Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
also, unless we come up with a clever way of raising the cost of reneging, we wont be able to make any bets On Tuesday, September 3, 2013, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, this is what i mean by determined doesn't mean logical. none of my desires seem to me logically justified, but that doesnt imply they are not deterministic. 2) your thesis is essentially, i cant see how a set of rules could lead to to desire, i cant see how a set of rules could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities, therefore there can be no such rules. that's fine i suppose, but I'm unable to pretend that your blindness is some sort of insight. i just think you havent looked hard enough On Tuesday, September 3, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 8:57:13 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Craig, What UV looks like will depend on how it is transduced into the nervous system. I could add a new opsin into your blue cones and it would appear to be a shade of blue. Sure, we can look at an infra-red camera too and see IR light as green or some other color. That isn't what I'm talking about. I am talking about new primary colors. Or, I could achieve the transduction in such a way that UV doesn't confuse with blue. In which case UV will look different from other colors *in way you cannot describe because you don't have access to how you condition your behavior based of the intensity of UV light. * It wouldn't matter if you did have access to how you condition your behavior based on the intensity of the UV light. Color cannot be described, it can only be experienced directly. I don't want you to waste our time trying to tell me what I already know. http://multisenserealism.com/thesis/light-revisited/is-visible-light-electromagnetic/ I've told you in a rudimentary form what is required to build a system that has drives and motivations, from parts that are inanimate. Not at all. You are projecting drives and motivations onto a system that is unconsciously serving a function that serves your drives and motivations. Nature has constructed such a device using 302 neurons. It learns, and it has motivations. The neurons are an expression of the motivations, not the other way around. Is your argument here that if we model the nematode deterministically, its ability to learn and its biological drives will vanish like smoke? Does a rabbit's taste for carrots vanish just because we model him as Bugs Bunny? Yes. Models, cartoons, figures, functions, shapes, descriptions, simulations...none of them can have any sense of being or feeling. Bugs Bunny is not a rabbit. He is a symbol which reminds our psychology of particular themes which overlap with rabbit themes. Because if so, I'd bet good money that you're wrong. Sure, I'd love to take that bet. I was going to say $10,000 but I don't think that you are going to pay that when you lose. What amount sounds good? Drives are traceable to electrochemical gradients trying to resolve themselves, driven by thermodynamic laws. Logic is how the pipes are connected up, desire is the water pump. I agree that microphysical events correspond to microphenomenal experiences, but that does not mean that all that has to happen to scale up an inanimate object's thermodynamic motives to mammalian quality emotions is that it must be configured in the correct shapes. That is an assumption, and a seductively popular one, but it is 100% wrong. Using the hypothesis of sense as the sole universal primitive, we should anticipate that the relevant qualifier of sensitivity is not structure but experience. Giving your cat a computer will not make him computer literate, and dressing a water pump up in human clothes does not cause a human. The clues are all around us. No machine or program has every succeeded in being anything but completely impersonal and psychologically empty. Furthermore, deterministic does not equal logical. There is no logic behind why opposites attract, even though this logically leads to like dissolving like. Whatever axioms there are in this universe -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 11:36:29 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless. No particular determination need be justified by our expectations, but determinism in general is an expectation of a logic of causality - an airtight logic of perfect correspondence. Rationality is more of a broad term which I would not apply to determinism in the strict sense of a deterministic cosmology. Rationality implies more tolerance of humanistic dimensions like free will. A person can freely choose to act rationally or irrationally, but in a deterministic universe, the logic would be that a person always acts to complete effects set into motion by prior cause. Logic is scripted and automated. Rationality can be responsive. You're welcome to use words in whatever way you like, but I don't want to dwell on word definitions. If by introducing rationality as a logic equivalence you mean to soften determinism, then I think we should stick to the word logic, since the determinism that I argue against has a zero tolerance for soft reasoning. Determinism is a closed shop of locked steps with all novelty being a pseudo-novelty derived from recombination. this is what i mean by determined doesn't mean logical. none of my desires seem to me logically justified, but that doesnt imply they are not deterministic. The fact that you have desires at all does not make sense in a deterministic universe. It gets confusing if you pull examples from real life. If we are going to talk about the fantasy world of determinism, we should refer only to those things which we can justify as being logically deterministic. 