date:20130213



On 13 Feb 2013, at 04:09, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com  
wrote:

Consider the following thought experiment, called The Duplicators:

At 1:00 PM tomorrow, you will be abducted by aliens. The aliens  
will tell
you not to worry, that you won't be harmed but they wish to conduct  
some
experiments on the subject of pain, which is unknown to them. These  
aliens
possess technology far in advance of our own. They have the ability  
to scan
and replicate objects down to the atomic level and the aliens use  
this
technology to create an atom-for-atom duplicate of yourself, which  
they call
you2. The aliens thank you for your assistance and return you  
unharmed back
to your home by 5:00 PM. You ask them What about the pain  
experiments? and
they hand you an informational pamphlet and quickly fly off. You  
read the
pamphlet which explains that a duplicate of you (you2) was created  
and
subjected to some rather terrible pain experiments, akin to what  
humans call
torture and at the end of the experiment you2 was euthanized. You  
consider
this awful, but are nonetheless glad that they tortured your  
duplicate

rather than you.

Now consider the slightly different thought experiment, called The
Restorers:

At 1:00 PM tomorrow, you will be abducted by aliens. Unlike the  
aliens with

the duplication technology (the duplicators), these aliens possess a
restorative technology. They can perfectly erase memories and all  
other
physical traces to perfectly restore you to a previous state. The  
aliens

will tell you not to worry, that you won't be harmed but they wish to
conduct some experiments on the subject of pain, which is unknown  
to them.
They then proceed to brutually torture you for many hours,  
conducting test
after test on pain. Afterwards, they erase your memory of the  
torture and
all traces of injury and stress from your body. When they are  
finished, you
are atom-for-atom identical to how you were before the torture  
began. The
aliens thank you for your assistance and return you unharmed back  
to your
home by 5:00 PM. You ask them What about the pain experiments?  
and they

hand you an informational pamphlet and quickly fly off. You read the
pamphlet which explains that a duplicate of you (you2) was created  
and
subjected to some rather terrible pain experiments, akin to what  
humans call
torture and at the end of the experiment you2 was euthenized. You  
consider
this awful, but are nonetheless glad that they tortured your  
duplicate

rather than you.

My questions for the list:

1. Do you consider yourself to have experienced the torture in the  
case of
the Restorers, even though you no longer remember it?  If not, why  
not.


2. If yes, do you consider yourself to have experienced the torture  
in the
case of the Duplicators?  If yes, please explain, if not, please  
explain.


3. If you could choose which aliens would abduct you, is there one  
you would

prefer?  If you have a preference, please provide some justification.


The two experiments are equivalent. Rationally, you should not have a
preference for either - though both are bad in that you experience
pain but then forget it.


OK, same answer (assuming comp).

If we assume non-comp, then the answer will be dependent on the theory  
of mind that we might propose.


Bruno





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Re: The duplicators and the restorers



On 13 Feb 2013, at 06:45, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Tuesday, February 12, 2013 10:09:40 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 12:24 PM, Craig Weinberg  
whats...@gmail.com wrote:
 1. Do you consider yourself to have experienced the torture in  
the case of
 the Restorers, even though you no longer remember it?  If not, why  
not.


 Yes


 2. If yes, do you consider yourself to have experienced the  
torture in the
 case of the Duplicators?  If yes, please explain, if not, please  
explain.


 The idea that atoms can be duplicated is an assumption. If we only  
look at
 the part of a plant that we can see and tried to duplicate that,  
it would
 not have an roots and it would die. I think of the roots of atoms  
to be
 experiences through time. Just having a person who seems to be  
shaped like

 you according to an electron microscope does not make them you.

 3. Both scenarios I think are based on misconceptions. Nothing in  
the
 universe can be duplicated absolutely and nothing can be erased  
absolutely,
 because what we see of time is, again, missing the roots that  
extend out to
 eternity.  I find it bizarre that we find it so easy to doubt our  
naive
 realism when it comes to physics but not when it comes to  
consciousness.
 Somehow we think that the idea that this moment of 'now' is  
mandated by

 physics to be universal and uniform.

What is to stop duplication of, say, the simplest possible conscious
being made up of only a few atoms?

Because I suspect that conscious beings are not made of atoms,  
rather atoms exist in the experience of beings.


But that's a consequence of the fact that we might be 3p-duplicable.





Experiences cannot be duplicated literally, because I suspect that  
unique is the only thing that experiences can literally be.


I agree with this, in the sense that this follows also from  
computationalism, and thus 3p-duplicability at some level.
An 1p-experience is not duplicable, as it is the unique experience of  
a unique being. It can still be duplicated relatively to some  
observer, but not relatively to the experiencer himself. Again what  
you say concur with comp, making astonishing why you are using those  
points against the possibility of 3p-duplication, which is so much  
well illustrated by nature, as life is constant self-body change and  
duplication (as Stathis argues convincingly).


To sum up: with comp, we are 3p-duplicable; the 1p, as attributed by a  
3p-person, is relatively duplicable. The 1p, seen from the 1p view, is  
not duplicable. Like in Everett QM, the 1p can't feel the split in any  
way.


Bruno











Sometimes the objection is raised
that an exact quantum state cannot be measured (although it can be
duplicated via quantum teleportation, with destruction of the
original), but this is probably spurious. If duplication down to the
quantum level were needed to maintain continuity of consciousness then
it would be impossible to maintain continuity of consciousness from
moment to moment in ordinary life, since the state of your body
changes in a relatively gross way and you remain you.

Can the year 1965 be duplicated? If you wanted just one millisecond  
from 1965. What I am suggesting is that the entire assumption of the  
universe as bodies or particles be questioned. The universe is  
unique variations of a single experience, with a continuum of  
'similarity' in between, contingent upon the experiential capacity  
of the participant.



So what you have to explain Craig is what you think would happen if
you tried to duplicate a person using very advanced science,

If you tried to duplicate a person's body, then you get an identical  
twin - my guess is probably a dead one.


and why
you don't think that happens when a person lives his life from day to
day,

Because the cells of the body exist within experiences, not the  
other way around. We aren't spirits or bodies, we are lifetimes.


having his brain replaced completely (and imprecisely) over the
course of months with the matter in the food he eats.

It's like saying the cars on a freeway are replaced constantly so it  
is no longer a freeway. What makes the traffic is the participation  
of drivers who employ vehicles to take them places. Understanding  
the phenomenon as just a statistical pattern of positions and  
frequencies, or of objects in a spatial relation are both  
interesting and useful, but without the underlying sensory-motive  
grounding, it's ultimately meaningless to the big picture.


Craig



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Re: Does p make sense?



On 13 Feb 2013, at 02:28, Russell Standish wrote:


On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:05:37AM -0800, Craig Weinberg wrote:
When we talk about a Bp, relating to consciousness is that we are  
making an
assumption about what a proposition is. In fact, if we look  
closely, a
proposition can only be another level of B. p is really nothing but  
a group

of sub-personal Beliefs (logarithmically nested as B^n) which we are
arbitrarily considered as a given condition...but there is no given
condition in actual experience. All experiences are contingent upon  
what

the experiencer is capable of receiving or interacting with.



I don't really follow your remaining comments, but I agree with you
that the p in the Theatetical definition of knowledge makes me
uncomfortable, post Popper.


That is why I like to sum up Popper by in Science there are only  
belief, never knowledge per se.
It is related to the modesty/Löbianity of the correct machines, and  
the fact that the genuine mystical machines are mute on their knowledge.
Unfortunately this leads to vocabulary problem (only) for some  
Popperians.






I'm happy for Bp  p to apply to mathematical knowledge, with B
semantically equivalent to prove, but when it comes to scientific
knowledge, requiring absolute truth in things seems a step too far.


Well, actually it was a problem that Bp  p could work for Bp = I  
prove p, because most scientists believe that this makes knowledge  
equivalent with belief or proof for/by the correct machine.


It takes some understanding of Gödel's theorem to realize that, even  
for the correct machine, and despite the fact that Bp is equivalent  
with Bp  p (prove the same arithmetical p), they obey different  
logics. So only G* proves Bp - Bp  p, the machine, nor G, can't  
prove that equivalence, and this makes Bp  p obeying a different  
logic (indeed the modal logic S4 defining the classical notion of  
knowledge).


A machine cannot prove that Bf is equivalent with Bf  f, without  
contradicting Gödel's second incompleteness theorem.







But I have no constructive suggestions as to how to modify  
Theatetus :(.


In conscience and mécanisme I argue in detail that the acceptance of  
the classical theory of knowledge (S4) which we get back by applying  
Theaetetus' definition of knowledge on Gödel's provability predicate)  
is the only one which can make sense of the dream argument in  
metaphysics.  We can know that we are dreaming, but we cannot know  
that we are awake, and that is a key to get the platonist idea that we  
might be in a sort of cave/matrix (in the digital setting).


Bruno





Cheers

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Visiting Professor of Mathematics  hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales  http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: The duplicators and the restorers


On 2/13/2013 10:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 13 Feb 2013, at 06:45, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Tuesday, February 12, 2013 10:09:40 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 12:24 PM, Craig Weinberg
whats...@gmail.com javascript: wrote:
 1. Do you consider yourself to have experienced the torture in
the case of
 the Restorers, even though you no longer remember it?  If not,
why not.

 Yes


 2. If yes, do you consider yourself to have experienced the
torture in the
 case of the Duplicators?  If yes, please explain, if not,
please explain.

 The idea that atoms can be duplicated is an assumption. If we
only look at
 the part of a plant that we can see and tried to duplicate
that, it would
 not have an roots and it would die. I think of the roots of
atoms to be
 experiences through time. Just having a person who seems to be
shaped like
 you according to an electron microscope does not make them you.

 3. Both scenarios I think are based on misconceptions. Nothing
in the
 universe can be duplicated absolutely and nothing can be erased
absolutely,
 because what we see of time is, again, missing the roots that
extend out to
 eternity.  I find it bizarre that we find it so easy to doubt
our naive
 realism when it comes to physics but not when it comes to
consciousness.
 Somehow we think that the idea that this moment of 'now' is
mandated by
 physics to be universal and uniform.

What is to stop duplication of, say, the simplest possible conscious
being made up of only a few atoms? 



Because I suspect that conscious beings are not made of atoms, rather 
atoms exist in the experience of beings.



Dear Bruno,

I have some questions but they are not well-formed, my apologies. I 
hope you can make some sense of them. I agree generally that atoms 
exist in the experience of beings only. We (the in the plural sense) 
happen to be able to agree on the locations and other properties of 
objects within our individual 1p.



But that's a consequence of the fact that we might be 3p-duplicable.


 If we are 3p-duplicatable then how do we obtain the 
non-clonability of quantum states?




Experiences cannot be duplicated literally, because I suspect that 
unique is the only thing that experiences can literally be.


I agree with this, in the sense that this follows also from 
computationalism, and thus 3p-duplicability at some level.


Could it be that the 3p-duplicatability is possible but global 1p 
correlations of these is not possible, thus obtaining the no cloning of QM?


An 1p-experience is not duplicable, as it is the unique experience of 
a unique being.


Does this follow from the uniqueness of a fixed point (for a given group 
of transformations on a closed (or semi-closed) collection?


It can still be duplicated relatively to some observer, but not 
relatively to the experiencer himself.


So would relate them to each other?

Again what you say concur with comp, making astonishing why you are 
using those points against the possibility of 3p-duplication, which is 
so much well illustrated by nature, as life is constant self-body 
change and duplication (as Stathis argues convincingly).


To sum up: with comp, we are 3p-duplicable; the 1p, as attributed by a 
3p-person, is relatively duplicable. The 1p, seen from the 1p view, is 
not duplicable. Like in Everett QM, the 1p can't feel the split in any 
way.


It seems to me that you are assuming a special observer that can 
distinguish all 3p-persons from each other. In my thinking this is cheating.




Bruno




Sometimes the objection is raised
that an exact quantum state cannot be measured (although it can be
duplicated via quantum teleportation, with destruction of the
original), but this is probably spurious. If duplication down to the
quantum level were needed to maintain continuity of consciousness
then
it would be impossible to maintain continuity of consciousness from
moment to moment in ordinary life, since the state of your body
changes in a relatively gross way and you remain you.


Can the year 1965 be duplicated? If you wanted just one millisecond 
from 1965. What I am suggesting is that the entire assumption of the 
universe as bodies or particles be questioned. The universe is unique 
variations of a single experience, with a continuum of 'similarity' 
in between, contingent upon the experiential capacity of the participant.



So what you have to explain Craig is what you think would happen if
you tried to duplicate a person using very advanced science,


If you tried to duplicate a person's body, then you get an identical 
twin - my guess is probably a dead one.


and why
you don't think that happens when a person lives his life from
day to
day, 



Because the cells of the body exist within

Re: Does p make sense?



