Re: The free will function
On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: can a virtual typhoon makes you wet? I don't know, it depends on whether you are in the same level of reality as the typhoon. I do know for certain that a real typhoon can't make the laws of physics wet because they exist at different levels, although I don't really have a way of determining if the storm is real or not, all I can do is tell if its at the same level as me or not. I can also say that some things behave much the same regardless of what level they are in, things like arithmetic and logic and consciousness. John K Clark -- 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: COMP theology
On 15 Feb 2012, at 01:21, David Nyman wrote: On 14 February 2012 20:00, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The reductio demolishes the possibility of this being true qua materia, because the relevant physical components have, in effect, been rendered impotent. Gosh? Why? Bruno, I think we must be at cross-purposes. I thought that the gist of both your and Maudlin's reductio arguments is the absurdity of associating conscious states with arbitrarily low or null physical activity, if one assumes that matter is primitive. Those reasoning are reductio ad absurdo starting from the physical supervenience thesis (PST). The idea (used by comp materialist) is that consciousness is associated to the physical activity needed to accomplish a computation, then MGA/Maudlin shows that if that is true then consciousness can be associated with arbitrary physical activity, or even with null physical activity, showing the absurdity of the physical supervenience thesis. Keeping comp we associate consciousness with the abstract computation, together with a weigh inherited by the natural redundancy of the somputations in the UD* or in arithmetic. Note that the PST can be criticized along the line of a a critics of Searles Chinese room argument, because PST, by associating the consciousness to the physical level already makes a level confusion (but this will not convince a religious believer in the role of matter, and MGA get a more thorough contradiction. Maudlin's conclusion (retaining the primitiveness assumption): CTM is false. Your conclusion: save CTM by reversing the relation of matter-mechanism. Isn't this how it goes? Yes, maudlin and MGA shows that PST (or materialism) and COMP are incompatible. Both reasoning shows the equivalent formula: MAT - ~COMP COMP - ~MAT ~MAT V ~COMP ~(MAT COMP) I was working in COMP, so I get ~MAT. So now let's assume computational supervenience as you propose and reconsider Maudlin's arguments. Presumably we aren't now in a position to deploy the same reductio argument with respect to primitively physical activity, because surely the alternative of computational supervenience was deployed precisely to save CTM by rescuing us from that horn of the dilemma. Yes. We are saved from the paradox/epistemological contradiction. So my question was, in effect, what implication would this have for saying yes to a doctor who proposed a partial brain substitution by some such contrivance as that described by Maudlin? In short ;-) From your 1p view, you survive in the reality (here: sheaf of computational histories) where your brains functions correctly, because the abstract computation (by definition of computation) has the correct counterfactuals. And for the external observer, like the doctor, you (the first person) remain or not conscious as far as you behave correctly, but the consciousness is no more associated with any physical activity at (be it done by a brain or a movie graph). Your consciousness is associated with the sheaves of computation in arithmetic, no more with any physical activity, given that PST, and the idea of ontological matter is abandoned. The concrete brain/machine is needed only for your consciousness to be manifestable relatively to some sheaf of computations. Now, this can only work, if the sheaf of computations has the good statistics justifying the persistence of the physical laws, by UDA1-7, but this means that the physical laws have to be justified in term of relative statistics on the computations. So physics continue to work (if comp is true), but is no more primitive. If the statistics on computations does not explains physics, then comp is refuted. The self- reference logics illustrate that physics might very well continue to work, despite we might think a priori that there exists too much aberrant histories. OK? Bruno David On 14 Feb 2012, at 17:52, David Nyman wrote: On 14 February 2012 12:56, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: David, Tell me is I have succeed to clarify this. The initial postulate is that the either MG set-up, or Maudlin's machine, instantiates an episode of consciousness in virtue of its computational states. Yes. More precisely, in virtue of a bet we make on some local UM (the computer, the boolean laser graph) to relate those states relatively to us. The reductio demolishes the possibility of this being true qua materia, because the relevant physical components have, in effect, been rendered impotent. Gosh? Why? It means just that we are at the place where we understand that we will have to justify the persistent appearances of those physical components from the computational structure (arithmetic). We abandon physical supervenience, but we keep comp, so it is the place where we associate our actual current mind no more to one phi_i(j)^k, say, but to the infinity of one
Re: COMP theology