2) your thesis is essentially, i cant see how a set of rules could lead to to desire, No, my thesis is not that I can't see something, it is that I can see something that others may not. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire. My thesis is that fact, along with many others, suggests that 'rules' are an abstraction which are fictional and derived from experience, whereas desire is a concrete fact from which abstractions can be derived. My thesis is that there is an important difference between presentations and representations, such that a natural presence has a coherent footprint across multiple levels of sense, which is itself multi-coherent and self-generated. By contrast, a representation, such as a 'rule', 'function', 'process', 'pattern', 'figure', or 'information' is a second order, symbiotic phenomenon within a natural presentation. Representations are not whole and are not grounded in the totality of nature (space, time, matter, energy, significance, entropy, sense, motive) but are rather a facade, like a hologram, which makes sense only from a particular set of externally defined perspectives. i cant see how a set of rules could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities, therefore there can be no such rules. Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. Why would the impotence of 'rules' to create natural phenomena mean that there can be no rules? When did I imply that there can't be any rules? that's fine i suppose, but I'm unable to pretend that your blindness is some sort of insight. i just think you havent looked hard enough I can tell from your responses that you haven't looked at my blindness at all, only your own, dressed up to sound like me. Craig On Tuesday, September 3, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 8:57:13 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Craig, What UV looks like will depend on how it is transduced into the nervous system. I could add a new opsin into your blue cones and it would appear to be a shade of blue. Sure, we can look at an infra-red camera too and see IR light as green or some other color. That isn't what I'm talking about. I am talking about new primary colors. Or, I could achieve the transduction in such a way that UV doesn't confuse with blue. In which case UV will look different from other colors *in way you cannot describe because you don't have access to how you condition your behavior based of the intensity of UV light. * It wouldn't matter if you did have access to how you condition your behavior based on the intensity of the UV light. Color cannot be described, it can only be experienced directly. I don't want you to waste our time trying to tell me what I already know. http://multisenserealism.com/thesis/light-revisited/is-visible-light-electromagnetic/ I've told you in a rudimentary form what is required to build a system that has
Kant's disproof of materialism and empiricism
Kant's disproof of materialism and empiricism Materialists argue that in essence we are no more than our bodies. Empiricists such as Hume ruled out the possible influence of anything transcendental in our perception of objects. But that position was disproven by Kant, for example in his transcdendent deduction of the role of the self in perception http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental/ in which cognitive science and philosophers such as Dennett and Chalmers seems to have overlooked the critical importance of the transcendental. As a result, Kant gave this argument against materialism and empiricism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant Kant proposed a Copernican Revolution-in-reverse, saying that: Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects [positivism] but ... let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition[transcendental idealism]. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough .com/malfunct -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: God's God
I agree with everyone else - not bad overall, but the weak ending paves the way for a sequel. In the next chapter, the bland, self-satisfied humanity character begins to wonder why and how this 'imagination' came to be, and why fear and grief are, in and of themselves, invitations for fiction to magically come into existence to soothe his natural functions into an unnatural solace. He could meet Santa Claus, as the gift bearing intermediary between humanity and the power to create fictional gods, with his bag of overflowing and curiously culturally independent archetypes. Would Mr. Bland be ready to find his own mask in there? Would he be able to accept that realism is, in the end, just another fiction, but with added gritty texture? On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 6:56:32 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Dennis Ochei do.inf...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: I liked it until they were on earth. The human's dialogue is too preachy and cheesy, the preceding parts of the cartoon were fun and more subtle i suppose. I would have probably ended it after God 2 died Agreed. Well, I love the sequence of weird gods but it could do away with the sanctimonious ending. On Friday, August 23, 2013 10:19:37 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODetOE6cbbc -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript:. