Re: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On 12.08.2012 07:18 Russell Standish said the following: On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 04:22:44PM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 11.08.2012 15:13 Stephen P. King said the following: On 8/11/2012 4:30 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Evgenii Dear Evgenii, A bacterium and a rock should not be put head to (no)head in this question. A bacterium has autonomy while a rock does not. It is better to see that the rock is just a small piece of an autonomous whole and then compare that whole to the (whole) bacterium. My goal was just to try to understand what Russell meant by life is unintelligent. Say let us take some creations of AI and compare them with a bacterium. Where do we find more intelligence? Evgenii It seems like a nonsensical question to me. Neither rocks nor bacteria are intelligent. Okay. Let us take then a self-driving car. Is it intelligent? Evgenii -- 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: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On 8/11/2012 11:28 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 12.08.2012 07:18 Russell Standish said the following: On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 04:22:44PM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 11.08.2012 15:13 Stephen P. King said the following: On 8/11/2012 4:30 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Evgenii Dear Evgenii, A bacterium and a rock should not be put head to (no)head in this question. A bacterium has autonomy while a rock does not. It is better to see that the rock is just a small piece of an autonomous whole and then compare that whole to the (whole) bacterium. My goal was just to try to understand what Russell meant by life is unintelligent. Say let us take some creations of AI and compare them with a bacterium. Where do we find more intelligence? Evgenii It seems like a nonsensical question to me. Neither rocks nor bacteria are intelligent. Okay. Let us take then a self-driving car. Is it intelligent? One of the hallmarks of intelligence is learning from experience. I don't know whether self-driving cars, e.g as developed by Google, do this or not. 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: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On 12.08.2012 08:53 Russell Standish said the following: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 08:28:42AM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: Okay. Let us take then a self-driving car. Is it intelligent? Evgenii Could be. A self-driving car that navigates a simple environment with beacons and constrained tracks need not be very intelligent. I'm thinking here of the Lego Mindstorm creations that my son created during robotics classes at school. But a car that successfully navigates everyday streets without mowing down other road users would probably have to be quite intelligent. Cheers Please look at self-driving cars from the Standford course on AI: http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2011/12/self-driving-cars.html The question however, how you define intelligence so that to make such a self-driving car more intelligent that a bacterium? Evgenii -- 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: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On 12.08.2012 08:39 meekerdb said the following: On 8/11/2012 11:28 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 12.08.2012 07:18 Russell Standish said the following: On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 04:22:44PM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 11.08.2012 15:13 Stephen P. King said the following: On 8/11/2012 4:30 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Evgenii Dear Evgenii, A bacterium and a rock should not be put head to (no)head in this question. A bacterium has autonomy while a rock does not. It is better to see that the rock is just a small piece of an autonomous whole and then compare that whole to the (whole) bacterium. My goal was just to try to understand what Russell meant by life is unintelligent. Say let us take some creations of AI and compare them with a bacterium. Where do we find more intelligence? Evgenii It seems like a nonsensical question to me. Neither rocks nor bacteria are intelligent. Okay. Let us take then a self-driving car. Is it intelligent? One of the hallmarks of intelligence is learning from experience. I don't know whether self-driving cars, e.g as developed by Google, do this or not. Could you please take another example from AI, that learns from experience? Then it will be more clear what do you mean. On learning from experience in cells, please see a paper Epigenetic learning in non-neural organisms http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2011/02/epigenetic-learning-in-non-neural-organisms.html Hence you will find learning from experience in a cell indeed. Evgenii -- 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: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 08:48:06AM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: Please look at self-driving cars from the Standford course on AI: http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2011/12/self-driving-cars.html The question however, how you define intelligence so that to make such a self-driving car more intelligent that a bacterium? Evgenii If the question is how to measure intelligence, I do not have an answer. However, assuming you do have a satisfactory answer, I would be surprised if a bacterium has a measure much above zero, whereas I would expect something like Google's self-driving car would measure significantly more highly, though still much less than a typical human being. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ?
On 10 Aug 2012, at 14:53, Roger wrote: Hi Russell Standish But Dennet has no agent to react to all of those signals. To perceive. To judge. To cause action. To do those, an agent has to be unified and singular -- a point of focus-- and there's no propect for such in current neuroscience/ neurophilosophy. I insist. The self is what computer science handles the best. I agree with you that it is immaterial, and beyond space and time, which are construct of souls Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say contradictory. It is factually contradictory. Leibniz is coherent as he seems to recognize changing his mind on that issue. Different theories are not necessarily contradictory, when they are not mixed together. On the contrary Leibniz is rather very coherent in each of its different approach, but some followers mix them. That agent or soul or self you have is your monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and neurophilosophy. But not in computer science, which is indeed not very well known by neuroscientists. Bruno Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/10/2012 - Receiving the following content - From: Russell Standish Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-10, 08:04:44 Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated! On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:10:43PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote: It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the total. This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts, you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'. With due respect to your salvia experiences, which I dare not follow, I'm still more presuaded by the likes of Daniel Dennett, and his pandemonia theory of the mind. In that idea, many subconscious process, working disparately, solve different aspects of the problems at hand, or provide different courses of action. The purpose of consciousness is to select from among the course of action presented by the pandemonium of subconscious processes - admittedly consciousness per se may not be necessary for this role - any unifying (aka reductive) process may be sufficient. The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian evolution is the key to any form of creative process. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- 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 . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On 12.08.2012 09:45 Russell Standish said the following: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 08:48:06AM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: Please look at self-driving cars from the Standford course on AI: http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2011/12/self-driving-cars.html The question however, how you define intelligence so that to make such a self-driving car more intelligent that a bacterium? Evgenii If the question is how to measure intelligence, I do not have an answer. However, assuming you do have a satisfactory answer, I would be surprised if a bacterium has a measure much above zero, whereas I would expect something like Google's self-driving car would measure significantly more highly, though still much less than a typical human being. However, without such a measure, a statement that life is mostly unintelligent is ill-defined. In general, if we assume inexorable physicals laws, for example the M-theory from Grad Design, then it is unclear to me what the meaning of the next statement could be: The behavior of this conglomerate of particles and fields is more intelligent than of that conglomerate of particle and fields. Evgenii -- 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: On rational prayer
