9:05 am, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 12:31 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Feeling doesn't come from a substance, it's the first person experience of energy itself. Substance is the third person presentation of energy patterns. If you turn it around so that feeling is observed in third person perspective, it looks like determinism or chance, while substance has no first person experience (which is why a machine, as an abstraction, can't feel, but what a machine is made of can feel to the extent that substance can feel.) Whether there are other substances in the brain that we haven't discovered yet is not the point. There might be, but so what. It's not the mechanism of brain chemistry that feels, it's the effect that mechanism has on the cumulatively entangled experience of the brain as a whole, as it experiences with the cumulatively entangled experiences of a human life as a whole. This is a bit hard to understand. Are you agreeing that there is no special consciousness stuff, but that consciousness results from the matter in the brain going about its business? That is more or less the conventional view. Do you think it's possible to reproduce the function of anything at all? It's possible to reproduce functions of everything, but there is no such thing as *the* function of something. To reproduce *all* possible functions of something is to be identical to that thing. If the reproduction even occupies a different space then it is not identical and does not have the same function. Think about it. If you have one ping pong ball in the universe, it has one set of finite states (which would be pretty damn finite). If you have another ping pong ball exactly the same there is a whole other set of states conjured out of thin air - they can smack together, roll over each other, move together and apart, etc. BUT, the original ball loses states that it never could have anticipated. True solitude becomes impossible. Solipsism becomes unlikely as the other ball becomes an object that it cannot not relate to. What you're not factoring in is that 'pattern' is a function of our pattern recognition abilities. Even though you firmly believe that our experience is flawed and illusory, somehow that gets set aside when you want to prove that logic is different. Your faith is that the logical patterns that we understand *are* what actually exists, rather than a particular kind of interpretation contingency. You think that A=A because it must by definition... but I'm pointing out that it's your definition that makes something = something, and has no explanatory power over A. In fact, the defining = can, like the second ping pong ball, obscure the truth of what A is by itself. This is critical when you're looking at this level of ontological comparison. Describing awareness itself cannot be accomplished by taking awareness for granted in the first place. First you have to kill = and start from nothing. The function I am talking about is relatively modest, like making a ping-pong ball out of a new plastic and designing it so that it weighs the same and is just as elastic. If you then put this ping-pong ball in with balls of the older type, the collection of balls will bounce around normally, even though the new ball might be different in colour, reflectivity, flammability etc. I understand that, but you are still assuming a metaphysical appearance of an 'awareness' somehow coming into being as a consequence of 'bouncingness' itself rather than seeing that awareness is a property OF the balls themselves. Although the bouncing certainly is part of what goes into the contents of any awareness that might already be there, the awareness itself is ultimately determined by what fundamental unit you are looking at. Organic molecules do a lot of strange things when they are bouncing around together - very different things compared to inorganic atoms, ping pong balls, or programmable abstractions. There is no need to figure out exactly where all the balls will be after bouncing around for an hour, just the important parameters of a single ball so that it can slot into the community of balls as one of their own. A fire could come along and it will be obvious that the new ball, being less flammable, behaves differently, but we are not interested in what happens in the event of a fire, otherwise we would have included that in the design specifications; we are only interested in balls bouncing around in a room. That's the problem. You're interested in the wrong thing. Cells and organsims are not billiard balls. If you treat them as predictable mechanisms, you lose the very dimension that you are trying to emulate. The unpredictable behavior of a cell doesn't arise out of complexity, it arises out of a higher order of simplicity that organic molecules
Re: bruno list