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On 04 Sep 2013, at 01:43, meekerdb wrote: On 9/3/2013 3:43 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: By the way the brain produces high fidelity illusions for us most of our waking lives. For example the way we perceive our sight is very different from the intermittent stream of neural signals that begin their journey from our retinas. Did you know that every time you shift your eyes from one focus point to another that during the period of time the eyeball is in movement from one focus to the next no visual signals are being sent down the optic nerve. That if the brain was not producing an illusion for us the world we see should vanish each time we move our eyes (or blink them) Does the world disappear each time you blink or move your eyes? Of course it doesn't. Your mind maintains a steady and beautifully rendered illusion of the world in your mind that is seamlessly stitched into the new stream of optic signals as they arrive. There is no discontinuity. That seems to look at it the wrong way around. Our model of the world is one in which objects are persistent even when we don't look at them. Even more! Today we have good evidences that when we don't look at something (so that we are isolated from it), not only it exists, but it multiplies. (cf. Everett, and/or Computationalism) That's a better model than one in which they only exist when we look at them. So our brain is creating the better model instead of the worse. I see no reason to call that an illusion. We cannot know, we can only prey we have a better model, and that our children will find even better model, and that such thing the model(s) or reality/realities exist(s). In all case there is some amount of faith, but it is coming from inside, not from the books or talks. Of course all authoritative institutional religion will always try to discourage or kill that sort of faith. I have faith and trust in elementary arithmetic, and other elementary mathematical jewels. Bruno Brent When you turn your head from one side to the other does the world spin? -- the world around you is instead held in a majestic stability that is not real, because it should be instead spinning as your head spins. Instead in our perception the world stays stable and it is our perspective -- our inner view -- that shifts. This makes sense from the point of view of the inner observer, but the mind needs to do a lot of work to build the illusion. Our brains are, grand masters of illusion and we live in illusion (a reification of sensorial reality) all our waking lives. The perfection of our visual illusion is a masterpiece of interpretive processing where the raw signals we get are stitched together into a field of view and a focus within that field of view that -- though it clearly is reflective of our sensorial reality is also quite different; the world we see is very different than the world as it is recorded on our eyeballs (even to the extent of smoothly persisting without the barest hint of any interruption even as our eyes are not seeing a single thing at all. Cheers, -Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On 03 Sep 2013, at 18:23, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 12:01 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: indeed free does not add much to the will, except to emphasize a local freedom degrees spectrum. It doesn't even do that. Will is the set of things I want to do, It is a bit circular, but that's not a problem. OK. but some of those things may not be physically possible, and some of my wishes may not even be logically consistent with each other, but I want them all the same. ? Well, in that case you have a problem to solve. If you are imprisoned, you can keep the will, but have the free- will quite constrained I'm not imprisoned, How do you know that? however I very much want the cardinality of the Real Numbers to be the same as that of the integers, but my wish remains unfulfilled. Cardinality is a relative notion. All (first order) theories have an enumerable model. Your wish can be exhausted ... outside our universe. Assuming comp it is absolutely undecidable if our universe (if it exists) is enumerable or not enumerable, but from inside it is definitely not enumerable, and all we can hope is that the outside seen from inside is constructively not enumerable, and this is the case for the ideally correct Turing (Post, Church, ...) Universal Machine. Comp associates consciousness to computation, and computation is an arithmetical concept (the proof of this is in all good textbook on computer science (the best one on that topic are Boolos and Jeffrey, Epstein Carnielli, etc.). It follows also in an amazing way in Matiyasevitch work. The additive+multiplicative structure of the natural numbers does implement a universal dovetailer. (Probably just the way primes distributed I would bet). And this makes only possible to formulate the mind-body problem in term of the statistic on the computations, obtained through a limit based on the invariance of the first person for the computations below their substitution level. If comp is false, this would still provide tools to measure our degree of non-computability. My point is that comp makes this amenable to computer science, which is arithmetic, or take any base (universal system or language) you want. I don't assume there is a physical universe, and ontologically there is none, comp + arithmetic explain how to extract the beliefs in stable lawful universe from a sort of statistics on which converge ideally correct machines. A Turing machine cannot know which computations run her, but can bet that below her substitution level she is run by a sort of average on an infinity of computations. The mysteries are why unitary transformations?, why linearity?, etc. There are results and open problems. Of course, it is a different conception of reality than the usual (Aristotelian) one (since always, except for some antic greeks during a millenium, and Indian and mystic). Bruno John K Clark We might use free-will as just will + freedom. It presupposes some stable deterministic realities, at some level. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