On 10 Aug 2012, at 14:24, Roger wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Rationality isn't a very useful function. I only use it when I get in trouble. I don't need it to drive my car or do practically anything. I doubt this. If you want to go on the left, you act accordingly, and that is a use of rationnality. We are rational all the times (except when doing philosophy perhaps :) I don't have more than a scanty definition of my ladyfriend, and only she knows if this is correct, but I can still talk to her. And the highest form of prayer (centering prayer) is simply wordless intention. And even higher, even the intention drops off (you stop doing praying and just be with God). I have only done this once in my life. Zen masters call this the Void. I would call it the Plenum. There are many path and all words miss it. But this can be explained in computer science through the use of the self-referential logics. You might read my papers on the subject perhaps. Mechanism is very close to Descartes and Leibniz, and also Plato and the neoplatonist. It is incompatible with Aristotle notion of primary matter and physicalism. In fact physics become a branch of machine's psychology, or theology, or simply theoretical computer science, itself embeddable in elementary arithmetic (that is not obvious, but well known by logicians since Gödel's 1931 paper). Bruno Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/10/2012 - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-10, 05:22:59 Subject: Re: God has no name Hi Roger, On 07 Aug 2012, at 11:53, Roger wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal OUR FATHER, WHICH ART IN HEAVBEN, HALLOWED BE THY NAME. Luther said that to meditate of the sacredness of God according to this phrase is the oldest prayer. In old testament times, God's name was considered too sacred to speak by the Jews. The King James Bible uses YHWH, the Jews never say God as far as I know, they sometimes write it as G*d. We have relaxed these constrictions in the protestant tradition, use Jehovah and all sorts of other sacfed names. It is the problem with the notions of God, Whole, Truth, consciousness, etc. we can't define them. You can sum up Damascius by one sentence on the ineffable is already one sentence too much, it can only miss the point. (But Damascius wrote thousand of pages on this!). Like Lao Tseu said that the genuine wise man is mute, also. John Clark said it recently too! This is actually well explained (which does not mean that the explanation is correct) by computer science: a universal machine can look inward and prove things about itself, including that there are true proposition that she cannot prove as far as she is consistent, that machine-truth is not expressible, etc. My last paper (in french) is entitled la machine mystique (the mystical machine) and concerns all the things that a machine might know without being able to justify it rationally and which might be counter-intuitive from her own point of view. The word god is not problematical ... as long as we don't take the word too much seriously. You can say I search God, but you can't say I found God, and still less things like God told me to tell you to send me money or you will go to hell. God is more a project or a hope for an explanation. It cannot be an explanation itself. For a scientist: it is more a problem than a solution, like consciousness, for example. Bruno Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/7/2012 Is life a cause/effect activity ? If so, what is the cause agent ? - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-07, 05:37:56 Subject: Re: God has no name Hi Stephen, On 8/6/2012 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: [SPK] Which is the definition I use. Any one that actually thinks that God is a person, could be a person, or is the complement (anti) of such, has truly not thought through the implications of such. [BM For me, and comp, it is an open problem. [SPK] ? Why? It's not complicated! A person must be, at least, nameable. A person has always has a name. [BM] Why? Because names are necessary for persistent distinguishability. OK. You are using name in the logician sense of definite description. With comp we always have a 3-name, but the first person have no name. Let us try an informal proof by contradiction. Consider the case where it is *not* necessary for a person to have a name. What means would then exist for one entity to be distinguished from another? By the entity itself: no problem (and so this is not a problem for the personal evaluation of the measure). By some other entity? We might consider the location of an entity as a proxy for the purposes of identification, but this will not work because entities can change location and a list of all of the past locations of an entity would constitute
Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!
On 11 Aug 2012, at 01:57, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 09:36:22AM -0700, meekerdb wrote: But a course of action could be 'selected', i.e. acted upon, without consciousness (in fact I often do so). I think what constitutes consciousness is making up a narrative about what is 'selected'. Absolutely! The evolutionary reason for making up this narrative is to enter it into memory so it can be explained to others and to yourself when you face a similar choice in the future. Maybe - I don't remember Dennett ever making that point. More importantly, its hard to see what the necessity of the narrative is for forming memories. Quite primitive organisms form memories, yet I'm sceptical they have any form of internal narrative. That the memory of these past decisions took the form of a narrative derives from the fact that we are a social species, as explained by Julian Jaynes. This explains why the narrative is sometimes false, and when the part of the brain creating the narrative doesn't have access to the part deciding, as in some split brain experiments, the narrative is just confabulated. I find Dennett's modular brain idea very plausible and it's consistent with the idea that consciousness is the function of a module that produces a narrative for memory. If were designing a robot which I intended to be conscious, that's how I would design it: With a module whose function was to produce a narrative of choices and their supporting reasons for a memory that would be accessed in support of future decisions. This then requires a certain coherence and consistency in robots decisions - what we call 'character' in a person. I don't think that would make the robot necessarily conscious according to Bruno's critereon. But if it had to function as a social being, it would need a concept of 'self' and the ability for self-reflective reasoning. Then it would be conscious according to Bruno. Brent IIRC, Dennett talks about feedback connecting isolated modules (as in talking to oneself) as being the progenitor of self-awareness (and perhaps even consciousness itself). Since this requires language, it would imply evolutionary late consciousness. I do think that self-awareness is a trick that enables efficient modelling of other members of the same species. Its the ability to put yourself in the other's shoes, and predict what they're about to do. I'm in two minds about whether one can be conscious without also being self-aware. I tend to think that consciousness is far more primitive than self- consciousness. I find plausible that a worm can experience pain, but it might not be self-aware or self-conscious. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:22:06PM -0400, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: Free will is the ability to do something stupid. Well OK, but there sure as hell is a lot of free will going around these days, even a pair of dice can be pretty stupid, the smart thing for it to do would be to come up with a 7, but sometimes it comes up with a 2 even though that number is 6 times less likely. Only a idiot would pick 2 but sometimes the dice does. As Homer Simpson would say Stupid dice. Roulette wheels do what they do, they never do anything different. Sure they do, sometimes they produce a 12 and sometimes they produce a 21. John K Clark In both your examples, (dice and roulette wheels), they always do something stupid (generate a random number). There is no choice in their actions, so it is senseless to assign agency to them. There is no optimisation of utility. I think you may be deliberately taking my statement out of context. Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On 11 Aug 2012, at 10:30, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Bacteria are provably Turing complete, rocks are not. You might remind us what you mean by intelligent. I tend to oppose it to competence and learning. Intelligence is needed for making competence capable of growing and diversified, but competence has a negative feedback on intelligence. I use intelligence in a sense closer to free-will and consciousness than an ability to solve problems. IQ tests concerns always form of competence (very basic one: they have been invented to detect mental disability). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model