On 8/26/2011 1:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: That's the problem. You're interested in the wrong thing. Cells and organsims are not billiard balls. If you treat them as predictable mechanisms, you lose the very dimension that you are trying to emulate. It's not a question of treating them as predictable; so far as anyone has been able to tell they *are* predictable. No one has found any evidence that they do not behave according to the known laws of physics and chemistry - which means they are predictable. What evidence do you have to the contrary? The unpredictable behavior of a cell doesn't arise out of complexity, it arises out of a higher order of simplicity that organic molecules facilitate. Higher order simplicity?? More magic or more poetry? You seem to be agreeing that complexity is not sufficient to make cells unpredictable. So in principle the complex behavior of the cell could be predicted even at the molecular level. You are claiming this prediction would fail because of ...what? Similarly with an artificial neuron, for the purposes of this discussion we are interested only in whether it stimulates the other neurons with the same timing and in response to the same inputs as a biological neuron would. Even if you could create an artificial neuron which could impersonate the responsiveness of an natural one, it wouldn't matter because it still doesn't feel anything. How do you know it doesn't feel anything? How do you know it doesn't feel exactly the same as the neuron it replaced? How do you know the feeling of either the neuron or the artificial neuron has an effect on what you would feel? We know from operations on the brain that electrostimulation may evoke memories, the sound of a melody, and other qualia. The subject never says, That felt like electrostimulation. or That didn't produce any feelings. Brent -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Unconscious Components
On Aug 26, 11:01 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 22 Aug 2011, at 22:20, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Aug 22, 1:56 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 21 Aug 2011, at 15:28, Craig Weinberg wrote: My point is that, by definition of philosophical zombie, they behave like normal and sane human being. It is not walking coma, or catatonic behavior. It is full human behavior. A zombie might write a book on consciousness, or have a diary of his dreams reports. A movie can feature an actress writing a book on consciousness or doing anything else that can be demonstrated audiovisually. How is that not a zombie? The movie lack the counterfactual. If the public shout don't go the cave! to the heroine in a thriller, she will not listen. That can be obscured by making the movie ambiguous. Having the actors suddenly look in the camera and say something like Did you say something? We can't hear you very well in here. When the tension builds the heroine could say to the camera I know what you're thinking, but I'm going in anyways. I think if you give the movie anywhere near the latitude you are giving to arithmetic, you'll see that the threshold between a movie and a UM is much less than between a living organism and a silicon chip. You can make movies interactive with alternate story lines that an audience can vote on, or just pseudointeractive: http://listverse.com/2011/05/24/top-10-william-castle-film-gimmicks/ (#1) If the movie is so much interactive then, it is no more a movie, but a virtual reality. If the entities behave like humans for a long time enough, I will attribute them consciousness. That's where I think you are being too promiscuous with consciousness attribution. To me it wouldn't matter how long it takes for me to figure out that it wasn't conscious, once I found out that it was only an interactive movie, I would not continue to extend the presumption that the movie itself is conscious. This thought experiment brings out a relevant detail though in the idea of ventriloquism. Even if a ventriloquist is the best possible ventriloquist, I still do not think that we should attribute consciousness to the dummy (certain horror movies notwithstanding). It's ok to informally group them together as one, since that's how motive works - it's insistence can be read through a prosthetic puppet, mask, cartoon, work of art, etc. If we can read the text, then we can be influenced by the sender's intent. This is the case with software. It is a way for the intelligence of the programmer and groups of programmers to enact their ideas in the form of a machine. Most of the time, it makes no difference to conflate a ventriloquists intelligence with the character they use to impersonate the dummy, the two of them together could be thought of as a single ventriloquist act - but if we are talking about a dummy being it's own ventriloquist, then we are looking at a completely different phenomenon. We watch a movie and relate to it as a vicarious human experience - actors and their actions rather than frames of pixels or film. I could see how you could choose to see a sufficiently interactive film as being practically indistinguishable from a 3p perspective, but I don't see how you could assume that a corresponding 1p experience arises spontaneously. Where? The film? The electronics? The program? It's metaphysical and crazy. My view is crystal clear. The programmers sense and motives are sent through the medium of the theatrical experience to the audience, who receive it as human sense and motive. The text rides on the back of the many electronic production devices and perceptual organs of the viewers, but it is not interpreted by those media at all. No matter how much music you listen to on your iPod, it's never going to intentionally compose it's own songs. The movie doesn't learn to act, and the computer doesn't learn to feel either. They have their own perceptual frames to