On 12 Feb 2013, at 20:05, Craig Weinberg wrote:

When we talk about a Bp, relating to consciousness is that we are  
making an assumption about what a proposition is. In fact, if we  
look closely, a proposition can only be another level of B. p is  
really nothing but a group of sub-personal Beliefs (logarithmically  
nested as B^n)


?



which we are arbitrarily considered as a given condition...but there  
is no given condition in actual experience.


That's why we put Bp  p. To get the condition of 1p experience. It  
works as we get a non nameable, and non formalisable notion of  
knowledge. S4 and S4Grz do succeed in meta-formalizing a thoroughly  
non formalisable notion.





All experiences are contingent upon what the experiencer is capable  
of receiving or interacting with.


Any proposition that can be named relies on some pre-existing  
context (which is sensed or makes sense).


The problem with applying Doxastic models to consciousness is not  
only that it amputates the foundations of awareness,



It does not for the reason above. Note that even Bp  p can lead to  
falsity, in principle. Things get more complex when you add the non  
monotonic layers, that we need for natural languages and for the  
mundane type of belief or knowledge. Here, of course, with the goal of  
deriving the correct physical laws; it is simpler to consider the case  
of ideally correct machine, for which us, but not the machine itself  
can know the equivalence.


Bruno



but that the fact of the amputation will be hidden by the results.  
In Baudrillard's terms, this is a stage 3 simulacrum, (stage one = a  
true reflection, stage two = a perversion of the truth, stage three  
= a perversion which pretends not to be a perversion).


The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the  
simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no  
original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no  
representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely  
suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard  
calls this the order of sorcery, a regime of semantic algebra  
where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a  
reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

This is made more important by the understanding that sense or  
awareness is the source of authenticity itself. This means that  
there can be no tolerance for any stage of simulation beyond 1. In  
my hypotheses, I am always trying to get at the 1 stage for that  
reason, because consciousness or experience, by definition, has no  
substitute.


Craig

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Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto

*Wouldn’t Simulated Intelligence be a more appropriate term than Artificial 
Intelligence?*

Thinking of it objectively, if we have a program which can model a 
hurricane, we would call that hurricane a simulation, not an ‘artificial 
hurricane’. If we modeled any physical substance, force, or field, we would 
similarly say that we had simulated hydrogen or gravity or 
electromagnetism, not that we had created artificial hydrogen, gravity, etc.

By calling it artificial, we also emphasize a kind of obsolete notion of 
natural vs man-made as categories of origin. If we used simulated instead, 
the measure of intelligence would be framed more modestly as the degree to 
which a system meets our expectations (or what we think or assume are our 
expectations). Rather than assuming a universal index of intelligent 
qualities which is independent from our own human qualities, we could 
evaluate the success of a particular Turing emulation purely on its merits 
as a convincing reflection of intelligence rather than presuming to have 
replicated an organic conscious experience mechanically.

The cost of losing the promise of imminently mastering awareness would, I 
think, be outweighed by the gain of a more scientifically circumspect 
approach. Putting the Promethean dream on hold, we could guard against the 
shadow of its confirmation bias. My concern is that without such a 
precaution, the promise of machine intelligence as a stage 1 simulacrum (a 
faithful copy of an original, in Baudrillard’s 
termshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation), 
will be diluted to a stage 3 simulacrum (a copy that masks the absence of a 
profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy.)

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Re: How can intelligence be physical ?


On 2/13/2013 3:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:

The main reason Watson and similar programs fail to have human like
  intelligence is that they lack human like values and motivations

True, but they could have generic intelligence -- the ability to learn
something new in a new domain, just by being told to do it.


I don't know if that could work.  If you wanted the robot to learn to do some task you'd 
have stand there and say learn this, no learn that, learn this,...  Being able to learn 
already requires some degree of generality.



Such
slaves would be tremendously useful and free us from labor. There is
no lack of motivation to create such things.


  - and deliberately so

Deliberately implies that we have the option. I'm pretty sure a lot of
people would very much like to create an artificial human, but they
failed so far.


As Bruno would say, the want to create human level *competence*. But they haven't thought 
about the problem of that entailing human level intelligence (although some have, c.f. 
John McCarthy's website).





  because we don't want them to be making autonomous decisions
  based on their internal values.  That's why I usually take something like an
  advanced Mars rover as an example of intelligence.

I agree, but not general intelligence.


I as my professor used to say, Artificial intelligence is just whatever can't be 
done yet.

Brent

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Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie



On 11 Feb 2013, at 21:43, Stephen P. King wrote:


On 2/11/2013 10:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 10 Feb 2013, at 20:36, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Sunday, February 10, 2013 11:16:31 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 09 Feb 2013, at 22:07, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Saturday, February 9, 2013 3:32:52 PM UTC-5, Simon Forman wrote:
But then doesn't that leave subjectivity fundamentally mysterious?

I think that human subjectivity is a range of qualities of  
experience, some rooted in the sub-personal, some in the super- 
personal, and some reflected from the impersonal ranges. From  
this island of possible personal sensitivities, the influences  
arising from beneath, behind, or beyond us does seem mysterious,  
but from an absolute perspective, the only thing mysterious is  
why we should assume that it is not fundamental.



Because we want to explain it from something simpler. That's what  
make comp interesting, it allows at least the search (and then  
computer science illustrates that it works indeed).


It may not have any choice but to prove it works.


Lol.



If comp has no access to geometry, why would it have access to  
subjectivity?


Comp is an hypothesis, not a being. I guess you mean if a machine  
has no access to geometry 
But why would a machine not having access to geometry. On the  
contrary, geometry is rather simple for machines, bith in the  
quanta and qualia parts. See the theory of qualia in some of my  
papers.





In either case, there will be tautological internal consistency,  
but only because it comp is a closed-circuit echo chamber.


Machine intelligence is open, never close. I'm afraid that you are  
still using the pre-Gödelian, or pre-Turingian notion of machine.


Bruno



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




Dear Bruno,

   Just to be clear , is the definition of a machine that you  
support is: that whatever the machine is, it is capable of being  
exactly represented by a recursively enumerable function?



Yes, for the digital machine, at some of their computational step. We  
can represent them by a recursively enumerable set of numbers W_i, or  
by a partial computable function phi_i. This follows from Church's  
thesis.
But they cannot do that themselves, for themselves, without betting on  
a level, and having some faith in comp, and doctors!


Bruno





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Onward!

Stephen


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Re: The duplicators and the restorers



On 13 Feb 2013, at 16:25, Jason Resch wrote:




On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 9:18 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be  
wrote:


On 13 Feb 2013, at 04:09, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com  
wrote:

Consider the following thought experiment, called The Duplicators:

At 1:00 PM tomorrow, you will be abducted by aliens. The aliens will  
tell
you not to worry, that you won't be harmed but they wish to conduct  
some
experiments on the subject of pain, which is unknown to them. These  
aliens
possess technology far in advance of our own. They have the ability  
to scan

and replicate objects down to the atomic level and the aliens use this
technology to create an atom-for-atom duplicate of yourself, which  
they call
you2. The aliens thank you for your assistance and return you  
unharmed back
to your home by 5:00 PM. You ask them What about the pain  
experiments? and
they hand you an informational pamphlet and quickly fly off. You  
read the

pamphlet which explains that a duplicate of you (you2) was created and
subjected to some rather terrible pain experiments, akin to what  
humans call
torture and at the end of the experiment you2 was euthanized. You  
consider

this awful, but are nonetheless glad that they tortured your duplicate
rather than you.

Now consider the slightly different thought experiment, called The
Restorers:

At 1:00 PM tomorrow, you will be abducted by aliens. Unlike the  
aliens with

the duplication technology (the duplicators), these aliens possess a
restorative technology. They can perfectly erase memories and all  
other
physical traces to perfectly restore you to a previous state. The  
aliens

will tell you not to worry, that you won't be harmed but they wish to
conduct some experiments on the subject of pain, which is unknown to  
them.
They then proceed to brutually torture you for many hours,  
conducting test
after test on pain. Afterwards, they erase your memory of the  
torture and
all traces of injury and stress from your body. When they are  
finished, you
are atom-for-atom identical to how you were before the torture  
began. The
aliens thank you for your assistance and return you unharmed back to  
your
home by 5:00 PM. You ask them What about the pain experiments? and  
they

hand you an informational pamphlet and quickly fly off. You read the
pamphlet which explains that a duplicate of you (you2) was created and
subjected to some rather terrible pain experiments, akin to what  
humans call
torture and at the end of the experiment you2 was euthenized. You  
consider

this awful, but are nonetheless glad that they tortured your duplicate
rather than you.

My questions for the list:

1. Do you consider yourself to have experienced the torture in the  
case of
the Restorers, even though you no longer remember it?  If not, why  
not.


2. If yes, do you consider yourself to have experienced the torture  
in the
case of the Duplicators?  If yes, please explain, if not, please  
explain.


3. If you could choose which aliens would abduct you, is there one  
you would

prefer?  If you have a preference, please provide some justification.

The two experiments are equivalent. Rationally, you should not have a
preference for either - though both are bad in that you experience
pain but then forget it.

OK, same answer (assuming comp).


With comp are the probabilities the same?  For instance, would there  
be a 50% chance of experiencing the torture when duplicated vs.  
100% in the case of the memory wipe?


It is counter-intuitive, but if the memory wipe is perfect, the  
relative probabilities, evaluated before the experiment, should be the  
same. If a future memory wipe is done perfectly, it is analogous to a  
reconstitution of a past (3p) state in the future, and before that  
first state occurence, you have a probability non null to find  
yourself in the future.


It is not clear if such a perfect memory wipe is possible in practice  
though.


Bruno



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



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Re: The duplicators and the restorers

2013-02-13 Thread Jason Resch

Bruno,

Thanks for your response.  I think I understand now.

Jason

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:13 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:


 On 13 Feb 2013, at 16:25, Jason Resch wrote:



 On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 9:18 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:


 On 13 Feb 2013, at 04:09, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

  On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com
 wrote:

 Consider the following thought experiment, called The Duplicators:

 At 1:00 PM tomorrow, you will be abducted by aliens. The aliens will
 tell
 you not to worry, that you won't be harmed but they wish to conduct some
 experiments on the subject of pain, which is unknown to them. These
 aliens
 possess technology far in advance of our own. They have the ability to
 scan
 and replicate objects down to the atomic level and the aliens use this
 technology to create an atom-for-atom duplicate of yourself, which they
 call
 you2. The aliens thank you for your assistance and return you unharmed
 back
 to your home by 5:00 PM. You ask them What about the pain
 experiments? and
 they hand you an informational pamphlet and quickly fly off. You read
 the
 pamphlet which explains that a duplicate of you (you2) was created and
 subjected to some rather terrible pain experiments, akin to what humans
 call
 torture and at the end of the experiment you2 was euthanized. You
 consider
 this awful, but are nonetheless glad that they tortured your duplicate
 rather than you.

 Now consider the slightly different thought experiment, called The
 Restorers:

 At 1:00 PM tomorrow, you will be abducted by aliens. Unlike the aliens
 with
 the duplication technology (the duplicators), these aliens possess a
 restorative technology. They can perfectly erase memories and all other
 physical traces to perfectly restore you to a previous state. The aliens
 will tell you not to worry, that you won't be harmed but they wish to
 conduct some experiments on the subject of pain, which is unknown to
 them.
 They then proceed to brutually torture you for many hours, conducting
 test
 after test on pain. Afterwards, they erase your memory of the torture
 and
 all traces of injury and stress from your body. When they are finished,
 you
 are atom-for-atom identical to how you were before the torture began.
 The
 aliens thank you for your assistance and return you unharmed back to
 your
 home by 5:00 PM. You ask them What about the pain experiments? and
 they
 hand you an informational pamphlet and quickly fly off. You read the
 pamphlet which explains that a duplicate of you (you2) was created and
 subjected to some rather terrible pain experiments, akin to what humans
 call
 torture and at the end of the experiment you2 was euthenized. You
 consider
 this awful, but are nonetheless glad that they tortured your duplicate
 rather than you.

 My questions for the list:

 1. Do you consider yourself to have experienced the torture in the case
 of
 the Restorers, even though you no longer remember it?  If not, why not.

 2. If yes, do you consider yourself to have experienced the torture in
 the
 case of the Duplicators?  If yes, please explain, if not, please
 explain.

 3. If you could choose which aliens would abduct you, is there one you
 would
 prefer?  If you have a preference, please provide some justification.


 The two experiments are equivalent. Rationally, you should not have a
 preference for either - though both are bad in that you experience
 pain but then forget it.


 OK, same answer (assuming comp).