On 11 Aug 2012, at 12:47, Roger wrote: Hi Alberto G. Corona Agreed. Computers are quantitative instruments and so cannot have a self or feelings, which are qualitative. And intution is non-computable IMHO. Computer have a notion of self. I can explain someday (I already have, and it is the base of all I am working on). Better, they can already prove that their self has a qualitative components. They can prove to herself and to us, that their qualitative self, which is the knower, is not nameable. Machines, like PA or ZF, can already prove that intuition is non-computable by themselves. You confuse the notion of machine before and after Gödel, I'm afraid. You might study some good book on theoretical computer science. Today we have progressed a lot in the sense that we are open to the idea that we don't know what machine are capable of, and we can prove this if we bet we are machine (comp). Bruno Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/11/2012 - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-11, 04:08:29 Subject: Re: Where's the agent ? Who or what does stuff and is aware of stuff ? The Dennet conception is made to avoid an agent in the first place because i so, it whould be legitimate to question what is the agent made of an thus going trough an infinite regression. The question of the agent is the vivid intuition for which there are ingenious evolutionary explanations which i may subscribe. But a robot would implement such computations and still I deeply doubt about his internal notion oof self, his quialia etc. The best response to many questions for the shake of avooiding premature dogmatic closeness is to say we don't know El 11/08/2012 07:57, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net escribi�: Hi Roger, 牋� I have noticed and read your posts. Might you write some remarks about Leibniz' concept of pre-established harmony? On 8/10/2012 8:53 AM, Roger wrote: Hence I follow Leibniz, even though he's difficult and some say contradictory. That agent or soul or self you have is your monad, the only (alhough indirectly) perceiving/acting/feeling agent in all of us, but currently missing in neuroscience and neurophilosophy. -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- 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 . -- 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 . -- 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 . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: The persistence of intelligence
On 11 Aug 2012, at 13:03, Roger wrote: Hi Evgenii Rudnyi IMHO Intelligence is part of mind, so is platonic and outside of spacetime. It was there before the universe was created, used to create the universe and now guides and moves everything that happens i9n the unverse. That's a Leibnizian conjecture. I agree with this, and can explain why space and time appears, even in a stable way, in the computations in arithmetic. Arithmetic contains a web of machines' dreams, and physical reality is a form of dream sharing made possible by non trivial computer science constraints (through self-reference). Bruno Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/11/2012 - Receiving the following content - From: Evgenii Rudnyi Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-11, 04:30:32 Subject: Re: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI ordescribing life On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Evgenii -- 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 . -- 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 . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: A possible solution to the incomputability of experience
On 11 Aug 2012, at 13:22, Roger wrote: Hi Stephen P. King Personally I go with Roger Penrose and his conjecture that, as I personally understand it, conscious experience is noncomputable. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFbrnFzUc0U Penrose is right, but with a wrong argument. The fact that consciousness is not computable, nor even definable, is a consequence of mechanism. It does not refute mechanism, it confirms it. Bruno Which is not to say that IMHO experience can be understood through Leibniz's metaphysics of substances (using category theory). IMHO, that's the only way. ? Bruno Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/11/2012 http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Positivism and intelligence
On 11 Aug 2012, at 14:56, Roger wrote: Positivism seems to rule out native intelligence. I can't see how knowledge could be created on a blank slate without intelligence. OK. But with comp intelligence emerges from arithmetic, out of space and time. Or for that matter, how the incredibly unnatural structure of the carbon atom could have been created somehow somewhere by mere chance. Hmm... This can be explained by QM, which can be explained by comp and arithmetic. Fred Hoyle as I recall said that it was very unlikely that it was created by chance. All very unlikely things in my opinion show evidence of intelligence. In order to extract energy from disorder as life does shows that, like Maxwell's Demon, some intelligence is required to sort things out. Not sure what you mean by intelligence here. Bruno Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/11/2012 - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-10, 14:05:31 Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated! On 8/10/2012 7:23 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: The modern positivist conception of free will has no scientific meaning. But all modern rephasings of old philosophy are degraded. Or appear so because they make clear the deficiencies of the old philosophy. Positivist philosophy pass everithing down to what-we-know-by- science of the physical level, That's not correct. Postivist philosophy was that we only know what we directly experience and scientific theories are just ways of predicting new experiences from old experiences. Things not directly experienced, like atoms, were merely fictions used for prediction. that is the only kind of substance that they admit. this what-we-know-by-science makes positivism a moving ground, a kind of dictatorial cartesian blindness which states the kind of questions one is permitted at a certain time to ask or not. Classical conceptions of free will were concerned with the option ot thinking and acting morally or not, that is to have the capability to deliberate about the god or bad that a certain act implies for oneself One deliberates about consequences and means, but how does one deliberate about what one wants? Do you deliberate about whether pleasure or pain is good? and for others, and to act for god or for bad with this knowledge. Roughly speaking, Men have such faculties unless in slavery. Animals do not. My dog doesn't think about what's good or bad for himself? I doubt that. The interesting parts are in the details of these statements. An yes, they are questions that can be expressed in more scientific terms. This can be seen in the evolutionary study of moral and law under multilevel selection theory: https://www.google.es/search?q=multilevel+selectionsugexp=chrome,mod=11sourceid=chromeie=UTF-8 which gives a positivistic support for moral, and a precise, materialistic notion of good and bad. And thus suddenly these three concepts must be sanctioned as legitimate objects of study by the positivistic dictators, without being burnt alive to social death, out of the peer-reviewed scientific magazines, where sacred words of Modernity resides. We are witnessing this devolution since slowly all the old philosophical and theological concepts will recover their legitimacy, and all their old problems will stand as problems here and now. For example, we will discover that what we call Mind is nothing but the old concepts of Soul and Spirit. After stripping soul of it's immortality and acausal relation to physics. Concerning the degraded positivistic notion of free will, I said before that under an extended notion of evolution it is nor possible to ascertain if either the matter evolved the mind or if the mind selected the matter. So it could be said that the degraded question is meaningless and of course, non interesting. But the question of their relationship is still interesting. 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 . -- 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 . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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
Re: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 10:05:20AM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: However, without such a measure, a statement that life is mostly unintelligent is ill-defined. Informal perhaps, but hardly ill-defined. Much the same could be said about the concept life. In general, if we assume inexorable physicals laws, for example the M-theory from Grad Design, then it is unclear to me what the meaning of the next statement could be: The behavior of this conglomerate of particles and fields is more intelligent than of that conglomerate of particle and fields. That is because you are looking at it at the wrong level. You need to take into account emergence. Evgenii -- 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. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!