On 15 February 2012 16:27, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: OK? Thanks, that helped a lot. Sorry about the initial misunderstanding. David On 15 Feb 2012, at 01:21, David Nyman wrote: On 14 February 2012 20:00, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: The reductio demolishes the possibility of this being true qua materia, because the relevant physical components have, in effect, been rendered impotent. Gosh? Why? Bruno, I think we must be at cross-purposes. I thought that the gist of both your and Maudlin's reductio arguments is the absurdity of associating conscious states with arbitrarily low or null physical activity, if one assumes that matter is primitive. Those reasoning are reductio ad absurdo starting from the physical supervenience thesis (PST). The idea (used by comp materialist) is that consciousness is associated to the physical activity needed to accomplish a computation, then MGA/Maudlin shows that if that is true then consciousness can be associated with arbitrary physical activity, or even with null physical activity, showing the absurdity of the physical supervenience thesis. Keeping comp we associate consciousness with the abstract computation, together with a weigh inherited by the natural redundancy of the somputations in the UD* or in arithmetic. Note that the PST can be criticized along the line of a a critics of Searles Chinese room argument, because PST, by associating the consciousness to the physical level already makes a level confusion (but this will not convince a religious believer in the role of matter, and MGA get a more thorough contradiction. Maudlin's conclusion (retaining the primitiveness assumption): CTM is false. Your conclusion: save CTM by reversing the relation of matter-mechanism. Isn't this how it goes? Yes, maudlin and MGA shows that PST (or materialism) and COMP are incompatible. Both reasoning shows the equivalent formula: MAT - ~COMP COMP - ~MAT ~MAT V ~COMP ~(MAT COMP) I was working in COMP, so I get ~MAT. So now let's assume computational supervenience as you propose and reconsider Maudlin's arguments. Presumably we aren't now in a position to deploy the same reductio argument with respect to primitively physical activity, because surely the alternative of computational supervenience was deployed precisely to save CTM by rescuing us from that horn of the dilemma. Yes. We are saved from the paradox/epistemological contradiction. So my question was, in effect, what implication would this have for saying yes to a doctor who proposed a partial brain substitution by some such contrivance as that described by Maudlin? In short ;-) From your 1p view, you survive in the reality (here: sheaf of computational histories) where your brains functions correctly, because the abstract computation (by definition of computation) has the correct counterfactuals. And for the external observer, like the doctor, you (the first person) remain or not conscious as far as you behave correctly, but the consciousness is no more associated with any physical activity at (be it done by a brain or a movie graph). Your consciousness is associated with the sheaves of computation in arithmetic, no more with any physical activity, given that PST, and the idea of ontological matter is abandoned. The concrete brain/machine is needed only for your consciousness to be manifestable relatively to some sheaf of computations. Now, this can only work, if the sheaf of computations has the good statistics justifying the persistence of the physical laws, by UDA1-7, but this means that the physical laws have to be justified in term of relative statistics on the computations. So physics continue to work (if comp is true), but is no more primitive. If the statistics on computations does not explains physics, then comp is refuted. The self-reference logics illustrate that physics might very well continue to work, despite we might think a priori that there exists too much aberrant histories. OK? Bruno David On 14 Feb 2012, at 17:52, David Nyman wrote: On 14 February 2012 12:56, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: David, Tell me is I have succeed to clarify this. The initial postulate is that the either MG set-up, or Maudlin's machine, instantiates an episode of consciousness in virtue of its computational states. Yes. More precisely, in virtue of a bet we make on some local UM (the computer, the boolean laser graph) to relate those states relatively to us. The reductio demolishes the possibility of this being true qua materia, because the relevant physical components have, in effect, been rendered impotent. Gosh? Why? It means just that we are at the place where we understand that we will have to justify the persistent appearances of those physical components from the computational structure (arithmetic). We abandon physical supervenience,
Re: Intelligence and consciousness
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: TO HELL WITH ELIZA That prehistoric program is NOT intelligent! What makes you sure it isn't intelligent but that other programs are? How the hell do you think?! ELIZA doesn't act intelligently but other programs do. Nobody in their right mind would use ELIZA to help with writing a scientific paper and doing serious research, but you might use Watson or Siri. 20mb of conversational Chinese might be enough to pass a Turing Test for a moderate amount of time. Maybe, if a chimpanzee were performing the test. It's completely subjective. Yes the Turing Test is subjective and it's flawed. Failing the Turing Test proves nothing definitive, the subject may be smart as hell but simply not want to answer your questions and prefer to remain silent. And unsophisticated people might even be impressed by a program as brain dead dumb as ELIZA. And people can fool us too, I think we've all met people who for the first 10 minutes seem smart as hell but after 30 minutes you realize they are pretentious dullards. So with all these flaws why do we even bother with the Turing Test? Because despite its flaws it's the ONLY tool we have, its the only way of determining intelligence from stupidity, but if we are not very smart ourselves we will make