 With comp are the probabilities the same?  For instance, would there be a
 50% chance of experiencing the torture when duplicated vs. 100% in the
 case of the memory wipe?


 It is counter-intuitive, but if the memory wipe is perfect, the relative
 probabilities, evaluated before the experiment, should be the same. If a
 future memory wipe is done perfectly, it is analogous to a reconstitution
 of a past (3p) state in the future, and before that first state occurence,
 you have a probability non null to find yourself in the future.

 It is not clear if such a perfect memory wipe is possible in practice
 though.

 Bruno



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



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Re: The duplicators and the restorers


Hi Stephen,


On 13 Feb 2013, at 16:53, Stephen P. King wrote:


On 2/13/2013 10:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 13 Feb 2013, at 06:45, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Tuesday, February 12, 2013 10:09:40 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 12:24 PM, Craig Weinberg  
whats...@gmail.com wrote:
 1. Do you consider yourself to have experienced the torture in  
the case of
 the Restorers, even though you no longer remember it?  If not,  
why not.


 Yes


 2. If yes, do you consider yourself to have experienced the  
torture in the
 case of the Duplicators?  If yes, please explain, if not, please  
explain.


 The idea that atoms can be duplicated is an assumption. If we  
only look at
 the part of a plant that we can see and tried to duplicate that,  
it would
 not have an roots and it would die. I think of the roots of  
atoms to be
 experiences through time. Just having a person who seems to be  
shaped like

 you according to an electron microscope does not make them you.

 3. Both scenarios I think are based on misconceptions. Nothing  
in the
 universe can be duplicated absolutely and nothing can be erased  
absolutely,
 because what we see of time is, again, missing the roots that  
extend out to
 eternity.  I find it bizarre that we find it so easy to doubt  
our naive
 realism when it comes to physics but not when it comes to  
consciousness.
 Somehow we think that the idea that this moment of 'now' is  
mandated by

 physics to be universal and uniform.

What is to stop duplication of, say, the simplest possible conscious
being made up of only a few atoms?

Because I suspect that conscious beings are not made of atoms,  
rather atoms exist in the experience of beings.



Dear Bruno,

I have some questions but they are not well-formed, my  
apologies. I hope you can make some sense of them. I agree generally  
that atoms exist in the experience of beings only. We (the in the  
plural sense) happen to be able to agree on the locations and other  
properties of objects within our individual 1p.


OK, as they will be shared in the plural we.






But that's a consequence of the fact that we might be 3p-duplicable.


 If we are 3p-duplicatable then how do we obtain the non- 
clonability of quantum states?


Because below our substitution level, matter is (re)-defined by all  
computations going through our state, so the matter which constitute  
our local material brain cannot be duplicated. It involves the  
infinite sum on the whole UD*.









Experiences cannot be duplicated literally, because I suspect that  
unique is the only thing that experiences canliterally  
be.


I agree with this, in the sense that this follows also from  
computationalism, and thus 3p-duplicability at some level.


Could it be that the 3p-duplicatability is possible but global 1p  
correlations of these is not possible,


Hmm... we need the 1p correlations to trust the doctor, and introduce  
them, by chance perhaps, when betting on the correct level, or below.





thus obtaining the no cloning of QM?

An 1p-experience is not duplicable, as it is the unique experience  
of a unique being.


Does this follow from the uniqueness of a fixed point (for a given  
group of transformations on a closed (or semi-closed) collection?


You can get it intuitively. Even John Clark agrees that two absolutely  
identical computations, in case they support a mind, will support a  
unique mind. That's why in fine a mind is associated with all  
computations going through the states, and UDA makes matter redefined  
by the 1p relative measure.






It can still be duplicated relatively to some observer, but not  
relatively to the experiencer himself.


So would relate them to each other?


The density of the sharable computations would relate them to each  
other, with some high normal probability.






Again what you say concur with comp, making astonishing why you are  
using those points against the possibility of 3p-duplication, which  
is so much well illustrated by nature, as life is constant self- 
body change and duplication (as Stathis argues convincingly).


To sum up: with comp, we are 3p-duplicable; the 1p, as attributed  
by a 3p-person, is relatively duplicable. The 1p, seen from the 1p  
view, is not duplicable. Like in Everett QM, the 1p can't feel the  
split in any way.


It seems to me that you are assuming a special observer that can  
distinguish all 3p-persons from each other. In my thinking this is  
cheating.


To just enunciate comp we have to agree on the (sigma_1, tiny part of)  
arithmetic, which gives the whole set of possible 3p relations from  
which the dreams emerges and cohere (or not).


Bruno




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



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Re: How can intelligence be physical ?

2013-02-13 Thread John Clark

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote:

 So far, nobody has been able to figure out a learning algorithm as
 generic as the one our brains contains.


The developers of Watson have come very close to doing exactly that.


  there is definitely room for generalists.


Then why don't family doctors recommend that their patient see a
generalists when they run into a particular problem they can't handle?

 Einstein might have been a great scientist in any field.


Perhaps Einstein could have been great in ANY field, but he most certainly
could not have been great in EVERY field.

 Watson and Deep Blue cannot change their minds.


The great thing about computers is that every time they run a new program
they quite literally CHANGE THEIR MINDS.


   Deep Blue beat the world human chess champion and it required a
 supercomputer to do so, but that was 16 years ago and Moore's law marches
 on;


  Sort of.


There is no sort of about it, Moore's law marches on. In 1994 I bought
one of the most powerful PC's in the world, it had a one core
microprocessor running at 5 *10^7 cycles per second with 8*10^6 bytes of
solid state memory and a 2*10^8 byte hard drive and cost me $4000 in
expensive 1994 dollars; Today I am using a 4 core microprocessor running at
3.4 *10^9 cycles per second with 1.6 *10^10 bytes of solid state memory and
a 2*10^12 byte hard drive and it cost me $2000 in in much cheaper 2012
dollars.

 Now it's progressing due to multi-core architectures, which one could
 consider cheating


If I grew up on a farm and was retarded I might consider that cheating too,
but I didn't and I'm not so I don't.

 because algorithm parallelisation is frequently non-trivial.


Few things worth doing are trivial, but fortunately for us most physical
processes are inherently parallel as are most algorithms that are of
interest such as video and audio processing, playing chess, making quantum
mechanical calculations, understanding speech, language translation,
weather forecasting, car driving, Higgs particle hunting, and the sort of
thinking Watson did on Jeopardy.


 I believe you're underestimating the complexity of a good chess program


A chess program good enough to beat the best human player could be run on
very primitive 1997 hardware, therefore I am not underestimating the
complexity of a good chess program. QED.

 can Watson, for example, introspect on the chess game and update his view
 of the world accordingly? Can he read a new text and figure out how to play
 better?


Yes, Watson can and does learn from his mistakes

 could you ask Watson to go and learn by himself?


Yes, Watson spent many many hours organizing the vast amount of information
it contained and figuring out what it did wrong when it provided incorrect
answers in the past and trying new ways to improve performance. As a result
even the programers of Watson had no way of knowing what that machine would
do next; when Watson was asked a question they had to just watch and wait
to see what sort of response he would give just like everybody else. The
only way to know what Watson would do is to just watch him and see.

 If a person did half of what Watson did you would not hesitate for one
 second in calling him intelligent, but Watson is made of silicon not carbon
 so you don't.



 Nor for another second in considering him/her profoundly autistic.


Gregory Perelman is a mathematical genius who made the most important
advance in pure mathematics in the last 10 years, Perelman is also
autistic. Perelman is certainly not a genius about every aspect of human
endeavor, he recently turned down a $1,000,000 prize for proving the
Poincare Conjecture even though he's almost homeless. Perelman has his
faults but would you really want to say he is not intelligent?

Another example is Richard Borcherds, he is also a mathematician and he won
the Field's Medal, in prestige it is the mathematical equivalent to the
Nobel Prize. Borcherds admits that he has been officially diagnosed with
having Asperger's syndrome, a condition closely related to autism.

  John K Clark

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Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto



On 13 Feb 2013, at 17:35, Craig Weinberg wrote:

Wouldn’t Simulated Intelligence be a more appropriate term than  
Artificial Intelligence?


A better term would be natural imagination. But terms are not  
important.






Thinking of it objectively, if we have a program which can model a  
hurricane, we would call that hurricane a simulation, not an  
‘artificial hurricane’. If we modeled any physical substance, force,  
or field, we would similarly say that we had simulated hydrogen or  
gravity or electromagnetism, not that we had created artificial  
hydrogen, gravity, etc.


Assuming those things exist.





By calling it artificial, we also emphasize a kind of obsolete  
notion of natural vs man-made as categories of origin. If we used  
simulated instead, the measure of intelligence would be framed more  
modestly as the degree to which a system meets our expectations (or  
what we think or assume are our expectations). Rather than assuming  
a universal index of intelligent qualities which is independent from  
our own human qualities, we could evaluate the success of a  
particular Turing emulation purely on its merits as a convincing  
reflection of intelligence rather than presuming to have replicated  
an organic conscious experience mechanically.


Comp assumes we are Turing emulable, and in that case we can be  
emulated, trivially. To assume this being not possible assume the  
existence of infinite process playing relevant roles in the mind or in  
life. But it is up to you to motivates for them. The problem, for you,  
is that you have to speculate on something that we have not yet  
observed. You can't say consciousness, as this would just beg the  
question.






The cost of losing the promise of imminently mastering awareness  
would, I think, be outweighed by the gain of a more scientifically  
circumspect approach.


Invoking infinities is not so much circumspect, especially for driving  
negative statement about the consciousness of possible entities.




Putting the Promethean dream on hold, we could guard against the  
shadow of its confirmation bias. My concern is that without such a  
precaution, the promise of machine intelligence as a stage 1  
simulacrum (a faithful copy of an original, in Baudrillard’s terms),  
will be diluted to a stage 3 simulacrum (a copy that masks the  
absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a  
faithful copy.)


Assuming a non comp theory, like the quite speculative theory of mind  
by Penrose. Your own proposl fits remarkably ith comp, and some low  
level of substitution, it seems to me (we have already discussed this).


Bruno


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



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Re: The duplicators and the restorers



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 3:58:31 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:

 On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 4:45 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 

  What is to stop duplication of, say, the simplest possible conscious 
  being made up of only a few atoms? 
  
  
  Because I suspect that conscious beings are not made of atoms, rather 
 atoms 
  exist in the experience of beings. Experiences cannot be duplicated 
  literally, because I suspect that unique is the only thing that 
 experiences 
  can literally be. 

 That's what you suspect, but in order for you to be correct there must 
 be a mysterious non-physical entity that cannot be duplicated, even 
 with advanced scientific methods. 


Not at all. All that is required for me to be correct is that experience 
not be 100% repeatable, which, because an experience cannot ultimately be 
limited to anything except everything in the entire universe, is 
automatically true on that level. For me to be incorrect there would have 
to be a mysterious non-physical entity which separates any particular event 
from eternity.

This is equivalent to saying it is 
 magic. You get offended when I say this, perhaps because it has a 
 pejorative connotation, but that's what it is. Calling it something 
 else does not change the facts. 


I only get offended because you have no idea what I'm talking about, so you 
strawman it as some kind of weird idealism. Everything that I refer to is 
either Matter, Energy, Time, Space, Sense, Motive, Entropy, or Significance 
- all of which can be ultimately reduced to sense. There is nothing else, 
and I claim nothing else.  


  Sometimes the objection is raised 
  that an exact quantum state cannot be measured (although it can be 
  duplicated via quantum teleportation, with destruction of the 
  original), but this is probably spurious. If duplication down to the 
  quantum level were needed to maintain continuity of consciousness then 
  it would be impossible to maintain continuity of consciousness from 
  moment to moment in ordinary life, since the state of your body 
  changes in a relatively gross way and you remain you. 
  
  
  Can the year 1965 be duplicated? If you wanted just one millisecond from 
  1965. What I am suggesting is that the entire assumption of the universe 
 as 
  bodies or particles be questioned. The universe is unique variations of 
 a 
  single experience, with a continuum of 'similarity' in between, 
 contingent 
  upon the experiential capacity of the participant. 

 There is no reason in principle why the year 1965 could not be 
 replicated. 


Except that it happened already and will never happen again - just like 
every experience.
 

 In fact, in several models of cosmology it *is* 
 duplicated. Even if there is only one universe but it is infinite in 
 extent, given a large enough volume there is bound to be an exact copy 
 of anything you care to name. 


You're not seeing that it begs the question though. No matter what I say, 
you won't be able to imagine that the universe could be fundamentally 
experiences rather than objects.

The whole notion of 'copies' or 'exact' is based purely on sensitivity. If 
you have cataracts, it becomes harder to tell people apart and the Jack of 
Diamonds looks like an exact copy of the Queen of Hearts. If you factor out 
sensation from the start, everything that comes afterward is misconception.