On 12 Aug 2012, at 00:57, meekerdb wrote: On 8/11/2012 9:09 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Aug 2012, at 18:36, meekerdb wrote: On 8/10/2012 5:04 AM, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:10:43PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote: It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the total. This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts, you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'. With due respect to your salvia experiences, which I dare not follow, I'm still more presuaded by the likes of Daniel Dennett, and his pandemonia theory of the mind. In that idea, many subconscious process, working disparately, solve different aspects of the problems at hand, or provide different courses of action. The purpose of consciousness is to select from among the course of action presented by the pandemonium of subconscious processes - admittedly consciousness per se may not be necessary for this role - any unifying (aka reductive) process may be sufficient. But a course of action could be 'selected', i.e. acted upon, without consciousness (in fact I often do so). I think what constitutes consciousness is making up a narrative about what is 'selected'. The evolutionary reason for making up this narrative is to enter it into memory so it can be explained to others and to yourself when you face a similar choice in the future. That the memory of these past decisions took the form of a narrative derives from the fact that we are a social species, as explained by Julian Jaynes. This explains why the narrative is sometimes false, and when the part of the brain creating the narrative doesn't have access to the part deciding, as in some split brain experiments, the narrative is just confabulated. I find Dennett's modular brain idea very plausible and it's consistent with the idea that consciousness is the function of a module that produces a narrative for memory. OK. Not just a narrative though, but the meaning associated to it. If were designing a robot which I intended to be conscious, that's how I would design it: With a module whose function was to produce a narrative of choices and their supporting reasons for a memory that would be accessed in support of future decisions. This then requires a certain coherence and consistency in robots decisions - what we call 'character' in a person. OK. I don't think that would make the robot necessarily conscious according to Bruno's critereon. I think it would, if the system is universal it will potentially represent itself, That is a point of your ideas which frequently brings me up short. Perhaps it is because of your assumption of everythingness, but I see a distinction between what my robot will be and do, per my design, and what it can *potentially* do. As I understand the defintion of universal it is in terms of what a machine can potentially do - given the right program when we're referring to computers. But if it is not given all possible programs it will not realize all potentialities. Yet you often interject, as above, as though all potentialities are necessarily realized? Well, they are realized, in the same sense that the distribution of the primes exist independently of us. But this is used to derive pohysics, and is not relevant for the intelligence and consciousness of universal system, which is an here and now physical sensation. And this is not merely a metaphysical question. John McCarthy has pointed out that it would be unethical to create robots with certain levels of consciousness in certain circumstances, e.g. it would certainly be wrong to have programmed Curiosity with the potential to feel lonely. I agree with McCarthy, but Curiosity, as far as I know, has no capability to represent itself enough to feel lonely. His consciousness is still in the disconnected in Platonia. His soul has not yet felt on Earth, well on Mars :) Bruno and the consciousness is the meaning attached to the fixed point. In the worst case, it is trivially conscious. But if it had to function as a social being, it would need a concept of 'self' and the ability for self-reflective reasoning. That is already self-consciousness, which ask for one more loop of self-awareness. Like the K4 reasoners in Smullyan Forever Undecided, or any Löbian machine (universal machine believe
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Words vs experience
Hi Bruno Marchal Computers can only deal with what can be put into words, ie what can be discussed and shared. Consciousness or awareness is a wordless experience. There is a huge gulf between what we experience and what we say we experience. The former is wordless, personal, private and subjective, the latter is is in language--shareable, public (experience converted into words and thus communicated) and objective version. Thus there are the natural, unbreakable dualisms: subjectiveobjective experience spoken experience wordless in words private public personal shared faithbelief etc. Poets and novelists are good at converting experiences (what one can imagine) into words. Most of us are not that good. Computers can only think in words so cannot experience anything. They thus can thus not be conscious. Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/12/2012 - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-11, 11:42:35 Subject: Re: God has no name On 10 Aug 2012, at 18:45, Brian Tenneson wrote: Yeah but you can't define what a set is either, so... The difference, but is there really one?, is that we the notion of set we can agree on axioms and rules, so that we can discuss independently on the metaphysical baggage, as you pointed out once. This can be done both formally, in which case what we really do is an interview of a machine that we trust, or informally, betting on the human willingness to reason. For example, with sets, we can agree on the fact that they are identified by their elements: the extensionality axiom: For all x, y, z, if (x belongs to y - x belongs to z) then y = z. We might prefer to work in an intensional set theory, where a set is defined by their means of construct, and which is more relevant for the study of machines and processes. But then we do lambda calculus or elementary topoi, or we work in a variety of combinatory algebra. But it will not be a disagreement, as we know there can be different notion of set, and so different tools. Likewise with consciousness. We might not been able to define it, but we can agree on principle on it, notably that, assuming comp, it is invariant for a set of computable transformations, like the lower level substitutions, and reason from that. We can agree that if X is conscious, then X cannot justify that through words. Likewise with God. An informal definition could be that God is Reality, not necessarily as we observe or experience it but as it is. We can only hope or bet for such a thing. It might be a physical universe, or it might be a mathematical universe, or an arithmetical universe, but with comp it is a theological universe in the sense that comp separates clearly the communicable and the non communicable part of that reality, if it exists. Life and creativity develop on that frontier, as it develops also in between equilibrium and non equilibrium, between computable and non computable, between controllable and non controllable, etc. And we can agree on axioms on GOD, that is REALITY or TRUTH. For example that it is unique, that we can search on it, that it is not definable, so that such words are really only meta pointer to it, etc. The advantage of the definition of GOD by REALITY, or GOD = TRUTH, is that no honest believers, in any confessions, should have a problem with it, and for the atheists or the materialist GOD becomes a material physical universe a bit like 0, 1, and 2 became number when 'number' meant first 'numerous'. Mathematicians always does that trick, to extend the definition of a concept so that we simplify the key general statements. Is GOD a person? That might be an open problem for some, and an open problem for others. Truth might be subtile: in NeoPlatonism GOD (the ONE) is not a person, nor a creator, but from it emanates two other GODS (in the ancient greek sense, Plotinus call them hypostases) the third one being a person (the universal soul). For all matter, we need only to agree on semi-axiomatic definition, the rest is (a bit boring imo) vocabulary discussions. It hides the real conceptual differences in the attempt to apprehend what is, or could be. Bruno On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 2:22 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Hi Roger, On 07 Aug 2012, at 11:53, Roger wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal OUR FATHER, WHICH ART IN HEAVBEN, HALLOWED BE THY NAME. Luther said that to meditate of the sacredness of God according to this phrase is the oldest prayer. In old testament times, God's name was considered too sacred to speak by the Jews. The King James Bible uses YHWH, the Jews never say God as far as I know, they sometimes write it as G*d. We have relaxed these constrictions in the protestant tradition, use Jehovah and all sorts of other sacfed names. It is the problem with the notions of God, Whole, Truth, consciousness, etc. we
the unitary mind vs the modular brain
Hi Bruno Marchal As before, there is the natural, undeniable dualism between brain and mind: brain objective and modular mind subjective and unitary The brain can be discussed, the mind can only be experienced. I believe that the only subjective and unitary item in the universe is the monad. It is the eye of the universe, although for us we can only perceive indirectly. Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/12/2012 - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-11, 09:52:29 Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated! On 10 Aug 2012, at 14:04, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:10:43PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote: It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the total. This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts, you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'. With due respect to your salvia experiences, which I dare not follow, I'm still more presuaded by the likes of Daniel Dennett, and his pandemonia theory of the mind. In that idea, many subconscious process, working disparately, solve different aspects of the problems at hand, or provide different courses of action. The purpose of consciousness is to select from among the course of action presented by the pandemonium of subconscious processes - admittedly consciousness per se may not be necessary for this role - any unifying (aka reductive) process may be sufficient. The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian evolution is the key to any form of creative process. The brain parts I was talking about must be enough big and integrated, like an half hemisphere, or the limbic system, etc. What I said should not contradict Daniel Dennett pandemonia or Fodor modularity theory, which are very natural in a computationalist perspective. Only sufficiently big part of the brain can have their own consciousness as dissociation suggests, but also other experience, like splitting the brain, or the removing of half brain operation(*) suggest. The sleeping or paralysis of the corpus callosum can also leads to a splitting consciousness, and people can awake in the middle of doing two dreams at once. This consciousness multiplication does echoed Darwinian evolution as well, I think. Yet, I am not sure that Darwin evolution is a key to creativity. It might be a key to the apparition of creativity on earth, but creativity is a direct consequence of Turing universality. Emil Post called creative his set theoretical notion of universal probably for that reason: the fact that universal machine can somehow contradict any theories done about them, and transform itself transfinitely often. Or look at the Mandelbrot set. The formal description is very simple (less than 1K), yet its deployment is very rich and grandiose. It might be creative in Post sense, and most natural form, including biological, seem to appear in it. So very simple iteration can lead to creative process, and this echoes the fact that consciousness and creativity might appear more early than we usually thought. I was of course *not* saying that all parts of the brain are conscious, to be clear, only big one and structurally connected. Bruno (*) See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSu9HGnlMV0 http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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. -- 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.