lots of errors in administering the test. If you haven't read it already, this link from Stephen may do a better job than I have of explaining my position: http://newempiricism.blogspot.com/2009/02/symbol-grounding-problem.html And that fails the Turing Test because the author clearly thought that Searle was a pretty smart man. You ask the room to produce a quantum theory of gravity and it does so, you ask it to output a new poem that a considerable fraction of the human race would consider to be very beautiful and it does so, you ask it to output a original fantasy children's novel that will be more popular than Harry Potter and it does so. No. The thought experiment is not about simulating omniscience. If you ask the room to produce anything outside of casual conversation, it would politely decline. If that's all it could do, if it just produce streams of ELIZA style evasive blather then it has not demonstrated any intelligence so I would have no reason to think it was intelligent so I would not think its conscious so WHAT'S THE POINT OF THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT? First you say 'let's say that the impossible Chinese Room was possible'. Then you say 'it still doesn't work because the Chinese Room isn't possible'. What I said was that real computers don't work anything like the Chinese Room, they don't have a copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet in which the letters t and s are reversed (so be or nos so be shas it she quetsion) resting in its memory just in case somebody requested such a thing, but if it had a copy of the play as Shakespeare (or Thaketpeare) wrote it simple ways could be found to produce it. The Chinese Room is just [...] There you do again with the is just. 'Where were you on the night of October 15, 2011'? Well, your honor my brain was inside the head which was on top of the body knocking over that liquor store, my mind was in a lingerie model's bedroom, and then on the moons of Jupiter. My sense organs are always very close to my brain but that is just a Evolutionary accident resulting from the fact that nerve impulses travel much much slower than light and if they were far from my brain the signal delay would have severely reduced the chances of my ancestors surviving long enough to reproduce. There is a difference between organized matter and matter that wants to organize. Carbon atoms want to organize into amino acids and amino acids want to organize into proteins and proteins want to organize into cells and cells want to organize into brains, but silicon atoms have no ambition and don't want to organize into anything?? Do you really think that line of thought will lead to anything productive? Why wouldn't he [Einstein] be aware of his own intelligence? You tell me, you're the one who believes that intelligent things like smart computers are unaware of their own intelligence. We don't have to imagine solipsism just because subjectivity isn't empirical. But that only works for you, the existence of other minds can only be inferred through behavior. You admit then that you are not interested in defining it [intelligence] as it actually is, but only what is convenient to investigate. Convenient? If intelligence does not mean doing intelligent things then I don't see why anyone would be interested in it and don't even see the need for the word. You can't water corn with sulfuric acid You can if you change the organization of the acid a little. Sulfuric acid is H2SO4, remove the sulfur and 3 oxygen atoms and the result is H2O, and you can water corn with water just fine. In a similar way the only difference between a cadaver and
Re: 1p 3p comparison
On Feb 14, 5:44 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 14 Feb 2012, at 20:17, Craig Weinberg wrote: It's not clear to me what the difference would really be between emerging from truth and embodying logic. You tell me. Emerging from arithmetical truth just means true in arithmetic, or proved by some correct UMs, etc. It is standard terms for logicians, engineers, etc. And it makes perfect sense in that context, but the idea of something being true doesn't cause something to suddenly occur in the experience of people (or whoever lives through cells or atoms) in the universe. I can say that scoring a basket in basketball it worth two points, and that is true in basketball, but that truth does not literally cause a ball to do something to a basket. With comp, first person views are more complex, due to the first person dissemination in infinities of computations, which needs more subtle internal limit, but again comp has a tool which is computer science and math. I prefer to search a key under a lamp. If you are looking for a key that can only be seen when it glows in the dark, then the lamp is exactly what you can't use to search for it. I already got an answer. I don't know if it is the true one, but I know it follows from comp. How does it really answer what blue is though? Comp can only point to a function that would match the function of qualia in general, but no specific characteristics. To comp, blue is no different from sour. It might specify *that* two qualia would have different values, but it has no way to describe in what way the experience differs. That's just free negative speculation. Blue is a quasi singularize deep experience involving collection of experiences, and having some non communicable quality, says the machine. I don't think blue need involve more than one experience and it need not be a deep experience. If you live for one second and see the sky, you have seen blue. The idea of blue being non communicable is not so simple though. Two people who know blue can communicate about it easily, just as mathematicians can communicate about arithmetic easily. The only difference is that arithmetic can be applied to other frames of reference