  So what you have to explain Craig is what you think would happen if 
  you tried to duplicate a person using very advanced science, 
  
  
  If you tried to duplicate a person's body, then you get an identical 
 twin - 
  my guess is probably a dead one. 

 If it's dead then you would have made some mistake in the duplication. 


No, your assumption of duplication is not necessarily possible. If you 
clone everyone in New York City, and drop them into a model you have built 
of New York, they aren't suddenly going to know where they live and how to 
communicate with each other. You are assuming that particles are 
disconnected generic entities which have no past of future. I am saying 
that precisely the opposite is also true.
 

 If you haven't made a mistake and it's still dead then there is magic 
 involved, which science will not be able to fathom no matter how 
 advanced. 


If it's not white, it must be blacker than black! There must be 
consequences for heretic thoughts! This kind of Manichean compulsion has 
generally been a hindrance to science.
 


  and why 
  you don't think that happens when a person lives his life from day to 
  day, 
  
  
  Because the cells of the body exist within experiences, not the other 
 way 
  around. We aren't spirits or bodies, we are lifetimes. 
  
  having his brain replaced completely (and imprecisely) over the 
  course of months with the matter in the food he eats. 
  
  
  It's like saying the cars on a freeway are replaced constantly so it is 
 no 
  longer a freeway. What makes the traffic is the

Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie

2013-02-13 Thread John Clark

On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 Then why can't a one dimensional Turing machine do geometry,


  It can solve geometry problems,


Yes.

 but it can't generate geometric forms.


Can you generate geometric forms? Your fingers can draw a triangle but are
you fingers you, if your fingers were cut off would you no longer be you?

 It has nowhere to draw a triangle and nothing to draw it with, no eyes to
 see it, and no mind to appreciate it as a form.


I don't know what your point is. Yes if you restrict a AI to one dimension
then obviously it will not be able to draw a triangle, but you couldn't
either.

 It can tell you all kinds of things about triangles, just like Mary can
 tell you all kinds of things about red, but there is no experience which is
 triangular.


Then give the AI experience with triangles, after all the brain of a real
AI will be just as 3D as your brain.

 A universe generated by Turing-like arithmetic would not and could not
 have any use for multi-dimensional presentations.


A one dimensional Craig Weinberg would not and could not have any use for
multi-dimensional presentations.

 Since we actually do live in a universe of mega-multi demensional sensory
 presentations, that means that comp fails


Fine, comp fails. I'm glad to be rid of it as I never even knew what the
damn word meant and have become increasingly convinced that nobody else on
this list knows either.

  John K Clark

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Re: The duplicators and the restorers

On 2/13/2013 7:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Experiences cannot be duplicated literally, because I suspect that unique is the only
thing that experiences can literally be.

I agree with this, in the sense that this follows also from computationalism, and thus
3p-duplicability at some level.
An 1p-experience is not duplicable, as it is the unique experience of a unique being. It
can still be duplicated relatively to some observer, but not relatively to the
experiencer himself. Again what you say concur with comp, making astonishing why you are
using those points against the possibility of 3p-duplication, which is so much well
illustrated by nature, as life is constant self-body change and duplication (as Stathis
argues convincingly).

To sum up: with comp, we are 3p-duplicable; the 1p, as attributed by a 3p-person, is
relatively duplicable. The 1p, seen from the 1p view, is not duplicable. Like in Everett
QM, the 1p can't feel the split in any way.

That seems to imply that the 1p view is nothing but a stream of experiences and apart from
that sequence of experiences there is no 'person'.

Brent

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Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 12:46:23 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 13 Feb 2013, at 17:35, Craig Weinberg wrote:

 *Wouldn’t Simulated Intelligence be a more appropriate term than 
 Artificial Intelligence?*


 A better term would be natural imagination. But terms are not important. 


Except that we already have natural imagination, so what would we be 
developing? Replacing something with itself?
 





 Thinking of it objectively, if we have a program which can model a 
 hurricane, we would call that hurricane a simulation, not an ‘artificial 
 hurricane’. If we modeled any physical substance, force, or field, we would 
 similarly say that we had simulated hydrogen or gravity or 
 electromagnetism, not that we had created artificial hydrogen, gravity, etc.


 Assuming those things exist.


Whether they exist or not, the mathematically generated model of X is 
simulated X. It could be artificial X as well, but whether X is natural or 
artificial only tells us the nature of its immediate developers. 





 By calling it artificial, we also emphasize a kind of obsolete notion of 
 natural vs man-made as categories of origin. If we used simulated instead, 
 the measure of intelligence would be framed more modestly as the degree to 
 which a system meets our expectations (or what we think or assume are our 
 expectations). Rather than assuming a universal index of intelligent 
 qualities which is independent from our own human qualities, we could 
 evaluate the success of a particular Turing emulation purely on its merits 
 as a convincing reflection of intelligence rather than presuming to have 
 replicated an organic conscious experience mechanically.


 Comp assumes we are Turing emulable,


Which is why Comp fails. Not only are we not emulable, emulation itself is 
not primitively real - it is a subjective consensus of expectations.
 

 and in that case we can be emulated, trivially. 


Comp can't define us, so it can only emulate the postage stamp sized 
sampling of some of our most exposed, and least meaningful surfaces. Comp 
is a stencil or silhouette maker. No amount of silhouettes pieced together 
and animated in a sequence can generate an interior experience. If it did, 
we would only have to draw a cartoon and it would come to life on its own.
 

 To assume this being not possible assume the existence of infinite process 
 playing relevant roles in the mind or in life. But it is up to you to 
 motivates for them. The problem, for you, is that you have to speculate on 
 something that we have not yet observed. You can't say consciousness, as 
 this would just beg the question.


It is consciousness, and it is not begging the question, since all possible 
questions supervene on consciousness. Not sure what you mean about infinite 
processes or why they would mean that simulations can become experiences on 
their own.
 





 The cost of losing the promise of imminently mastering awareness would, I 
 think, be outweighed by the gain of a more scientifically circumspect 
 approach. 


 Invoking infinities is not so much circumspect, especially for driving 
 negative statement about the consciousness of possible entities.


What infinities do you refer to?
 




 Putting the Promethean dream on hold, we could guard against the shadow of 
 its confirmation bias. My concern is that without such a precaution, the 
 promise of machine intelligence as a stage 1 simulacrum (a faithful copy of 
 an original, in Baudrillard’s 
 termshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation), 
 will be diluted to a stage 3 simulacrum (a copy that masks the absence of a 
 profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy.) 


 Assuming a non comp theory, like the quite speculative theory of mind by 
 Penrose. Your own proposl fits remarkably ith comp, and some low level of 
 substitution, it seems to me (we have already discussed this).


Sense contains comp, by definition, but a comp world cannot generate, 
support, or benefit by sense in any way as far as I can tell.

Craig


 Bruno


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





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Re: Does p make sense?


On 2/13/2013 8:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 13 Feb 2013, at 03:03, meekerdb wrote:


On 2/12/2013 5:28 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:05:37AM -0800, Craig Weinberg wrote:

When we talk about a Bp, relating to consciousness is that we are making an
assumption about what a proposition is. In fact, if we look closely, a
proposition can only be another level of B. p is really nothing but a group
of sub-personal Beliefs (logarithmically nested as B^n) which we are
arbitrarily considered as a given condition...but there is no given
condition in actual experience. All experiences are contingent upon what
the experiencer is capable of receiving or interacting with.


I don't really follow your remaining comments, but I agree with you
that the p in the Theatetical definition of knowledge makes me
uncomfortable, post Popper.

I'm happy for Bp  p to apply to mathematical knowledge, with B
semantically equivalent to prove, but when it comes to scientific
knowledge, requiring absolute truth in things seems a step too far.

But I have no constructive suggestions as to how to modify Theatetus :(.



Intuitively Bp  p does not define knowledge.


Why? It obeys to the classical theory of knowledge (the modal logic S4), and in the comp 
context, we get the more stronger logic S4Grz1, and it works very well. It even makes 
the knower unnameable and close to the Plotinus universal soul or inner God.




As Edmund Gettier pointed out Bp, where B stands for 'believes' as in non-mathematical 
discourse, can be accidental.  Hence he argued that the belief must be causally 
connected to the fact of the proposition in order to count as knowledge.


We have already discussed this.  Edmund Gettier seems to accept a notion of knowledge 
which makes just no sense, neither in comp, nor in platonism. 


I don't know what notion of knowledge he accepts, but he rejects accidental beliefs that 
happen to be true.  The example he gives is Bob and Bill work together.  Bob knows that 
Bill has gone to pick up a new car he bought.  He sees Bill drive a new blue car into the 
parking lot and concludes that the car Bill bought is blue.  In fact it is blue, but it 
wasn't ready and so the dealer gave Bill a blue loaner to drive that day.  So does Bob 
know that Bill bought a blue car, or does he only believe, truly that he did?


From my reflection about the dream-argument, it probably means that Gettier believes 
that we can know things for sure 


I don't think that follows that all.  Even a causally connected belief can be false.  The 
problem is in explicating what constitutes 'causally connected' in complicated cases.


Brent

and communicate them as such, making him believe implicitly, at least, that we can know 
that we are awake, or that our communicable knowledge is secure, but with comp that is 
impossible. With comp we can be sure of our consciousness only, but that knowledge is 
typically not communicable.


And the belief does not need to be accidental, and hopefully (but only hopefully) is 
not. And it is never accidental for the ideal case of simpler machine than us, that we 
need to study to get the physics (quanta and qualia) from the numbers relations.


Bruno





Brent

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Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto

On 2/13/2013 8:35 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

*Wouldn’t Simulated Intelligence be a more appropriate term than Artificial
Intelligence?*

Thinking of it objectively, if we have a program which can model a hurricane, we would
call that hurricane a simulation, not an ‘artificial hurricane’. If we modeled any
physical substance, force, or field, we would similarly say that we had simulated
hydrogen or gravity or electromagnetism, not that we had created artificial hydrogen,
gravity, etc.

No, because the idea of an AI is that it can control a robot or other machine which
interacts with the real world, whereas a simulate AI or hurricane acts within a simulated
world.

By calling it artificial, we also emphasize a kind of obsolete notion of natural vs
man-made as categories of origin.

Why is the distinction between the natural intelligence of a child and the artificial
intelligence of a Mars rover obsolete? The latter is one we create by art, the other is
created by nature.

If we used simulated instead, the measure of intelligence would be framed more modestly
as the degree to which a system meets our expectations (or what we think or assume are
our expectations). Rather than assuming a universal index of intelligent qualities which
is independent from our own human qualities,

But if we measure intelligence strictly relative to human intelligence we will be saying
that visual pattern recognition is intelligence but solving Navier-Stokes equations is
not. This is the anthropocentrism that continually demotes whatever computers can do as
not really intelligent even when it was regarded a the apothesis of intelligence
*before* computers could do it.

we could evaluate the success of a particular Turing emulation purely on its merits as a
convincing reflection of intelligence

But there is no one-dimensional measure of intelligence - it's just competence in many
domains.

rather than presuming to have replicated an organic conscious experience
mechanically.

I don't think that's a presumption. It's an inference from the incoherence of the idea of
a philosophical zombie.

The cost of losing the promise of imminently mastering awareness would, I think, be
outweighed by the gain of a more scientifically circumspect approach. Putting the
Promethean dream on hold, we could guard against the shadow of its confirmation bias. My
concern is that without such a precaution, the promise of machine intelligence as a
stage 1 simulacrum (a faithful copy of an original, in Baudrillard’s terms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation), will be diluted to a stage 3
simulacrum (a copy that masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum
pretends to be a faithful copy.) --

The assumption that there is a 'profound reality' is what Stathis showed to be
'magic'.

Brent

Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 1:23:14 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:

 On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote:

  Then why can't a one dimensional Turing machine do geometry, 


  It can solve geometry problems,


 Yes. 

   but it can't generate geometric forms. 


 Can you generate geometric forms? Your fingers can draw a triangle but are 
 you fingers you, if your fingers were cut off would you no longer be you? 


Even if that were true, (which is questionable since I could still imagine 
geometric forms visually or embodied by gestures), all that says is that 
the geometry which we experience in the universe does not arise from my 
conscious control - which I have never asserted. 

My point was that a universe which is purely arithmetic is incompatible 
with a universe which contains any geometry.
 


  It has nowhere to draw a triangle and nothing to draw it with, no eyes 
 to see it, and no mind to appreciate it as a form.


 I don't know what your point is. Yes if you restrict a AI to one dimension 
 then obviously it will not be able to draw a triangle, but you couldn't 
 either.