Why AI is impossible
Hi Evgenii Rudnyi This is not going to make you computer folks happy, sorry. Life is whatever can experience its surroundings, nonlife cannot do so. That's the difference. Intelligence requires the ability to experience what it is selecting. So only life can have intelligence. Life is subjective, nonlife is objective. Computers cannot experience anything because they are not subjective, only objective. Everytthing must be in words, not directly experienced. Thus computers cannot be (truly) intelligent. And AI is impossible, because only living items can experience the world.. Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/12/2012 - Receiving the following content - From: Evgenii Rudnyi Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-11, 10:22:44 Subject: Re: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI ordescribing life On 11.08.2012 15:13 Stephen P. King said the following: On 8/11/2012 4:30 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Evgenii Dear Evgenii, A bacterium and a rock should not be put head to (no)head in this question. A bacterium has autonomy while a rock does not. It is better to see that the rock is just a small piece of an autonomous whole and then compare that whole to the (whole) bacterium. My goal was just to try to understand what Russell meant by life is unintelligent. Say let us take some creations of AI and compare them with a bacterium. Where do we find more intelligence? Evgenii -- 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. -- 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: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On 12.08.2012 11:06 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 11 Aug 2012, at 10:30, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Bacteria are provably Turing complete, rocks are not. You might remind us what you mean by intelligent. I tend to oppose it This is a question to Russell, as he has made a statement that life need not be intelligent. This was exactly my question what intelligent in this respect would mean. Evgenii to competence and learning. Intelligence is needed for making competence capable of growing and diversified, but competence has a negative feedback on intelligence. I use intelligence in a sense closer to free-will and consciousness than an ability to solve problems. IQ tests concerns always form of competence (very basic one: they have been invented to detect mental disability). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On 12.08.2012 11:38 Russell Standish said the following: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 10:05:20AM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: However, without such a measure, a statement that life is mostly unintelligent is ill-defined. Informal perhaps, but hardly ill-defined. Much the same could be said about the concept life. In general, if we assume inexorable physicals laws, for example the M-theory from Grad Design, then it is unclear to me what the meaning of the next statement could be: The behavior of this conglomerate of particles and fields is more intelligent than of that conglomerate of particle and fields. That is because you are looking at it at the wrong level. You need to take into account emergence. Let us take Game of Life. I believe that you have used it once as an example of what emergence is. Suppose there are some complex conglomerates emerge in Game of Life. How one could compare, which a conglomerate is more intelligent? Evgenii -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 12.08.2012 16:24 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. Bruno, Is it possible to say that compatibilism is equivalent to Leibniz' pre-established harmony? Evgenii -- 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: the unitary mind vs the modular brain
On 12 Aug 2012, at 14:28, Roger wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal As before, there is the natural, undeniable dualism between brain and mind: brain objective and modular mind subjective and unitary OK. You can even say: brain/body: objective and doubtable soul/consciousness: subjective and undoubtable The brain can be discussed, the mind can only be experienced. Exactly. I would say the soul, as the mind can be discussed in theories, but the soul is much more complex. We can discuss it through strong assumption like mechanism. I believe that the only subjective and unitary item in the universe is the monad. It is the eye of the universe, although for us we can only perceive indirectly. I am open to this. The monad would be the center of the wheel, or the fixed point of the doubting consciousness. The machines already agree with you on this : ) (to prove this you need to accept the most classical axiomatic (modal) definition of belief, knowledge, etc.) See my paper here for an introduction to the theology of the ideally correct machine: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html Bruno Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/12/2012 - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-11, 09:52:29 Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated! On 10 Aug 2012, at 14:04, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:10:43PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote: It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the total. This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts, you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'. With due respect to your salvia experiences, which I dare not follow, I'm still more presuaded by the likes of Daniel Dennett, and his pandemonia theory of the mind. In that idea, many subconscious process, working disparately, solve different aspects of the problems at hand, or provide different courses of action. The purpose of consciousness is to select from among the course of action presented by the pandemonium of subconscious processes - admittedly consciousness per se may not be necessary for this role - any unifying (aka reductive) process may be sufficient. The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian evolution is the key to any form of creative process. The brain parts I was talking about must be enough big and integrated, like an half hemisphere, or the limbic system, etc. What I said should not contradict Daniel Dennett pandemonia or Fodor modularity theory, which are very natural in a computationalist perspective. Only sufficiently big part of the brain can have their own consciousness as dissociation suggests, but also other experience, like splitting the brain, or the removing of half brain operation(*) suggest. The sleeping or paralysis of the corpus callosum can also leads to a splitting consciousness, and people can awake in the middle of doing two dreams at once. This consciousness multiplication does echoed Darwinian evolution as well, I think. Yet, I am not sure that Darwin evolution is a key to creativity. It might be a key to the apparition of creativity on earth, but creativity is a direct consequence of Turing universality. Emil Post called creative his set theoretical notion of universal probably for that reason: the fact that universal machine can somehow contradict any theories done about them, and transform itself transfinitely often. Or look at the Mandelbrot set. The formal description is very simple (less than 1K), yet its deployment is very rich and grandiose. It might be creative in Post sense, and most natural form, including biological, seem to appear in it. So very simple iteration can lead to creative process, and this echoes the fact that consciousness and creativity might appear more early than we usually thought. I was of course *not* saying that all parts of the brain are conscious, to be clear, only big one and structurally connected. Bruno (*) See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSu9HGnlMV0 http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 12 Aug 2012, at 16:29, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 12.08.2012 16:24 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. Bruno, Is it possible to say that compatibilism is equivalent to Leibniz' pre-established harmony? Thiscan be *one* interpretation of Leibniz' pre-established harmony, but I doubt it is necessarily the only one. With comp you can interpret the pre-established harmony by the arithmetical truth, but to be honest, the harmony break down. The arithmetical truth can be considered as pre-established, but it is messy, infinitely complex, and beyond *all* theories, even theories of everything, provably so if comp is postulated. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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: Why AI is impossible