outside of our direct experience but blue cannot. Instead blue can be applied figuratively within our own interiority. We can say we feel blue for sadness, red for anger, green for envy, yellow for cowardice, etc. These vary somewhat from culture to culture, but no culture as far as I know says they feel five for sadness, one for anger, four for envy, etc. Of course if you treat the machine as a zombie, there are few sense that you will ever listening to her. No zombie...puppet. It insults machines to call them zombies - or it would, if they weren't puppets. Logic is always an a posteriori analysis No doubt on this. But arithmetical truth does not depend on logic. What does it depend on? That's a mystery. The question is: do you believe in it. Does the theorem of Fermat story makes sense. Does the problem of the distribution of prime numbers make sense to you. All introspecting UMs is confronted to that mystery, and understand that IF they are correct machine, then that mystery is insoluble. That's why I say sense is primitive and not arithmetic. Arithmetic is only real because it makes sense, but sense is not limited to arithmetic. Logic is used in *theories*, or by *machines or beings* attempting to get a tiny bit of the arithmetical truth. and never precedes or causes a sense experience (outside of more verbal-symbolic sense experiences). Logic and arithmetic is a late afterthought in the history of the development of the psyche and is always rooted in emotion and sensation first, both individually and evolutionarily. What must we assume to become ourselves? What must we assume to feel the wind? Nothing. What if, to feel the wind, the brain has to make many unconscious assumptions? Then it's an infinite regress of unconscious assumptions that neurons, molecules, atoms, and quantum has to make. Why an infinite regress? Because each assumption supervenes upon a more primitive layer of assumption. If the bottom layer can arbitrarily make initial assumptions, then why not any or all layers? Why is the brain taking orders from cells any better of an explanation than the brain taking orders from itself? It forces an infinitely efficacious microcosmic reality with a whole universe of arbitrary spectator illusions. My thinking is that there is no reason to presume that our relative size and complexity makes us any less grounded in absolute reality. We are direct participants in the universe as much as the brain is. That's about how I see the thing. All UMs are grounded in the absolute arithmetical reality. That's the other way of looking at it, but once you have arithmetic reality, there doesn't seem to be any point to embodied
Re: Intelligence and consciousness
On Feb 15, 1:22 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: TO HELL WITH ELIZA That prehistoric program is NOT intelligent! What makes you sure it isn't intelligent but that other programs are? How the hell do you think?! ELIZA doesn't act intelligently but other programs do. Nobody in their right mind would use ELIZA to help with writing a scientific paper and doing serious research, but you might use Watson or Siri. Obviously Watson or Siri give you access to intelligence, but so does a book. Would you say that an almanac is more intelligent than a book of poems? Does the IQ of a book change when you turn it upside down? I'm trying to point out that what you associate with intelligence figuratively does not correspond to literal capacity for intelligent reasoning. 20mb of conversational Chinese might be enough to pass a Turing Test for a moderate amount of time. Maybe, if a chimpanzee were performing the test. Yes. It's completely subjective. Yes the Turing Test is subjective and it's flawed. Failing the Turing Test proves nothing definitive, the subject may be smart as hell but simply not want to answer your questions and prefer to remain silent. And unsophisticated people might even be impressed by a program as brain dead dumb as ELIZA. And people can fool us too, I think we've all met people who for the first 10 minutes seem smart as hell but after 30 minutes you realize they are pretentious dullards. That's my point. But eventually we do realize they are dullards - or machines. So with all these flaws why do we even bother with the Turing Test? Because despite its flaws it's the ONLY tool we have, its the only way of determining intelligence from stupidity, but if we are not very smart ourselves we will make lots of errors in administering the test. You might consider that we don't need a test. That intelligence is fundamentally different than muscle strength or height. If you haven't read it already, this link from Stephen may do a better job than I have of explaining my position: http://newempiricism.blogspot.com/2009/02/symbol-grounding-problem.html And that fails the Turing Test because the author clearly thought that Searle was a pretty smart man. He doesn't have to be smart to be right about the Chinese room. Even if possibly for the wrong reason. You ask the room to produce a quantum theory of gravity and it does so, you ask it to output a new poem that a considerable fraction of the human race would consider to be very beautiful and it does so, you ask it to output a original fantasy children's novel that will be more popular than Harry Potter and it does so. No. The thought experiment is not about simulating omniscience. If you ask the room to produce anything outside of casual conversation, it would politely decline. If that's all it could do, if it just produce streams of ELIZA style evasive blather then it has not demonstrated any intelligence so I would have no reason to think it was intelligent so I would not think its conscious so WHAT'S THE POINT OF THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT? It would demonstrate X intelligence for t duration to Z audience. Which is all any intelligence could hope to accomplish. First you say 'let's say that the impossible Chinese Room was possible'. Then you say 'it still doesn't work because the Chinese Room isn't possible'. What I said was that real computers don't work anything like the Chinese Room, they don't have a copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet in which the letters t and s are reversed (so be or nos so be shas it she quetsion) resting in its memory just in case somebody requested such a thing, but if it had a copy of the play as Shakespeare (or Thaketpeare) wrote it simple ways could be found to produce it. That's helpful but it is still the programmer's intelligence that is reflected in the program, not the computer's. Which is the whole point. The Chinese Room is just [...] There you do again with the is just. 