It can have a million dimensions and still won't ever have a use for 
geometry. This is why we have to scan images into binary code rather than 
just miniaturizing pictures of them to be stored in some kind of geometric 
computer.

 It can tell you all kinds of things about triangles, just like Mary can 
 tell you all kinds of things about red, but there is no experience which is 
 triangular.


Then give the AI experience with triangles, after all the brain of a real 
AI will be just as 3D as your brain. 

The AI can never experience triangles. It has no need to. It has all the 
information it can ever need about triangles just be defining them as 
arithmetic functions.

 A universe generated by Turing-like arithmetic would not and could not 
 have any use for multi-dimensional presentations. 


A one dimensional Craig Weinberg would not and could not have any use for 
multi-dimensional presentations. 

Right. But since I know for a fact that I have multi-dimensional 
presentations, I know that arithmetic is not sufficient to define me. 
That's my point. Any number of quantitative dimensions of arithmetic could 
only ever be the same dimension arranged in more complex relations. There 
is no possibility that a qualitative difference could arise. The computer 
doesn't care if you listen to the mp3 in headphones, look at it as graphic 
oscillations over time, or one huge bitmap, or a list of values in ASCII 
text. If the computer had a point of view, it would see all of these forms 
as arbitrary computational formats without any presentational forms at all.



 Since we actually do live in a universe of mega-multi demensional sensory 
 presentations, that means that comp fails 


Fine, comp fails. I'm glad to be rid of it as I never even knew what the 
damn word meant and have become increasingly convinced that nobody else on 
this list knows either. 

I think of it as meaning that consciousness can be defined entirely as a 
computational process, but I agree, it seems like an elusive beast 
sometimes.

Craig

  John K Clark


 

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Re: Does p make sense?



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 10:56:05 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 12 Feb 2013, at 20:05, Craig Weinberg wrote:

 When we talk about a Bp, relating to consciousness is that we are making 
 an assumption about what a proposition is. In fact, if we look closely, a 
 proposition can only be another level of B. p is really nothing but a group 
 of sub-personal Beliefs (logarithmically nested as B^n) 


 ?


If I understand it correctly:

If Bp = 'The belief that China is in Asia', 
then p = 'China is in Asia'. 

What I'm saying is that p is really hundreds of millions of experiences 
in which the location of China is referenced, visually, verbally, 
cognitively. The p is the inertia of those implicit memories, balanced 
against the absence of any counterfactual experiences. Each one of those 
memories, thoughts, and images is itself a lower level 'Bp'. I might 
imagine a composite image of a generic world map in my mind, where China is 
represented as a green bulge in Asia. That image is a Bp: 'China is shaped 
like this (China shape) and is part of the shape called Asia'. There is no 
objective p condition of China being in Asia which is independent of all 
experiences. It is the Bp experiences, direct and indirect, of China and 
Asia which define every possible p about China being in Asia.


which we are arbitrarily considered as a given condition...but there is no 
given condition in actual experience. 


That's why we put Bp  p. To get the condition of 1p experience. It works 
as we get a non nameable, and non formalisable notion of knowledge. S4 and 
S4Grz do succeed in meta-formalizing a thoroughly non formalisable notion. 

I don't know what that means. If notions are non nameable and non 
formalisable, it doesn't have to mean that they are all the same notion.



All experiences are contingent upon what the experiencer is capable of 
receiving or interacting with.

Any proposition that can be named relies on some pre-existing context 
(which is sensed or makes sense). 

The problem with applying Doxastic models to consciousness is not only that 
it amputates the foundations of awareness,



It does not for the reason above. Note that even Bp  p can lead to 
falsity, in principle. Things get more complex when you add the non 
monotonic layers, that we need for natural languages and for the mundane 
type of belief or knowledge. Here, of course, with the goal of deriving the 
correct physical laws; it is simpler to consider the case of ideally 
correct machine, for which us, but not the machine itself can know the 
equivalence.

?

Craig
Bruno



but that the fact of the amputation will be hidden by the results. In 
Baudrillard's terms, this is a stage 3 simulacrum, (stage one = a true 
reflection, stage two = a perversion of the truth, stage three = a 
perversion which pretends not to be a perversion).

The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the 
 simulacrum *pretends* to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no 
 original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no 
 representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as 
 things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the 
 order of sorcery, a regime of 
 semantichttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semanticsalgebra where all human 
 meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a 
 reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

This is made more important by the understanding that sense or awareness is 
the source of authenticity itself. This means that there can be no 
tolerance for any stage of simulation beyond 1. In my hypotheses, I am 
always trying to get at the 1 stage for that reason, because consciousness 
or experience, by definition, has no substitute.

Craig 

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Re: The duplicators and the restorers


On 2/13/2013 2:36 PM, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/13/2013 7:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Experiences cannot be duplicated literally, because I suspect that 
unique is the only thing that experiences can literally be.


I agree with this, in the sense that this follows also from 
computationalism, and thus 3p-duplicability at some level.
An 1p-experience is not duplicable, as it is the unique experience of 
a unique being. It can still be duplicated relatively to some 
observer, but not relatively to the experiencer himself. Again what 
you say concur with comp, making astonishing why you are using those 
points against the possibility of 3p-duplication, which is so much 
well illustrated by nature, as life is constant self-body change and 
duplication (as Stathis argues convincingly).


To sum up: with comp, we are 3p-duplicable; the 1p, as attributed by 
a 3p-person, is relatively duplicable. The 1p, seen from the 1p view, 
is not duplicable. Like in Everett QM, the 1p can't feel the split in 
any way.


That seems to imply that the 1p view is nothing but a stream of 
experiences and apart from that sequence of experiences there is no 
'person'.


Brent


Hi Brent,

Yes, but that is true only for the computable portion of any 1p 
view. The person' itself is not computable, but it related to an 
intersection of an infinite number of computations (if I get Bruno's 
idea correctly).


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Re: Does p make sense?

On 2/13/2013 2:46 PM, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/13/2013 8:04 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 13 Feb 2013, at 03:03, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/12/2013 5:28 PM, Russell Standish wrote:

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:05:37AM -0800, Craig Weinberg wrote:
When we talk about a Bp, relating to consciousness is that we are
making an
assumption about what a proposition is. In fact, if we look
closely, a
proposition can only be another level of B. p is really nothing
but a group

of sub-personal Beliefs (logarithmically nested as B^n) which we are
arbitrarily considered as a given condition...but there is no given
condition in actual experience. All experiences are contingent
upon what

the experiencer is capable of receiving or interacting with.

I don't really follow your remaining comments, but I agree with you
that the p in the Theatetical definition of knowledge makes me
uncomfortable, post Popper.

I'm happy for Bp p to apply to mathematical knowledge, with B
semantically equivalent to prove, but when it comes to scientific
knowledge, requiring absolute truth in things seems a step too far.

But I have no constructive suggestions as to how to modify
Theatetus :(.

Intuitively Bp p does not define knowledge.

Why? It obeys to the classical theory of knowledge (the modal logic
S4), and in the comp context, we get the more stronger logic S4Grz1,
and it works very well. It even makes the knower unnameable and close
to the Plotinus universal soul or inner God.

As Edmund Gettier pointed out Bp, where B stands for 'believes' as
in non-mathematical discourse, can be accidental. Hence he argued
that the belief must be causally connected to the fact of the
proposition in order to count as knowledge.

We have already discussed this. Edmund Gettier seems to accept a
notion of knowledge which makes just no sense, neither in comp, nor
in platonism.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem we read:

A Gettier problem is any one of a category of thought experiments in
contemporary epistemology that seem to repudiate a definition of
knowledge as justified true belief (JTB). The category of problem owes
its name to a three-page paper published in 1963, by Edmund Gettier,
called Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?. In it, Gettier proposed
two scenarios where the three criteria (justification, truth, and
belief) seemed to be met, but where the majority of readers would not
have felt that the result was knowledge due to the element of luck
involved.

Bruno's notion involves betting, so luck is a factor! ;-)

I don't know what notion of knowledge he accepts, but he rejects
accidental beliefs that happen to be true. The example he gives is
Bob and Bill work together. Bob knows that Bill has gone to pick up a
new car he bought. He sees Bill drive a new blue car into the parking
lot and concludes that the car Bill bought is blue. In fact it is
blue, but it wasn't ready and so the dealer gave Bill a blue loaner to
drive that day. So does Bob know that Bill bought a blue car, or does
he only believe, truly that he did?

From my reflection about the dream-argument, it probably means that
Gettier believes that we can know things for sure

I don't think that follows that all. Even a causally connected belief
can be false. The problem is in explicating what constitutes
'causally connected' in complicated cases.

WTF is a causally connected belief ? I see something related to
the idea in this paper
https://www.google.com/url?sa=trct=jq=esrc=ssource=webcd=2ved=0CDoQFjABurl=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.135.6125%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdfei=eA4cUcfkKIvI9gSMqoH4DAusg=AFQjCNGqdgT1-h5HaLR32l2vdtoXsRRbpAsig2=ci0UE1moSaz5Ybmq2ER76Abvm=bv.42261806,d.eWU
but Causality is a concept that is on intimate terms with Time. No?

Brent

and communicate them as such, making him believe implicitly, at
least, that we can know that we are awake, or that our communicable
knowledge is secure, but with comp that is impossible. With comp we
can be sure of our consciousness only, but that knowledge is
typically not communicable.

And the belief does not need to be accidental, and hopefully (but
only hopefully) is not. And it is never accidental for the ideal case
of simpler machine than us, that we need to study to get the physics
(quanta and qualia) from the numbers relations.

Bruno

--
Onward!

Stephen

Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto


On 2/13/2013 2:58 PM, meekerdb wrote:

On 2/13/2013 8:35 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
*Wouldn’t Simulated Intelligence be a more appropriate term than 
Artificial Intelligence?*


Thinking of it objectively, if we have a program which can model a 
hurricane, we would call that hurricane a simulation, not an 
‘artificial hurricane’. If we modeled any physical substance, force, 
or field, we would similarly say that we had simulated hydrogen or 
gravity or electromagnetism, not that we had created artificial 
hydrogen, gravity, etc.


No, because the idea of an AI is that it can control a robot or other 
machine which interacts with the real world, whereas a simulate AI or 
hurricane acts within a simulated world.


What difference that makes a difference does that make in the grand 
scheme of things? The point is that we cannot 'prove' that we are not in 
a gigantic simulation. Yeah, we cannot prove a negative, but we can 
extract a lot of valuable insights and maybe some predictions from the 
assumption that 'reality = best possible simulation.






By calling it artificial, we also emphasize a kind of obsolete notion 
of natural vs man-made as categories of origin. 


Why is the distinction between the natural intelligence of a child and 
the artificial intelligence of a Mars rover obsolete?  The latter is 
one we create by art, the other is created by nature.


If we used simulated instead, the measure of intelligence would be 
framed more modestly as the degree to which a system meets our 
expectations (or what we think or assume are our expectations). 
Rather than assuming a universal index of intelligent qualities which 
is independent from our own human qualities, 


But if we measure intelligence strictly relative to human intelligence 
we will be saying that visual pattern recognition is intelligence but 
solving Navier-Stokes equations is not.  This is the anthropocentrism 
that continually demotes whatever computers can do as not really 
intelligent even when it was regarded a the apothesis of intelligence 
*before* computers could  do it.


we could evaluate the success of a particular Turing emulation purely 
on its merits as a convincing reflection of intelligence 


But there is no one-dimensional measure of intelligence - it's just 
competence in many domains.


rather than presuming to have replicated an organic conscious 
experience mechanically.


I don't think that's a presumption.  It's an inference from the 
incoherence of the idea of a philosophical zombie.




The cost of losing the promise of imminently mastering awareness 
would, I think, be outweighed by the gain of a more scientifically 
circumspect approach. Putting the Promethean dream on hold, we could 
guard against the shadow of its confirmation bias. My concern is that 
without such a precaution, the promise of machine intelligence as a 
stage 1 simulacrum (a faithful copy of an original, in Baudrillard’s 
terms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation), will 
be diluted to a stage 3 simulacrum (a copy that masks the absence of 
a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful 
copy.) -- 


The assumption that there is a 'profound reality' is what Stathis 
showed to be 'magic'.


Brent

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Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 2:58:28 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

  On 2/13/2013 8:35 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: 

 *Wouldnï¿½t Simulated Intelligence be a more appropriate term than 
 Artificial Intelligence?*

 Thinking of it objectively, if we have a program which can model a 
 hurricane, we would call that hurricane a simulation, not an ï¿½artificial 
 hurricaneï¿½. If we modeled any physical substance, force, or field, we 
 would similarly say that we had simulated hydrogen or gravity or 
 electromagnetism, not that we had created artificial hydrogen, gravity, etc.