Life is an ill defined phenomenological concept. Saibal Citeren Roger rclo...@verizon.net: Hi Evgenii Rudnyi This is not going to make you computer folks happy, sorry. Life is whatever can experience its surroundings, nonlife cannot do so. That's the difference. Intelligence requires the ability to experience what it is selecting. So only life can have intelligence. Life is subjective, nonlife is objective. Computers cannot experience anything because they are not subjective, only objective. Everytthing must be in words, not directly experienced. Thus computers cannot be (truly) intelligent. And AI is impossible, because only living items can experience the world.. Roger , rclo...@verizon.net 8/12/2012 - Receiving the following content - From: Evgenii Rudnyi Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-11, 10:22:44 Subject: Re: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI ordescribing life On 11.08.2012 15:13 Stephen P. King said the following: On 8/11/2012 4:30 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Evgenii Dear Evgenii, A bacterium and a rock should not be put head to (no)head in this question. A bacterium has autonomy while a rock does not. It is better to see that the rock is just a small piece of an autonomous whole and then compare that whole to the (whole) bacterium. My goal was just to try to understand what Russell meant by life is unintelligent. Say let us take some creations of AI and compare them with a bacterium. Where do we find more intelligence? Evgenii -- 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. -- 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. -- 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: Why AI is impossible
Roger: Nothing in the universe is objective. Objectivity is an ideal. When the physicist seeks to make some measure of the physical universe, he or she necessarily must use some other part of the physical universe by which to obtain that measure. QED. The physical universe is purely subjective. wrb From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Roger Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2012 5:35 AM To: everything-list Subject: Why AI is impossible Hi Evgenii Rudnyi This is not going to make you computer folks happy, sorry. Life is whatever can experience its surroundings, nonlife cannot do so. That's the difference. Intelligence requires the ability to experience what it is selecting. So only life can have intelligence. Life is subjective, nonlife is objective. Computers cannot experience anything because they are not subjective, only objective. Everytthing must be in words, not directly experienced. Thus computers cannot be (truly) intelligent. And AI is impossible, because only living items can experience the world.. Roger , mailto:rclo...@verizon.net rclo...@verizon.net 8/12/2012 - Receiving the following content - From: Evgenii Rudnyi mailto:use...@rudnyi.ru Receiver: everything-list mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com Time: 2012-08-11, 10:22:44 Subject: Re: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI ordescribing life On 11.08.2012 15:13 Stephen P. King said the following: On 8/11/2012 4:30 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Evgenii Dear Evgenii, A bacterium and a rock should not be put head to (no)head in this question. A bacterium has autonomy while a rock does not. It is better to see that the rock is just a small piece of an autonomous whole and then compare that whole to the (whole) bacterium. My goal was just to try to understand what Russell meant by life is unintelligent. Say let us take some creations of AI and compare them with a bacterium. Where do we find more intelligence? Evgenii -- 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. mailto:%20everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. mailto:%20unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- 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. -- 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: Severe limitations of a computer as a brain model
On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 6:47 AM, Roger rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Computers are quantitative instruments and so cannot have a self or feelings Do you have any way of proving that isn't also true of your fellow human beings? I don't. intution is non-computable Not true. Statistical laws and rules of thumb can be and are incorporated into software, and so can induction which is easier to do that deduction, even invertebrates can do induction but Euclid would stump them. 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: Words vs experience
This is already a consequence of computer science. All sound machines looking inward, or doing self-reference, cannot avoid the discovery between what they can justify with words, and what they can intuit as truth. What do justify and intuit mean? There are some machines out there that do not believe intuiting the truth exists; for them, if it is not justified they do not believe. -- 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: pre-established harmony
Hi Roger, I will interleave some remarks. On 8/11/2012 7:37 AM, Roger wrote: Hi Stephen P. King As I understand it, Leibniz's pre-established harmony is analogous to a musical score with God, or at least some super-intelligence, as composer/conductor. Allow me to use the analogy a bit more but carefully to not go too far. This musical score, does it require work of some kind to be created itself? This prevents all physical particles from colliding, instead they all move harmoniously together*. The score was composed before the Big Bang-- my own explanation is like Mozart God or that intelligence could hear the whole (symphony) beforehand in his head. I argue that the Pre-Established Harmony (PEH) requires solving anNP-Complete computational problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NP-complete_problems that has an infinite number of variables. Additionally, it is not possible to maximize or optimize more than one variable in a multivariate system http://www.wellesley.edu/Economics/weerapana/econ300/econ300pdf/lecture%20300-08.pdf. Unless we are going to grant God the ability to contradict mathematical facts, which, I argue, is equivalent to granting violations of the basis rules of non-contradiction, then God would have to run an eternal computation prior to the creation of the Universe. This is absurd! How can the existence of something have a beginning if it requires an an infinite problem to be solved first? Here is the problem: Computations require resources to run, and if resources are not available then there is no way to claim access to the information that would be in the solution that the computation would generate. WE might try to get around this problem the way that Bruno does by stipulating that the truth of the solution gives it existence, but the fact that some mathematical statement or sigma_1 sentence is true (in the prior sense) does not allow it to be considered as accessible for use for other things. For example, we could make valid claims about the content of a meteor that no one has examined but we cannot have any certainty about those claims unless we actually crack open the rock and physically examine its contents. The state of the universe as moving harmoniously together was not exactly what the PEH was for Leibniz. It was the synchronization of the simple actions of the Monads. It was a coordination of the percepts that make up the monads such that, for example, my monadic percept of living in a world that you also live in is synchronized with your monadic view of living in a world that I also live in such that we can be said to have this email chat. Remember, Monads (as defined in the Monadology) have no windows and cannot be considered to either exchange substances nor are embedded in a common medium that can exchange excitations. The entire common world of appearances emerges from and could be said to supervene upon the synchronization of internal (1p subjective) Monadic actions. I argue that the only way that God could find a solution to the NP-Complete problem is to make the creation of the universe simulataneous with the computations so that the universe itself is the computer that is finding the solution. This idea is discussed by several people including David Deutsch, Lee Smolin, Roger Penrose and Stuart Kaufman in their books. This implies that God's creative act is not a singular event but an eternal process. I suppose that this accords with Leibniz's belief that God, whoc is good, constructed the best possible world where as a miniomum, that least physics is obeyed. Yes. Hence Voltaire's foolish criticism of Leibniz in Candide that how could the volcanic or earthquake disaster in Lisbon be part of the most perfect world ? Voltair was a poor fool that could not understand the simple idea that only one variable can be maximized. Perhaps he was not a fool and knew the facts but wanted to discredit Leibniz's superior ideas. Thus, because physics must be obeyed, sometimes crap happens. Indeed. One might even argue that the existence of evil in the world is a consequence of choice; that only in a world completely devoid of choice might it be possible for crap to never occur. But this can be shown to have a vanishingly small probability or even zero chance of actually occurring, as 1) the NP-Complete problem would have to first be solved and 2) there would have to be a very happy accident where no one ever happen to be doing the actions which would lead them to see evil - given that evil is a valuation that occurs in our minds and is not an actual extant state of the world. * As a related and possibly explanatory point, L's universe completely is nonlocal. Indeed! I argue that L's monadology almost exactly anticipated the concept of a quantum mechanical system, since a QM system by definition is a windowless monad that never exchanges substances