'Where were you on the night of October 15, 2011'? Well, your honor my brain was inside the head which was on top of the body knocking over that liquor store, my mind was in a lingerie model's bedroom, and then on the moons of Jupiter. My sense organs are always very close to my brain but that is just a Evolutionary accident resulting from the fact that nerve impulses travel much much slower than light and if they were far from my brain the signal delay would have severely reduced the chances of my ancestors surviving long enough to reproduce. Ah, then you shouldn't mind if we put your body in prison. There is a difference between organized matter and matter that wants to organize. Carbon atoms want to organize into amino acids and amino acids want to organize into proteins and proteins want to organize into cells and cells want to organize into brains, but silicon
Re: On Pre-existing Fields
On 2/14/2012 13:45, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/14/2012 5:13 AM, acw wrote: How does the existence on an entity determine its properties? Please answer this question. What do soundness and consistency even mean when there does not exist an unassailable way of defining what they are? Look carefully at what is required for a proof, don't ignore the need to be able to communicate the proof. Soundness and consistency have precise definitions. If you want an absolute definition of consistency, it could be seen as a particular machine never halting. Due to circularity of any such definitions, one has to take some notion of abstract computation fundamental (for example through arithmetic or combinators or ...) Dear ACW, I do like this definition of consistency as an (abstract) machine that never halts (its computation of itself). I like it a lot! We can use the language of hypersets http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-well-founded_set_theory to get consistent definitions in spite of the circularity. Ben Goertzel wrote a very nice paper that outlines the idea: goertzel.org/consciousness/consciousness_paper.pdf Ben Goertzel is one smart dude! Using hypersets to talk about such self-similar concepts sounds fine. That's a pretty interesting paper. I've read some of Ben Geortzel's other work before (mostly in the field of AGI), his ideas and work are quite interesting. Getting back to my basic question: How is it that the mere existence of an entity gives it a definition? The usual notion of a definition of a word is what is found to the right of a word listed in a dictionary, but are we going beyond that notion? If something does have existence, I will tend to assume it also has a consistent definition (even if we're not aware of it yet), although some things might either be undefinable in simpler terms (for example arithmetic) or they might require stronger theories than themselves to define them (such as arithmetical truth). The dictionary meaning of the word is too narrow, a better way of thinking about it is to think about what 'is' means. More precise definitions of the concept of definition can be given in more precise languages than English (such as programming languages), but that might be again too restrictive. How come that one definition and not some other or even a class of definitions? There may be many equivalent definitions, possibly even an infinity of them. Am I incorrect in thinking that definitions are a set of relations that are built up by observers though the process of observation of the world and communicating with each other about the possible content of their individual observations? You're not incorrect, but that's just the act of inferring or inducing a definition. However, something can have existence and should also have a proper definition (in some language) even if you haven't reached it. Someone does some reasoning and gives some pattern some name. I claim that the pattern's existence is independent of that person giving it a name. A person might not be able to properly communicate the pattern to others without introducing the pattern to others, but the pattern exists - their own bodies, world, knowledge, ... are such patterns. This is, after all, how dictionaries are formed (modulo the printing process, etc.)... When I am thinking of the existence of an entity, I am not considering that it is observed or that observation or measurement by an automated system occurred or anything else that might yield a definite count of what the properties of an entity are; I am just considering its existence per se. So I guess that I am not being clear... Okay. How does the mere existence of an entity act in any way as an observation of itself? Why that question? B/c it seems to me that that is what is required to have a consistent notion of an entity having properties merely by existing. So maybe you are thinking of what a hyperset is without realizing it! Hmm, you're right! Hypersets and hyperset-like concepts are quite common, especially in knowledge-representation. Onward! Stephen -- 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.