contend with. The iPod and the computer need to gratify their semiconductor circuits. The movie reel needs to spin, the motor needs to keep cycling, the film strip needs to keep falling into the sprockets, etc. They don't have any appreciation of the contents which we find significant. I think there's a tragic gender relation metaphor in there somewhere. Something about what boys and girls find attractive in each other not being similar to what they value in themselves. Zombie are different, they behave like you and me. By definition of philosophical zombie, you can't distinguish it from a real human. You can distinguish a human from filmed human, all right? Not without breaking the frame of reference. I can't distinguish a live TV broadcast from a recorded broadcast. It's an audiovisual only frame of reference. To postulate a philosophical zombie, you are saying that nothing about them can be distinguished from a genuine person, which is
Re: bruno list
On Aug 26, 4:38 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/26/2011 1:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: That's the problem. You're interested in the wrong thing. Cells and organsims are not billiard balls. If you treat them as predictable mechanisms, you lose the very dimension that you are trying to emulate. It's not a question of treating them as predictable; so far as anyone has been able to tell they *are* predictable. No one has found any evidence that they do not behave according to the known laws of physics and chemistry - which means they are predictable. What evidence do you have to the contrary? None of what goes on in a cell could be predicted purely by chemistry. If you were down at the level of individual atoms, you would have no possible clue of the existence of anything like a cell, just as looking at the surface of a TV screen with a microscope excludes the possibility of making sense of a movie being watched. You have to grasp this concept of perceptual frame of reference. A cell is not the same thing as molecules - it's meta-molecular. Most of what a cell does makes sense in pure chemical terms, like most of what an animal does makes sense in purely cellular terms. It has absolutely nothing to do with defying physics or chemistry, it's that the reliable, predictable levels of physical reality are routinely manipulated to serve the purposes, whims, and fantasies of meta-meta- meta organic entities. The unpredictable behavior of a cell doesn't arise out of complexity, it arises out of a higher order of simplicity that organic molecules facilitate. Higher order simplicity?? More magic or more poetry? Do you consider cells and bodies magic or poetic? What about higher order simplicity sounds like witchcraft to you? You seem to be agreeing that complexity is not sufficient to make cells unpredictable. So in principle the complex behavior of the cell could be predicted even at the molecular level. You are claiming this prediction would fail because of ...what? No. You're equating simplicity with microcosm. That's what I mean by higher order simplicity and perceptual frames of reference. You can't predict how a baseball game will turn out by looking at nothing but the trajectories of baseballs in previous games. That is exactly what substance monism suggests by insisting that the macrocosm can always be predicted by scaling up the microcosm. I didn't think that kind of mechanistic view is even taken seriously anymore, even in the hard sciences. All that went out the window in the 20th century. The prediction fails because it's basing the prediction on the wrong thing. What we think about has an effect on our body on a systemic level. The neurons behavior is caught up in that like we're caught up in weather systems. We make brain hurricanes happen just by thinking about something we enjoy or hate. Those make floods and blackouts the tissues of our gut and sweat glands. It's no big voodoo - it's the ordinary way that we function and experience our lives. Similarly with an artificial neuron, for the purposes of this discussion we are interested only in whether it stimulates the other neurons with the same timing and in response to the same inputs as a biological neuron would. Even if you could create an artificial neuron which could impersonate the responsiveness of an natural one, it wouldn't matter because it still doesn't feel anything. How do you know it doesn't feel anything? How do you know it doesn't feel exactly the same as the neuron it replaced? Because there is no reason to imagine it would. How do I know that a ventrilioquist's dummy doesn't feel anything? Because I know it's a manufactured artifact that has no living tissue in it. Same reason a semiconductor array has no feeling. I don't *know* know it has no feeling, but I think that whatever it does have is likely on the microcosmic level rather than a higher order simplicity, and I think that because of that it's likely not to be very similar to the feelings of a conscious Homo sapien. How do you know the feeling of either the neuron or the artificial neuron has an effect on what you would feel? Because we can feel it when we use transcranial magnetic stimulation or a taser to change the electromagnetic conditions of our neurons. We know from operations on the brain that electrostimulation may evoke memories, the sound of a melody, and other qualia. The subject never says, That felt like electrostimulation. or That didn't produce any feelings. You could have electrostimulation to a lot of parts of your brain and you wouldn't feel it. Only areas relevant to your perception and cognition would end up being experienced in real time by you. I think that the perceptual frame determines whether the stimulation is felt as blind electric shock or a sound or a memory, but it's not really debatable whether changes to neurons affect how we feel and how we can