 No, because the idea of an AI is that it can control a robot or other 
 machine which interacts with the real world, whereas a simulate AI or 
 hurricane acts within a simulated world.


AI doesn't need to interact with the real world though. It makes no 
difference to the AI whether its environment is real or simulated. Just 
because we can attach a robot to a simulation doesn't change it into an 
experience of a real world.
 



 By calling it artificial, we also emphasize a kind of obsolete notion of 
 natural vs man-made as categories of origin. 


 Why is the distinction between the natural intelligence of a child and the 
 artificial intelligence of a Mars rover obsolete?ï¿½ The latter is one we 
 create by art, the other is created by nature.


Because we understand now that we are nature and nature is us. We can 
certainly use the term informally to clarify what we are referring to, like 
we might call someone a plumber because it helps us communicate who we are 
talking about, but anyone who does plumbing can be a plumber. It isn't an 
ontological distinction. Nature creates our capacity to create art, and we 
use that capacity to shape nature in return.
 


 If we used simulated instead, the measure of intelligence would be framed 
 more modestly as the degree to which a system meets our expectations (or 
 what we think or assume are our expectations). Rather than assuming a 
 universal index of intelligent qualities which is independent from our own 
 human qualities, 


 But if we measure intelligence strictly relative to human intelligence


I think that it is a misconception to imagine that we have access to any 
other measure.
 

 we will be saying that visual pattern recognition is intelligence but 
 solving Navier-Stokes equations is not.


Why, equations are written by intelligent humans?
 

 ï¿½ This is the anthropocentrism that continually demotes whatever 
 computers can do as not really intelligent even when it was regarded a 
 the apothesis of intelligence *before* computers couldï¿½ do it.


If I had a camera with higher resolution than a human eye, that doesn't 
mean that I can replace my eyes with those cameras. Computers can still be 
exemplary at computation without being deemed literally intelligent. A 
planetarium's star projector can be as accurate as any telescope and still 
be understood not to be projecting literal galaxies and stars into the 
ceiling of the observatory.
 


 we could evaluate the success of a particular Turing emulation purely on 
 its merits as a convincing reflection of intelligence 


 But there is no one-dimensional measure of intelligence - it's just 
 competence in many domains.


Competence in many domains is fine. I'm saying that the competence relates 
to how well it reflects or amplifies existing intelligence, not that it 
actually is itself intelligent.
 


 rather than presuming to have replicated an organic conscious experience 
 mechanically.


 I don't think that's a presumption.ï¿½ It's an inference from the 
 incoherence of the idea of a philosophical zombie.


The idea of a philosophical zombie is a misconception based on some 
assumptions about matter and function which I clearly understand to be 
untrue. A sociopath is already a philosophical zombie as far as emotional 
intelligence is concerned. Someone with blindsight is a philosophical 
zombie as far as visual perception is concerned. Someone who is 
sleepwalking is a p-zombie as far as bipedal locomotion is concerned. The 
concept is bogus.
 



 The cost of losing the promise of imminently mastering awareness would, I 
 think, be outweighed by the gain of a more scientifically circumspect 
 approach. Putting the Promethean dream on hold, we could guard against the 
 shadow of its confirmation bias. My concern is that without such a 
 precaution, the promise of machine intelligence as a stage 1 simulacrum (a 
 faithful copy of an original, in Baudrillardï¿½s 
 termshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation), 
 will be diluted to a stage 3 simulacrum (a copy that masks the absence of a 
 profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy.) 
 --ï¿½


 The assumption that there is a 'profound reality' is what Stathis showed 
 to be 'magic'.


Baudrillard is not talking about consciousness in particular, only the sum 
of whatever is in the original which is not accessible in the copy.

Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 5:11:32 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote:

  On 2/13/2013 2:58 PM, meekerdb wrote:
  
 On 2/13/2013 8:35 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: 

 *Wouldnï¿½t Simulated Intelligence be a more appropriate term than 
 Artificial Intelligence?*

 Thinking of it objectively, if we have a program which can model a 
 hurricane, we would call that hurricane a simulation, not an ï¿½artificial 
 hurricaneï¿½. If we modeled any physical substance, force, or field, we 
 would similarly say that we had simulated hydrogen or gravity or 
 electromagnetism, not that we had created artificial hydrogen, gravity, etc.


 No, because the idea of an AI is that it can control a robot or other 
 machine which interacts with the real world, whereas a simulate AI or 
 hurricane acts within a simulated world.


 ï¿½ï¿½ï¿½ What difference that makes a difference does that make in the 
 grand scheme of things? The point is that we cannot 'prove' that we are not 
 in a gigantic simulation. Yeah, we cannot prove a negative, but we can 
 extract a lot of valuable insights and maybe some predictions from the 
 assumption that 'reality = best possible simulation.


I just realized how to translate that into my view: Reality = making the 
most sense possible. Same thing really. That's why I talk about multisense 
Realism, with Realism being the quality of maximum unfiltered sense. Since 
sense is subtractive, the more senses you have overlapping and diverging, 
the less there is that you are missing. Reality = nothing is missing (i.e. 
only possible at the Absolute level), Realism = you can't tell that 
anything is missing from your perceptual capacity/inertial frame/simulation.

I don't like the word simulation per se, because I think that anything the 
idea of a Matrix universe does for us would be negated by the idea that the 
simulation eventually has to run on something which is not a simulation, 
otherwise the word has no meaning. Either way, the notion of simulation 
doesn't make any of the big questions more answerable, even if it is 
locally true for us.

Craig
 


  

 By calling it artificial, we also emphasize a kind of obsolete notion of 
 natural vs man-made as categories of origin. 


 Why is the distinction between the natural intelligence of a child and the 
 artificial intelligence of a Mars rover obsolete?ï¿½ The latter is one we 
 create by art, the other is created by nature.

 If we used simulated instead, the measure of intelligence would be framed 
 more modestly as the degree to which a system meets our expectations (or 
 what we think or assume are our expectations). Rather than assuming a 
 universal index of intelligent qualities which is independent from our own 
 human qualities, 


 But if we measure intelligence strictly relative to human intelligence we 
 will be saying that visual pattern recognition is intelligence but solving 
 Navier-Stokes equations is not.ï¿½ This is the anthropocentrism that 
 continually demotes whatever computers can do as not really intelligent 
 even when it was regarded a the apothesis of intelligence *before* 
 computers couldï¿½ do it.

 we could evaluate the success of a particular Turing emulation purely on 
 its merits as a convincing reflection of intelligence 


 But there is no one-dimensional measure of intelligence - it's just 
 competence in many domains.

 rather than presuming to have replicated an organic conscious experience 
 mechanically.


 I don't think that's a presumption.ï¿½ It's an inference from the 
 incoherence of the idea of a philosophical zombie.


 The cost of losing the promise of imminently mastering awareness would, I 
 think, be outweighed by the gain of a more scientifically circumspect 
 approach. Putting the Promethean dream on hold, we could guard against the 
 shadow of its confirmation bias. My concern is that without such a 
 precaution, the promise of machine intelligence as a stage 1 simulacrum (a 
 faithful copy of an original, in Baudrillardï¿½s 
 termshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation), 
 will be diluted to a stage 3 simulacrum (a copy that masks the absence of a 
 profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy.) 
 --ï¿½


 The assumption that there is a 'profound reality' is what Stathis showed 
 to be 'magic'.

 Brent

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Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto


On 2/13/2013 5:40 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


[SPK wrote} What difference that makes a difference does that make
in the grand scheme of things? The point is that we cannot 'prove'
that we are not in a gigantic simulation. Yeah, we cannot prove a
negative, but we can extract a lot of valuable insights and maybe
some predictions from the assumption that 'reality = best possible
simulation.


I just realized how to translate that into my view: Reality = making 
the most sense possible. Same thing really. That's why I talk about 
multisense Realism, with Realism being the quality of maximum 
unfiltered sense. Since sense is subtractive, the more senses you have 
overlapping and diverging, the less there is that you are missing. 
Reality = nothing is missing (i.e. only possible at the Absolute 
level), Realism = you can't tell that anything is missing from your 
perceptual capacity/inertial frame/simulation.


I don't like the word simulation per se, because I think that anything 
the idea of a Matrix universe does for us would be negated by the idea 
that the simulation eventually has to run on something which is not a 
simulation, otherwise the word has no meaning. Either way, the notion 
of simulation doesn't make any of the big questions more answerable, 
even if it is locally true for us.


Craig


I like the idea of a Matrix universe exactly for that reason; it 
takes resources to 'run' it. No free lunch, even for universes!!!


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Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto


On 2/13/2013 5:21 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 2:58:28 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

On 2/13/2013 8:35 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

*Wouldn�t Simulated Intelligence be a more appropriate term
than Artificial Intelligence?*

Thinking of it objectively, if we have a program which can model
a hurricane, we would call that hurricane a simulation, not an
�artificial hurricane�. If we modeled any physical substance,
force, or field, we would similarly say that we had simulated
hydrogen or gravity or electromagnetism, not that we had created
artificial hydrogen, gravity, etc.


No, because the idea of an AI is that it can control a robot or
other machine which interacts with the real world, whereas a
simulate AI or hurricane acts within a simulated world.


AI doesn't need to interact with the real world though. It makes no 
difference to the AI whether its environment is real or simulated. 
Just because we can attach a robot to a simulation doesn't change it 
into an experience of a real world.


Hi Craig,

I think that you might be making a huge fuss over a difference that 
does not always make a difference between a public world and a private 
world! IMHO, that makes the 'real' physical world Real is that we can 
all agree on its properties (subject to some constraints that matter). 
Many can point at the tree over there and agree on its height and 
whether or not it is a deciduous variety.








By calling it artificial, we also emphasize a kind of obsolete
notion of natural vs man-made as categories of origin. 


Why is the distinction between the natural intelligence of a child
and the artificial intelligence of a Mars rover obsolete?� The
latter is one we create by art, the other is created by nature.


Because we understand now that we are nature and nature is us.


I disagree! We can fool ourselves into thinking that we 
understand' but what we can do is, at best, form testable explanations 
of stuff... We are fallible!


We can certainly use the term informally to clarify what we are 
referring to, like we might call someone a plumber because it helps us 
communicate who we are talking about, but anyone who does plumbing can 
be a plumber. It isn't an ontological distinction. Nature creates our 
capacity to create art, and we use that capacity to shape nature in 
return.


I agree! I think it is that aspect of Nature that can throw itself 
into its choice, as Satre mused, that is making the computationalists 
crazy. I got no problem with it as I embrace non-well foundedness.


L'homme est d'abord ce qui se jette vers un avenir, et ce qui est
conscient de se projeter dans l'avenir./ ~ Jean Paul Satre





If we used simulated instead, the measure of intelligence would
be framed more modestly as the degree to which a system meets our
expectations (or what we think or assume are our expectations).
Rather than assuming a universal index of intelligent qualities
which is independent from our own human qualities, 


But if we measure intelligence strictly relative to human intelligence


I think that it is a misconception to imagine that we have access to 
any other measure.


Yeah!



we will be saying that visual pattern recognition is intelligence
but solving Navier-Stokes equations is not.


Why, equations are written by intelligent humans?


People are confounded by computational intractability and eagerly 
spin tales of hypercomputers and other perpetual motion machines.




� This is the anthropocentrism that continually demotes whatever
computers can do as not really intelligent even when it was
regarded a the apothesis of intelligence *before* computers
could� do it.


If I had a camera with higher resolution than a human eye, that 
doesn't mean that I can replace my eyes with those cameras. Computers 
can still be exemplary at computation without being deemed literally 
intelligent. A planetarium's star projector can be as accurate as any 
telescope and still be understood not to be projecting literal 
galaxies and stars into the ceiling of the observatory.




we could evaluate the success of a particular Turing emulation
purely on its merits as a convincing reflection of intelligence 


But there is no one-dimensional measure of intelligence - it's
just competence in many domains.


Competence in many domains is fine. I'm saying that the competence 
relates to how well it reflects or amplifies existing intelligence, 
not that it actually is itself intelligent.




rather than presuming to have replicated an organic conscious
experience mechanically.


I don't think that's a presumption.� It's an inference from the
incoherence of the idea of a philosophical zombie.


The idea of a philosophical zombie is a misconception based on some 
assumptions about matter and function which I clearly understand to be

Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto


On 2/13/2013 5:40 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


[SPK wrote: ]'reality = best possible simulation.


I just realized how to translate that into my view: Reality = making 
the most sense possible. Same thing really. That's why I talk about 
multisense Realism, with Realism being the quality of maximum 
unfiltered sense. Since sense is subtractive, the more senses you have 
overlapping and diverging, the less there is that you are missing. 
Reality = nothing is missing (i.e. only possible at the Absolute 
level), Realism = you can't tell that anything is missing from your 
perceptual capacity/inertial frame/simulation.