Re: Why AI is impossible
Hi Roger, We distinguish between computers as physical objects and computations which are not necessarily only those things that physical computer objects do. My definition of a computation is any transformation of information (which is defined as the difference between two things that makes a difference to a third thing). On 8/12/2012 8:35 AM, Roger wrote: Hi Evgenii Rudnyi This is not going to make you computer folks happy, sorry. Life is whatever can experience its surroundings, nonlife cannot do so. That's the difference. Intelligence requires the ability to experience what it is selecting. So only life can have intelligence. Life is subjective, nonlife is objective. Computers cannot experience anything because they are not subjective, only objective. Everytthing must be in words, not directly experienced. Thus computers cannot be (truly) intelligent. And AI is impossible, because only living items can experience the world.. Roger , rclo...@verizon.net mailto:rclo...@verizon.net 8/12/2012 - Receiving the following content - *From:* Evgenii Rudnyi mailto:use...@rudnyi.ru *Receiver:* everything-list mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-08-11, 10:22:44 *Subject:* Re: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI ordescribing life On 11.08.2012 15:13 Stephen P. King said the following: On 8/11/2012 4:30 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Evgenii Dear Evgenii, A bacterium and a rock should not be put head to (no)head in this question. A bacterium has autonomy while a rock does not. It is better to see that the rock is just a small piece of an autonomous whole and then compare that whole to the (whole) bacterium. My goal was just to try to understand what Russell meant by life is unintelligent. Say let us take some creations of AI and compare them with a bacterium. Where do we find more intelligence? Evgenii -- 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. mailto:%20everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. mailto:%20unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- 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. -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/12/2012 10:29 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 12.08.2012 16:24 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. Bruno, Is it possible to say that compatibilism is equivalent to Leibniz' pre-established harmony? Evgenii Hi Evgenii, Yes, but with problems. -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- 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: the unitary mind vs the modular brain
On 8/12/2012 10:47 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Aug 2012, at 14:28, Roger wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal As before, there is the natural, undeniable dualism between brain and mind: brain objective and modular mind subjective and unitary OK. You can even say: brain/body: objective and doubtable soul/consciousness: subjective and undoubtable The brain can be discussed, the mind can only be experienced. Exactly. I would say the soul, as the mind can be discussed in theories, but the soul is much more complex. We can discuss it through strong assumption like mechanism. I believe that the only subjective and unitary item in the universe is the monad. It is the eye of the universe, although for us we can only perceive indirectly. I am open to this. The monad would be the center of the wheel, or the fixed point of the doubting consciousness. By Leibniz' definition, a monad would be the entire consciousness, the ego of i or self of the monad would be the fixed point. The machines already agree with you on this : ) (to prove this you need to accept the most classical axiomatic (modal) definition of belief, knowledge, etc.) See my paper here for an introduction to the theology of the ideally correct machine: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html Bruno Roger , rclo...@verizon.net mailto:rclo...@verizon.net 8/12/2012 - Receiving the following content - *From:* Bruno Marchal mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be *Receiver:* everything-list mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-08-11, 09:52:29 *Subject:* Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated! On 10 Aug 2012, at 14:04, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:10:43PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote: It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority of the total. This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts, you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very idea of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I think that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'. With due respect to your salvia experiences, which I dare not follow, I'm still more presuaded by the likes of Daniel Dennett, and his pandemonia theory of the mind. In that idea, many subconscious process, working disparately, solve different aspects of the problems at hand, or provide different courses of action. The purpose of consciousness is to select from among the course of action presented by the pandemonium of subconscious processes - admittedly consciousness per se may not be necessary for this role - any unifying (aka reductive) process may be sufficient. The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian evolution is the key to any form of creative process. The brain parts I was talking about must be enough big and integrated, like an half hemisphere, or the limbic system, etc. What I said should not contradict Daniel Dennett pandemonia or Fodor modularity theory, which are very natural in a computationalist perspective. Only sufficiently big part of the brain can have their own consciousness as dissociation suggests, but also other experience, like splitting the brain, or the removing of half brain operation(*) suggest. The sleeping or paralysis of the corpus callosum can also leads to a splitting consciousness, and people can awake in the middle of doing two dreams at once. This consciousness multiplication does echoed Darwinian evolution as well, I think. Yet, I am not sure that Darwin evolution is a key to creativity. It might be a key to the apparition of creativity on earth, but creativity is a direct consequence of Turing universality. Emil Post called creative his set theoretical notion of universal probably for that reason: the fact that universal machine can somehow contradict any theories done about them, and transform itself transfinitely often. Or look at the Mandelbrot set. The formal description is very simple (less than 1K), yet its deployment is very rich and grandiose. It might be creative in Post sense, and most natural form, including biological, seem to appear in it. So very
Re: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On 8/12/2012 10:56 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Aug 2012, at 16:29, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 12.08.2012 16:24 Bruno Marchal said the following: On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. Bruno, Is it possible to say that compatibilism is equivalent to Leibniz' pre-established harmony? Thiscan be *one* interpretation of Leibniz' pre-established harmony, but I doubt it is necessarily the only one. With comp you can interpret the pre-established harmony by the arithmetical truth, but to be honest, the harmony break down. The arithmetical truth can be considered as pre-established, but it is messy, infinitely complex, and beyond *all* theories, even theories of everything, provably so if comp is postulated. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ Dear Bruno, Given this remark about the PEH, do you agree with me that even though arithmetic truth is prior, that it is not accessible without physical actions? -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- 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: Why AI is impossible