Re: bruno list
On 8/26/2011 4:41 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Aug 26, 4:38 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/26/2011 1:14 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: That's the problem. You're interested in the wrong thing. Cells and organsims are not billiard balls. If you treat them as predictable mechanisms, you lose the very dimension that you are trying to emulate. It's not a question of treating them as predictable; so far as anyone has been able to tell they *are* predictable. No one has found any evidence that they do not behave according to the known laws of physics and chemistry - which means they are predictable. What evidence do you have to the contrary? None of what goes on in a cell could be predicted purely by chemistry. If you were down at the level of individual atoms, you would have no possible clue of the existence of anything like a cell, just as looking at the surface of a TV screen with a microscope excludes the possibility of making sense of a movie being watched. You have to grasp this concept of perceptual frame of reference. A cell is not the same thing as molecules - it's meta-molecular. I'm well aware that a cell is made of molecules and that it is their structural and dynamic relations that constitute the cell. I understand perceptual frame of reference: If I stand a different place I see a different scene. What's that have to do with cells and being meta-molecular? Most of what a cell does makes sense in pure chemical terms, But not all (according to you). And that's the question. What part doesn't? How can this part be detected? like most of what an animal does makes sense in purely cellular terms. It has absolutely nothing to do with defying physics or chemistry, it's that the reliable, predictable levels of physical reality are routinely manipulated to serve the purposes, whims, and fantasies of meta-meta- meta organic entities. Which is it? Does being manipulated by organic entities entail doing something other than predicted by the laws of physics and chemistry? The unpredictable behavior of a cell doesn't arise out of complexity, it arises out of a higher order of simplicity that organic molecules facilitate. Higher order simplicity?? More magic or more poetry? Do you consider cells and bodies magic or poetic? What about higher order simplicity sounds like witchcraft to you? All of it. What's the operational definition whereby I can recognize and measure simplicity and order it as higher and lower? It is a thing? A substance? A property...of what? A relation? You seem to be agreeing that complexity is not sufficient to make cells unpredictable. So in principle the complex behavior of the cell could be predicted even at the molecular level. You are claiming this prediction would fail because of ...what? No. You're equating simplicity with microcosm. That's what I mean by higher order simplicity and perceptual frames of reference. You can't predict how a baseball game will turn out by looking at nothing but the trajectories of baseballs in previous games. But you could do it by looking at the microstates of the players in the present game plus various environmental states. No one has suggested that you could predict the behavior of a neuron or a brain by looking at past brains or neurons. Why do you bring up such strawman arguments? That is exactly what substance monism suggests by insisting that the macrocosm can always be predicted by scaling up the microcosm. I didn't think that kind of mechanistic view is even taken seriously anymore, even in the hard sciences. All that went out the window in the 20th century. Fortunately it's the 21st century now. Who told you the macrocosm couldn't be predicted by synthesis of the micro? I must have missed that in physics class. If you're relying quantum randomness then please say where Tegmark went wrong in his paper showing the brain must operate classically? If you're relying on classical chaos theory then your argument is with Bruno who assumes everything can be simulated in digits. The prediction fails because it's basing the prediction on the wrong thing. What we think about has an effect on our body on a systemic level. The neurons behavior is caught up in that like we're caught up in weather systems. We make brain hurricanes happen just by thinking about something we enjoy or hate. And how do you choose what to enjoy and who to hate? Those make floods and blackouts the tissues of our gut and sweat glands. It's no big voodoo - it's the ordinary way that we function and experience our lives. And it supervenes on the processes of our body and brain. Similarly with an artificial neuron, for the purposes of this discussion we are interested only in whether it stimulates the other neurons with the same timing and in response to the same inputs as a biological neuron would.