From: meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tuesday, September 3, 2013 4:43 PM Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test? On 9/3/2013 3:43 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: By the way the brain produces high fidelity illusions for us most of our waking lives. For example the way we perceive our sight is very different from the intermittent stream of neural signals that begin their journey from our retinas. Did you know that every time you shift your eyes from one focus point to another that during the period of time the eyeball is in movement from one focus to the next no visual signals are being sent down the optic nerve. That if the brain was not producing an illusion for us the world we see should vanish each time we move our eyes (or blink them) Does the world disappear each time you blink or move your eyes? Of course it doesn't. Your mind maintains a steady and beautifully rendered illusion of the world in your mind that is seamlessly stitched into the new stream of optic signals as they arrive. There is no discontinuity. That seems to look at it the wrong way around. Our model of the world is one in which objects are persistent even when we don't look at them. That's a better model than one in which they only exist when we look at them. So our brain is creating the better model instead of the worse. I see no reason to call that an illusion. It is an illusion in the sense that it is manufactured by the brain. The brain fills in the gaps in the stream of visual signals with a manufactured world that does not in fact exist -- as a stream of in-coming sense data. But you are correct that it is a better way to model the world; I am not arguing that it isn't. I agree that evolution would favor a vision that did not suddenly switch off every time the eye stopped sending signals. My point is that the world we see is in many ways a manufactured illusion -- and model (we agree on that term) -- of the world. The same is true for how when we turn our heads the world does not spin but rather our brain cleverly re-renders our visual world by changing our own inner viewpoint from which we perceive our sight -- as our brains have served it up to us. This is also a better way to model a change in the direction of vision. Instead of spinning the world as would be the case if the brain had not re-interpreted the visual data stream and re-rendered it in this alternate manner; we perceive our visual field as being stable and our perception of this stable field being the factor that shifts instead. This brain illusion -- after all, it is manufactured internally by the brain itself and is a different and highly interpretive rendition of the raw data going into the brain -- also seems a clearly superior way to model vision than the alternative of staying true to reality, which would have the world radically spin each time you shifted your gaze from here to there or turned your head... imagine how disorienting that would be. We both agree that it makes evolutionary sense for the brain to model reality like it does -- in terms of these visual tricks the mind is doing. My point was that the mind is clearly capable of producing masterful illusions and does so each and every single day in healthy individuals. We depend on our minds innate ability to produce high fidelity illusions -- or models if you will -- of the underlying world that we are perceiving via our senses, and we depend on our conjuring mental acrobats each and every day of our lives. In general, we need on our brains to filter out by far most of what impinges on our senses, and if it did not, we would suffer under a cacophony of sensorial overload. Our brains however are masters of illusion (or if you prefer of models that while tied to and dependent on reality are also fundamentally divergent form how reality would present to us if it were not reified by our brains into the way we sense it). Brent When you turn your head from one side to the other does the world spin? -- the world around you is instead held in a majestic stability that is not real, because it should be instead spinning as your head spins. Instead in our perception the world stays stable and it is our perspective -- our inner view -- that shifts. This makes sense from the point of view of the inner observer, but the mind needs to do a lot of work to build the illusion. Our brains are, grand masters of illusion and we live in illusion (a reification of sensorial reality) all our waking lives. The perfection of our visual illusion is a masterpiece of interpretive processing where the raw signals we get are stitched together into a field of view and a focus within that field of view that -- though it clearly is reflective of our sensorial reality is also quite different; the world we see is very different than the world