Hi Craig,

There is something else that we must discuss in what you wrote! I 
think that you can't tell that anything is missing from your perceptual 
capacity/inertial frame/simulation has nothing to do with realism at 
all. We get that illusion of completeness precisely because the 
necessary conditions for having Sense are met. (This is part of the 
fixed point stuff.)
 If you are conscious at all at any level you will automatically 
not be able to percieve any 'holes' or inconsistencies in your personal 
1p 'Sense of all that is, as othe Sense that one has must be have 
relational closure to some degree, otherwise we have at least one 
instant infinite regress in one's dictionary of concept relations. This 
reasoning is a key part of my motivation to claim that 'reality', for 
any single observer (up to isomorphisms) must be representable as a 
Boolean algebra: it must be that all of its propositions (when 
considered as a lattice of propositions) are mutually consistent. This 
mutual consistency does not come for free, pace Bruno, but is dependent 
on the resources available to compute the Sense content. One must have a 
functioning physical brain to think...


A digression: This universal restriction of Boolean algebraic 
representability on observable content seems to back up that @$$_*)# 
Noam Chomsky's universal grammar law but I think that the Piraha' 
people's language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language 
points out that there can be non-recursive 'bubbles' in a overall global 
network of recursive relations. (Chomsky's idea that language is 
causally determined by a genetically determined capacity seems to be the 
distilled essence of rubbish, in my not so humble opinion btw.)


--
Onward!

Stephen

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Re: Chosen-ness

2013-02-13 Thread freqflyer07281972

Hi Craig, 

Thank you for your very well considered point of view on my original post. 
I have some interjections that I would enjoy hearing a response to:

On Sunday, January 27, 2013 9:37:03 PM UTC-5, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Sunday, January 27, 2013 5:35:22 PM UTC-5, freqflyer07281972 wrote:

 Hey everyone,

 I've been following this group a lot. I read it everyday and enjoy all of 
 the wonderful stuff that comes up, even if some of it tends towards ad 
 hominem, argument from authority, and petitio principi. Hey, we're humans, 
 right? That means we get to make these fallacies, in good conscience or 
 bad. 

 Anyway, I wondered about what anyone/everyone thought about the notion of 
 'chosenness' as a way to understand where we are here in the world. It 
 seems to me that concepts like MWI, Bruno's comp/mech hypothesis and the 
 'dreams of numbers' ideas of subjectivity, and even Leibniz's 'best of all 
 possible worlds' don't actually do something like flee away from our 
 everyday responsibility to accept the basic fact that we have been CHOSEN 
 -- and when I say this, please don't immediately put a bunch of theological 
 baggage on it. I'm not saying God chose this reality as opposed to another, 
 although this might be a convenient shorthand. But what I am saying is 
 that, out of all the staggering possibilities that we know exist with 
 regards to our universe, our galaxy, our solar system, our planet, our 
 society, and even our individual selves, things could have very easily 
 turned out to be different than they were. The fact that they have turned 
 out in just this way and not another indicates this kind of chosenness, and 
 along with it, comes a certain degree of responsibility, I guess? 

 It seems to me that all the various 'everything' hypotheses (MWI, comp, 
 Leibniz, and others) try to apply the Copernican principle to its breaking 
 point. True enough, there is from a purely 3p point of view nothing special 
 about our cosmic situation re: our planet and our sun. BUT, from an 
 existential 1p point of view there is a huge privilege that we have, i.e. 
 we are sentient observers, who love, feel pain, feel desire, and long for 
 transcendence. 

 Moreover, the 3p point of view is a pure abstraction, kind of like eating 
 the picture of a meal rather than the actual meal. How do we know what any 
 kind of 3p account of truth would be? What would it even look like? A 
 universe with no observers. A falling tree without a hearer/listener. This, 
 to me, is nonsense. 

 Aren't things like MWI of quantum physics and comp hypothesis of 
 universal dovetailer trying to, at a fundamental and existential level, an 
 attempt to try to run away from the concreteness and absolute 'givenness' 
 (gift) of the world as we find it? And isn't our role, in creation, as 
 freely choosing beings (sorry, John Clark, free will is more than just a 
 noise) to choose what will make other people with us now and in the future 
 feel more love and less pain? And isn't this why we were chosen? 

 I'll go back to lurking now, but I'd appreciate any thoughts you might 
 have on this reflection of mine. 

 Cheers,

 Dan


 What I propose is that a complete description of the universe must include:

 1. The experience of significance.

 This speaks to the idea of chosen-ness, of choice, of free will, of 
 improbability as a quality as the subject of appreciation. 

There is a difference between choosing and being chosen. The former takes 
place on the level of the agent -- it is where 'free will' is exercised. 
The latter has no free will associated with it -- if you are chosen to go 
to war by your government, then you go, regardless of what you personally 
want (barring conscientious objection, but you get my meaning, I hope). Our 
free will, internally, may have many features of improbability and 
uncertainty, but the fact that we were 'chosen' (i.e. came into this world 
without any kind of vote or say or decision on our own parts) is a 
different matter.  


 2. The experience of the significance of the idea of insignificance.

 I word the significance of the idea of insignificance in this convoluted 
 way to reflect the natural sequence in which the revelation of objectivity 
 has occurred across all human societies. Since as far as I know:

a.  *all* cultures begin their history steeped in animistic shamanism, 
 divination, creation myths and charismatic deities and 
b.  *no* cultures develop eliminative materialism, mathematics, and 
 mechanism earlier than philosophy or religion, and
c.   *all* individuals experience the development of their own psyche 
 through imaginative, emotional, and irrational or superstitious thought
d.   *no* individuals are born with a worldview based only on generic 
 facts and objectivity. Healthy children do not experience their lives in an 
 indifferent and detached mode of observation but rather grow into 
 analytical modes of thought through experience

Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 7:05:38 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote:

  On 2/13/2013 5:40 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
  
  [SPK wrote: ]'reality = best possible simulation.
  

 I just realized how to translate that into my view: Reality = making the 
 most sense possible. Same thing really. That's why I talk about multisense 
 Realism, with Realism being the quality of maximum unfiltered sense. Since 
 sense is subtractive, the more senses you have overlapping and diverging, 
 the less there is that you are missing. Reality = nothing is missing (i.e. 
 only possible at the Absolute level), Realism = you can't tell that 
 anything is missing from your perceptual capacity/inertial frame/simulation.

 Hi Craig,

 There is something else that we must discuss in what you wrote! I 
 think that you can't tell that anything is missing from your perceptual 
 capacity/inertial frame/simulation has nothing to do with realism at all. 
 We get that illusion of completeness precisely because the necessary 
 conditions for having Sense are met. (This is part of the fixed point 
 stuff.)


If all there is is sense though, then there can never be an illusion of 
completeness, just a comparison of one experience to another in which  one 
is found to be lacking realism. If all there is in the universe is a single 
flicker of light for a millisecond, then that is the only reality. With 
sense, illusion is just a conflict among different sensory frames and 
applications of motive. There is no realism beyond that, but no realism 
beyond that is necessary.

 

  If you are conscious at all at any level you will automatically not 
 be able to percieve any 'holes' or inconsistencies in your personal 1p 
 'Sense of all that is,


We perceive holes all the time. When we look at an optical illusion, our 
visual channel of sense seems to present an experience which conflicts with 
our cognitive channel of sense (understanding). It happens through time 
too. We learn something that makes us rethink our previous understandings, 
etc. That's kind of the main thing that goes on in our life is finding out 
about our gaps, either gracefully or the hard way as regrets.
 

 as othe Sense that one has must be have relational closure to some degree, 
 otherwise we have at least one instant infinite regress in one's dictionary 
 of concept relations.


Sure, there are millions of relational closures, and they're nested within 
each other too. Everything that we can recognize is a closed presence, but 
when we discover new frames of references, previously closed relations can 
change or seem to break.
 

 This reasoning is a key part of my motivation to claim that 'reality', for 
 any single observer (up to isomorphisms) must be representable as a Boolean 
 algebra: it must be that all of its propositions (when considered as a 
 lattice of propositions) are mutually consistent. This mutual consistency 
 does not come for free, pace Bruno, but is dependent on the resources 
 available to compute the Sense content. One must have a functioning 
 physical brain to think...


I don't think that sense is never computed, it is only experienced.  
Computation is only a strategy for organizing sense in public/public 
interactions - which is the essence of realism. The consistency of 
propositions for a single observer is like perspective. If something moves 
closer to your face, it appears larger. That is not because something is 
being computed locally and presented as an illusion, it appears larger 
because that is the sensory content of the experience which best reflects 
all of the conditions involved. This is a hybrid of private and public 
conditions, just as your sink's supply of water is a hybrid of local 
plumbing conditions and distant aqueducts. Because of the unity of sense, 
the mutual consistency does come for free, rather it is the insulation, the 
gaps, the resistance which cannot be maintained for free because they are 
ultimately disequilibrium.


 A digression: This universal restriction of Boolean algebraic 
 representability on observable content seems to back up that @$$_*)# Noam 
 Chomsky's universal grammar law but I think that the Piraha' people's 
 language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language points out 
 that there can be non-recursive 'bubbles' in a overall global network of 
 recursive relations. (Chomsky's idea that language is causally determined 
 by a genetically determined capacity seems to be the distilled essence of 
 rubbish, in my not so humble opinion btw.)


Yeah I agree that language doesn't follow genetics - it's the other way 
around if anything. I think you're right for associating algebra with 
realism, because it pertains to functions among public bodies (which is a 
big part of realism). I would say though that most of sense does not have 
to do with algebra or geometry or arithmetic at all. Math and physics are 
what sense sees when it hides from itself.

Craig
 

 --

Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 5:51:27 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote:

  On 2/13/2013 5:40 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
  
  [SPK wrote} What difference that makes a difference does that make in 
 the grand scheme of things? The point is that we cannot 'prove' that we are 
 not in a gigantic simulation. Yeah, we cannot prove a negative, but we can 
 extract a lot of valuable insights and maybe some predictions from the 
 assumption that 'reality = best possible simulation.
  

 I just realized how to translate that into my view: Reality = making the 
 most sense possible. Same thing really. That's why I talk about multisense 
 Realism, with Realism being the quality of maximum unfiltered sense. Since 
 sense is subtractive, the more senses you have overlapping and diverging, 
 the less there is that you are missing. Reality = nothing is missing (i.e. 
 only possible at the Absolute level), Realism = you can't tell that 
 anything is missing from your perceptual capacity/inertial frame/simulation.

 I don't like the word simulation per se, because I think that anything the 
 idea of a Matrix universe does for us would be negated by the idea that the 
 simulation eventually has to run on something which is not a simulation, 
 otherwise the word has no meaning. Either way, the notion of simulation 
 doesn't make any of the big questions more answerable, even if it is 
 locally true for us.

 Craig


 I like the idea of a Matrix universe exactly for that reason; it takes 
 resources to 'run' it. No free lunch, even for universes!!!


You can still have the idea of resources if the universe isn't a simulation 
though. No particular diffraction tree within the supreme monad can last as 
long as the Absolute diffraction, so the clock is always running and every 
motive carries risk.

Craig


 -- 
 Onward!

 Stephen

  

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Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 5:37:08 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote:

  On 2/13/2013 5:21 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
  


 On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 2:58:28 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: 

  On 2/13/2013 8:35 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: 

 *Wouldnï¿½t Simulated Intelligence be a more appropriate term than 
 Artificial Intelligence?*

 Thinking of it objectively, if we have a program which can model a 
 hurricane, we would call that hurricane a simulation, not an ï¿½artificial 
 hurricaneï¿½. If we modeled any physical substance, force, or field, we 
 would similarly say that we had simulated hydrogen or gravity or 
 electromagnetism, not that we had created artificial hydrogen, gravity, etc.


 No, because the idea of an AI is that it can control a robot or other 
 machine which interacts with the real world, whereas a simulate AI or 
 hurricane acts within a simulated world.
  

 AI doesn't need to interact with the real world though. It makes no 
 difference to the AI whether its environment is real or simulated. Just 
 because we can attach a robot to a simulation doesn't change it into an 
 experience of a real world.
  

 Hi Craig,

 I think that you might be making a huge fuss over a difference that 
 does not always make a difference between a public world and a private 
 world! IMHO, that makes the 'real' physical world Real is that we can all 
 agree on its properties (subject to some constraints that matter). Many can 
 point at the tree over there and agree on its height and whether or not it 
 is a deciduous variety.