Hear hear! It is the shared delusion of many first person content. On 8/12/2012 12:01 PM, William R. Buckley wrote: Roger: Nothing in the universe is objective. Objectivity is an ideal. When the physicist seeks to make some measure of the physical universe, he or she necessarily must use some other part of the physical universe by which to obtain that measure. QED. The physical universe is purely subjective. wrb *From:*everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Roger *Sent:* Sunday, August 12, 2012 5:35 AM *To:* everything-list *Subject:* Why AI is impossible Hi Evgenii Rudnyi This is not going to make you computer folks happy, sorry. Life is whatever can experience its surroundings, nonlife cannot do so. That's the difference. Intelligence requires the ability to experience what it is selecting. So only life can have intelligence. Life is subjective, nonlife is objective. Computers cannot experience anything because they are not subjective, only objective. Everytthing must be in words, not directly experienced. Thus computers cannot be (truly) intelligent. And AI is impossible, because only living items can experience the world.. Roger , rclo...@verizon.net mailto:rclo...@verizon.net 8/12/2012 - Receiving the following content - *From:*Evgenii Rudnyi mailto:use...@rudnyi.ru *Receiver:*everything-list mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:*2012-08-11, 10:22:44 *Subject:*Re: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI ordescribing life On 11.08.2012 15:13 Stephen P. King said the following: On 8/11/2012 4:30 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Evgenii Dear Evgenii, A bacterium and a rock should not be put head to (no)head in this question. A bacterium has autonomy while a rock does not. It is better to see that the rock is just a small piece of an autonomous whole and then compare that whole to the (whole) bacterium. My goal was just to try to understand what Russell meant by life is unintelligent. Say let us take some creations of AI and compare them with a bacterium. Where do we find more intelligence? Evgenii -- 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. mailto:%20everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. mailto:%20unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- 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 mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- 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. -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- 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: the unitary mind vs the modular brain errata
On 8/12/2012 2:13 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 8/12/2012 10:47 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Aug 2012, at 14:28, Roger wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal As before, there is the natural, undeniable dualism between brain and mind: brain objective and modular mind subjective and unitary OK. You can even say: brain/body: objective and doubtable soul/consciousness: subjective and undoubtable The brain can be discussed, the mind can only be experienced. Exactly. I would say the soul, as the mind can be discussed in theories, but the soul is much more complex. We can discuss it through strong assumption like mechanism. I believe that the only subjective and unitary item in the universe is the monad. It is the eye of the universe, although for us we can only perceive indirectly. I am open to this. The monad would be the center of the wheel, or the fixed point of the doubting consciousness. By Leibniz' definition, a monad would be the entire consciousness, the ego of i or self of the monad would be the fixed point. What I wrote was incorrect. The monad is defined by the closure on the topological space that is dual to the Boolean algebra representing the consciousness. The I is the fixed point that is defined in this closure. -- Onward! Stephen Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. ~ Francis Bacon -- 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: Stephen Hawking: Philosophy is Dead
On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 04:24:22PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Aug 2012, at 11:45, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:01:09AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 09:45, Russell Standish wrote: Nevertheless, randomness is a key component of free will. So comp is false? I mean comp can only defend a compatibilist (or mechanist, deterministic) theory of free-will, like with the self- indetermination based on diagonalization. I have never seen how we can use randomness to justify free-will. May be you can elaborate? Bruno If there are several actions an agent may perform, and one optimal in terms of the agent's utility, but the utility is computationally unfeasible, then an agent can choose one of the actions by random choice. How? Agents perform actions. That is the meaning of agency. If random oracles are available to the agent, why shouldn't the agent use them. I don't see why this would entail comp is false though. Perhaps you could elaborate? Because comp implies that there is no randomness at the ontological level. Assuming that by ontological level, you mean what I call the syntactic level in my book. There is no free will at the syntactic level, nor is there consciousness, nor human beings, wet water or any other emergent stuff. Free will only makes sense at the semantic level. The level which gives meaning to consious lives. I guess you are alluding to the self-indeterminacy (à-la Turing, not to be confused with the first person indeterminacy) which can make a decision looking random for the one who does it, I would have thought that first person indeterminancy would fit the bill perfectly. Note that as there can be no conscious observer of the 3rd person deterministic subtsrate, it makes no sense to speak of free will for the entities of that substrate. but which is not the non-compatibilist kind of randomness that some defender of free-will want to introduce. I have never met anyone wanting to do this. They sound like some sort of long-discredited Cartesian dualist. Are you sure they're not strawmen you have conjured up? There was a deterministic/free will paradox in the 19th century, when Laplace's clockwork universe reigned supreme. But since the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920, the paradox was disolved. And as David Deutcsh is want to point out, for the price of a Multiverse, one can have one's deterministic cake and freely eat it too (sorry for mangling the metaphors :). But this works because the free will exists at a different level from that where determinism rules. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 03:55:15PM +0200, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: This is a question to Russell, as he has made a statement that life need not be intelligent. This was exactly my question what intelligent in this respect would mean. I was not using it in a technical sense, but just the everyday informal notion. Bacteria exhibit adaptive behaviour, such as chemotaxis, quorum sensing and switching between random and linear motion depending on nutrient concentration. But I would argue that none of these behaviours could be considered intelligent, as they can be duplicated by low dimensional dynamical systems. I would imagine that no technical definition for intelligence would be agreed upon at the present time. The situation would appear to be even more dire than that with complexity, which does have at least some vague consensus (see the discussion of complexity in my book, and references therein). Here is one (Fulcher Computational Intelligence: A Compendium (2008), Fulcher, Jain (eds) page 3), in citing Eberhardt et al (1996) Computational Intelligence PC Tools: a) ability to learn (Brent Meeker already mentioned this) b) ability to deal with new situations c) ability to reason I hope this answers your (new) question to some degree. Your previous questions were actually rather different, even if what you were trying to do was take me to task on my use of the term intelligent. Best. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: [SPAM] Re: God has no name
On 8/12/2012 1:57 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Let phi_i be an enumeration of the (partial) computable function. u is universal if phi_u(x, y) = phi_x(y). (x,y) = some number code for the couple (x, y) So can y be some number code for a pair (a,b) and b a code for a pair (c,d),...? Brent So phi_u is able to compute phi_i for all i. In that case we say that u emulate x on y. u can emulate itself, as in phi_u(u, x) = phi_u(x), but u does not emulate itself per se, by its own functioning. -- 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: Definitions of intelligence possibly useful to computers in AI or describing life
On 8/12/2012 2:06 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 11 Aug 2012, at 10:30, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 10.08.2012 00:55 Russell Standish said the following: The point being that life need not be intelligent. In fact 999.9% of life (but whatever measure, numbers, biomass etc) is unintelligent. The study of artificial life by the same reason need not be a study of artitificial intelligence, although because of a biases as an intelligent species, a significantly higher fraction of alife research is about AI. What does intelligence means in this context that life is unintelligent? Let us compare for example a bacterium and a rock. Where there is more intelligence? Bacteria are provably Turing complete, rocks are not. Bacteria a certainly smarter than rocks by any reasonable measure. But I don't think a bacterium has a semi-infinite tape. Brent You might remind us what you mean by intelligent. I tend to oppose it to competence and learning. Intelligence is needed for making competence capable of growing and diversified, but competence has a negative feedback on intelligence. I use intelligence in a sense closer to free-will and consciousness than an ability to solve problems. IQ tests concerns always form of competence (very basic one: they have been invented to detect mental disability). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- 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.