Why does our agreement mean on something's properties mean anything other 
than that though? We are people living at the same time with human sized 
bodies, so it would make sense that we would agree on almost everything 
that involve our bodies. You can have a dream with other characters in the 
dream who point to your dream tree and agree on its characteristics, but 
upon waking, you are re-oriented to a more real, more tangibly public world 
with longer and more stable histories. These qualities are only significant 
in comparison to the dream though. If you can't remember your waking life, 
then the dream is real to you, and to the universe through you.



   
  
  

 By calling it artificial, we also emphasize a kind of obsolete notion of 
 natural vs man-made as categories of origin. 


 Why is the distinction between the natural intelligence of a child and 
 the artificial intelligence of a Mars rover obsolete?ï¿½ The latter is one 
 we create by art, the other is created by nature.
  

 Because we understand now that we are nature and nature is us.


 I disagree! We can fool ourselves into thinking that we understand' 
 but what we can do is, at best, form testable explanations of stuff... We 
 are fallible!


I agree, but I don't see how that applies to us being nature. What would it 
mean to be unnatural? How would an unnatural being find themselves in a 
natural world?
 


  We can certainly use the term informally to clarify what we are 
 referring to, like we might call someone a plumber because it helps us 
 communicate who we are talking about, but anyone who does plumbing can be a 
 plumber. It isn't an ontological distinction. Nature creates our capacity 
 to create art, and we use that capacity to shape nature in return.
  

 I agree! I think it is that aspect of Nature that can throw itself 
 into its choice, as Satre mused, that is making the computationalists 
 crazy. I got no problem with it as I embrace non-well foundedness.


Cool, yeah I mean it could be said that aspect is defines nature?
 


 L'homme est d'abord ce qui se jette vers un avenir, et ce qui est 
 conscient de se projeter dans l'avenir./ ~ Jean Paul Satre

   
  
  
 If we used simulated instead, the measure of intelligence would be framed 
 more modestly as the degree to which a system meets our expectations (or 
 what we think or assume are our expectations). Rather than assuming a 
 universal index of intelligent qualities which is independent from our own 
 human qualities, 


 But if we measure intelligence strictly relative to human intelligence


 I think that it is a misconception to imagine that we have access to any 
 other measure.
  

 Yeah!

   
  
  we will be saying that visual pattern recognition is intelligence but 
 solving Navier-Stokes equations is not.


 Why, equations are written by intelligent humans?
  

 People are confounded by computational intractability and eagerly spin 
 tales of hypercomputers and other perpetual motion machines.


Complexity seems to be the only abstract principle that the Western-OMMM 
orientation respects.
 


   
  
 ï¿½ This is the anthropocentrism that continually demotes whatever 
 computers can do as not really intelligent even when it was regarded a 
 the apothesis of intelligence *before* computers couldï¿½ do it.
  

 If I had a camera with higher resolution than a human eye, that doesn't 
 mean that I can

Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto

2013-02-13 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 3:35 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:
 Wouldn’t Simulated Intelligence be a more appropriate term than Artificial
 Intelligence?

 Thinking of it objectively, if we have a program which can model a
 hurricane, we would call that hurricane a simulation, not an ‘artificial
 hurricane’. If we modeled any physical substance, force, or field, we would
 similarly say that we had simulated hydrogen or gravity or electromagnetism,
 not that we had created artificial hydrogen, gravity, etc.

 By calling it artificial, we also emphasize a kind of obsolete notion of
 natural vs man-made as categories of origin. If we used simulated instead,
 the measure of intelligence would be framed more modestly as the degree to
 which a system meets our expectations (or what we think or assume are our
 expectations). Rather than assuming a universal index of intelligent
 qualities which is independent from our own human qualities, we could
 evaluate the success of a particular Turing emulation purely on its merits
 as a convincing reflection of intelligence rather than presuming to have
 replicated an organic conscious experience mechanically.

 The cost of losing the promise of imminently mastering awareness would, I
 think, be outweighed by the gain of a more scientifically circumspect
 approach. Putting the Promethean dream on hold, we could guard against the
 shadow of its confirmation bias. My concern is that without such a
 precaution, the promise of machine intelligence as a stage 1 simulacrum (a
 faithful copy of an original, in Baudrillard’s terms), will be diluted to a
 stage 3 simulacrum (a copy that masks the absence of a profound reality,
 where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy.)

A simulated hurricane is different from an actual hurricane, but
simulated intelligence is the same as actual intelligence, just as
simulated arithmetic is the same as actual arithmetic. Whether the
intelligence has the same associated consciousness or not is a matter
for debate, but not the intelligence itself.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Chosen-ness



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 7:05:39 PM UTC-5, freqflyer07281972 wrote:

 Hi Craig, 

 Thank you for your very well considered point of view on my original post. 
 I have some interjections that I would enjoy hearing a response to:


Thanks Dan, I'll try my best.
 


 On Sunday, January 27, 2013 9:37:03 PM UTC-5, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Sunday, January 27, 2013 5:35:22 PM UTC-5, freqflyer07281972 wrote:

 Hey everyone,

 I've been following this group a lot. I read it everyday and enjoy all 
 of the wonderful stuff that comes up, even if some of it tends towards ad 
 hominem, argument from authority, and petitio principi. Hey, we're humans, 
 right? That means we get to make these fallacies, in good conscience or 
 bad. 

 Anyway, I wondered about what anyone/everyone thought about the notion 
 of 'chosenness' as a way to understand where we are here in the world. It 
 seems to me that concepts like MWI, Bruno's comp/mech hypothesis and the 
 'dreams of numbers' ideas of subjectivity, and even Leibniz's 'best of all 
 possible worlds' don't actually do something like flee away from our 
 everyday responsibility to accept the basic fact that we have been CHOSEN 
 -- and when I say this, please don't immediately put a bunch of theological 
 baggage on it. I'm not saying God chose this reality as opposed to another, 
 although this might be a convenient shorthand. But what I am saying is 
 that, out of all the staggering possibilities that we know exist with 
 regards to our universe, our galaxy, our solar system, our planet, our 
 society, and even our individual selves, things could have very easily 
 turned out to be different than they were. The fact that they have turned 
 out in just this way and not another indicates this kind of chosenness, and 
 along with it, comes a certain degree of responsibility, I guess? 

 It seems to me that all the various 'everything' hypotheses (MWI, comp, 
 Leibniz, and others) try to apply the Copernican principle to its breaking 
 point. True enough, there is from a purely 3p point of view nothing special 
 about our cosmic situation re: our planet and our sun. BUT, from an 
 existential 1p point of view there is a huge privilege that we have, i.e. 
 we are sentient observers, who love, feel pain, feel desire, and long for 
 transcendence. 

 Moreover, the 3p point of view is a pure abstraction, kind of like 
 eating the picture of a meal rather than the actual meal. How do we know 
 what any kind of 3p account of truth would be? What would it even look 
 like? A universe with no observers. A falling tree without a 
 hearer/listener. This, to me, is nonsense. 

 Aren't things like MWI of quantum physics and comp hypothesis of 
 universal dovetailer trying to, at a fundamental and existential level, an 
 attempt to try to run away from the concreteness and absolute 'givenness' 
 (gift) of the world as we find it? And isn't our role, in creation, as 
 freely choosing beings (sorry, John Clark, free will is more than just a 
 noise) to choose what will make other people with us now and in the future 
 feel more love and less pain? And isn't this why we were chosen? 

 I'll go back to lurking now, but I'd appreciate any thoughts you might 
 have on this reflection of mine. 

 Cheers,

 Dan


 What I propose is that a complete description of the universe must 
 include:

 1. The experience of significance.

 This speaks to the idea of chosen-ness, of choice, of free will, of 
 improbability as a quality as the subject of appreciation. 

 There is a difference between choosing and being chosen. The former takes 
 place on the level of the agent -- it is where 'free will' is exercised. 
 The latter has no free will associated with it 


Sure, but they are ontological conjugates, i.e. you can be chosen locally 
without having the ability to make choices yourself (theoretically 
anyways), but you can't be chosen without the presence of some choosing 
agency in the universe.
 

 -- if you are chosen to go to war by your government, then you go, 
 regardless of what you personally want (barring conscientious objection, 
 but you get my meaning, I hope). Our free will, internally, may have many 
 features of improbability and uncertainty, but the fact that we were 
 'chosen' (i.e. came into this world without any kind of vote or say or 
 decision on our own parts) is a different matter.  


Right. In general I don't have an opinion on human experience in 
particular. I'm happy to speculate for fun, but I don't have any special 
insight into whether we choose to incarnate or anything like that. Could 
be? Doesn't have to be.
 


 2. The experience of the significance of the idea of insignificance.

 I word the significance of the idea of insignificance in this 
 convoluted way to reflect the natural sequence in which the revelation of 
 objectivity has occurred across all human societies. Since as far as I know:

a.  *all* cultures begin their history steeped in

Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto



On Wednesday, February 13, 2013 9:45:43 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:

 On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 3:35 AM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 
  Wouldn’t Simulated Intelligence be a more appropriate term than 
 Artificial 
  Intelligence? 
  
  Thinking of it objectively, if we have a program which can model a 
  hurricane, we would call that hurricane a simulation, not an ‘artificial 
  hurricane’. If we modeled any physical substance, force, or field, we 
 would 
  similarly say that we had simulated hydrogen or gravity or 
 electromagnetism, 
  not that we had created artificial hydrogen, gravity, etc. 
  
  By calling it artificial, we also emphasize a kind of obsolete notion of 
  natural vs man-made as categories of origin. If we used simulated 
 instead, 
  the measure of intelligence would be framed more modestly as the degree 
 to 
  which a system meets our expectations (or what we think or assume are 
 our 
  expectations). Rather than assuming a universal index of intelligent 
  qualities which is independent from our own human qualities, we could 
  evaluate the success of a particular Turing emulation purely on its 
 merits 
  as a convincing reflection of intelligence rather than presuming to have 
  replicated an organic conscious experience mechanically. 
  
  The cost of losing the promise of imminently mastering awareness would, 
 I 
  think, be outweighed by the gain of a more scientifically circumspect 
  approach. Putting the Promethean dream on hold, we could guard against 
 the 
  shadow of its confirmation bias. My concern is that without such a 
  precaution, the promise of machine intelligence as a stage 1 simulacrum 
 (a 
  faithful copy of an original, in Baudrillard’s terms), will be diluted 
 to a 
  stage 3 simulacrum (a copy that masks the absence of a profound reality, 
  where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy.) 

 A simulated hurricane is different from an actual hurricane, but 
 simulated intelligence is the same as actual intelligence, just as 
 simulated arithmetic is the same as actual arithmetic. 


No, that's a false equivalence. Any simulated hurricane *can be* the same 
as any other simulated hurricane, but no simulated hurricane can be the 
same as any actual hurricane.

Arithmetic cannot be simulated because it is only figurative to begin with. 
You can paint a painting of a pipe that says 'this isn't a pipe', but you 
can't paint a painting that truthfully says 'these are not words' or 'this 
is not a painting'.
 

 Whether the 
 intelligence has the same associated consciousness or not is a matter 
 for debate, but not the intelligence itself. 


I disagree. There is no internal intelligence there at all. Zero. There is 
a recording of some aspects of human intelligence which can extend human 
intelligence into extra-human ranges for human users. The computer itself 
has no extra-human intelligence, just as a telescope itself doesn't see 
anything, it just helps us see, passively of course. We are the users of 
technology, technology itself is not a user.

Craig
 



 -- 
 Stathis Papaioannou 


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Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto

2013-02-13 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 2:27 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 Whether the
 intelligence has the same associated consciousness or not is a matter
 for debate, but not the intelligence itself.


 I disagree. There is no internal intelligence there at all. Zero. There is a
 recording of some aspects of human intelligence which can extend human
 intelligence into extra-human ranges for human users. The computer itself
 has no extra-human intelligence, just as a telescope itself doesn't see
 anything, it just helps us see, passively of course. We are the users of
 technology, technology itself is not a user.

I think you're conflating intelligence with consciousness. If the
table talks to you and helps you solve a difficult problem, then by
definition the table is intelligent. How the table pulls this off and
whether it is conscious or not are separate questions.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto


On 2/13/2013 8:09 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


[SPK wrote: ]I like the idea of a Matrix universe exactly for that
reason; it takes resources to 'run' it. No free lunch, even for
universes!!!


You can still have the idea of resources if the universe isn't a 
simulation though. No particular diffraction tree within the supreme 
monad can last as long as the Absolute diffraction, so the clock is 
always running and every motive carries risk.


Right, but since we do have the resources, why not assume that the 
Matrix is up and running on them already? The fun thing is that if we 
have both then we have a nice solution to both the mind (for matter) and 
body (for comp) problems. There can be no 'supreme monad' as such would 
be equivalent to a preferred frame and basis. The totality of all that 
exists is not a hierarchy, it is a fractal network.


--
Onward!

Stephen

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Re: Simulated Intelligence Mini-Manifesto