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: ** Can not comment, don't know what ASCII sequence free will means. You are merely being argumentative here. I AM NEVER ARGUMENTATIVE! You certainly do have a very clear idea of the sensations you experience within your brain that we describe as experiencing free will No I most certainly do not, and not only do I lack a clear understanding of what the hell free will is supposed to mean nobody on this list has the slightest idea either; I know this because for over 2 years I have been reading posts from people who claimed to be able to explain what it was without resorting to gibberish, and every single one of them failed spectacularly. to state that the only meaning this has to you is as a series of ASCII symbols strung together is hiding behind the skirt of semantics Semantics is the branch of logic concerned with meaning, and I hope to hide behind that skirt for the rest of my life. So I take it therefore that you accept that we have self awareness I have self awareness obviously, perhaps others do too. a clear sense of self Yes. but that free will is just ASCII characters strung together Yes. Not very consistent of you. How the hell do you figure that?? So if free will is an illusion it is therefore necessarily mere noise in your estimation of things [...] Free will is NOT an illusion! The word illusion has a clear meaning and is not gibberish, free will is. you have left unsupported by any evidence that the brain would go through all the trouble of producing the illusion just to make noise.. and that the evolutionary cost of maintaining this elaborate ruse is essentially non-existent. For the 99'th time FREE WILL IS NOT A ILLUSION! you need to convincingly show how free will necessarily arises as a by-product of some other necessary brain function And you need to convincingly show that when you make a free will noise with your mouth you know what you're talking about. I take it that your position is that free will and self awareness are necessary by-products of intelligence My position is that because I know for a fact that Evolution produce self awareness once (and who knows, maybe my fellow human beings are conscious too) and because Evolution can not directly see self awareness any better than I can see it in others, Evolution could not have made it, could not have selected for it unless self awareness was a byproduct of something else that Evolution could see, like intelligence. As for free will, my only position on that is that it is a noise that for unknown reasons some bipeds like to make with their mouth. Ducks are different, they prefer to say quack rather than free will. you cannot show how these are necessary by products of intelligence If consciousness is fundamental, and I think it probably is, then after saying that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed there is simply nothing more to say on the subject, if there were then it wouldn't be fundamental. even if you like to state that free will is just a string of ASCII characters to you -- can be generated within our brains at no extra cost Random number generators cost very little and can produce gibberish like xudb-eyjq or free-will very efficiently. both the direct costs of all the brain activity required in order to generate it and all the ancillary costs for the survival of the individuals who have it and who now must wrestle with self awareness, personal death -- i.e. our own mortality, The awareness of death, the fear it engenders and the wish to avoided it has such a strong Evolutionary justification that I won't insult your intelligence by spelling it out. and free will Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII sequence free will means. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Assuming comp it is absolutely undecidable if our universe (if it exists) is enumerable or not enumerable, I make no assumptions whatsoever regarding comp, I never touch the stuff; but if time and space are quantized (a big if I admit) then our universe is enumerable and, although you would need to overcome gargantuan technological challenges, it should be possible to demonstrate that fact experimentally. And Bruno, if our universe does not exist how would things be different if it did? I don't assume there is a physical universe, What difference would it make one way or the other? And what do you mean by physical? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
2013/9/4 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com wrote: ** Can not comment, don't know what ASCII sequence free will means. You are merely being argumentative here. I AM NEVER ARGUMENTATIVE! You certainly do have a very clear idea of the sensations you experience within your brain that we describe as experiencing free will No I most certainly do not, and not only do I lack a clear understanding of what the hell free will is supposed to mean nobody on this list has the slightest idea either; Yes, yes we know, nobody on this list as a slightest idea, but everybody since three years have been answering you, it's like the nobody on this list knows what comp means but blablablabla... The only one who doesn't know (and doesn't ever want to know) and doesn't read is you, John. You can repeat ad nauseam false facts, they're still false facts. Quentin I know this because for over 2 years I have been reading posts from people who claimed to be able to explain what it was without resorting to gibberish, and every single one of them failed spectacularly. to state that the only meaning this has to you is as a series of ASCII symbols strung together is hiding behind the skirt of semantics Semantics is the branch of logic concerned with meaning, and I hope to hide behind that skirt for the rest of my life. So I take it therefore that you accept that we have self awareness I have self awareness obviously, perhaps others do too. a clear sense of self Yes. but that free will is just ASCII characters strung together Yes. Not very consistent of you. How the hell do you figure that?? So if free will is an illusion it is therefore necessarily mere noise in your estimation of things [...] Free will is NOT an illusion! The word illusion has a clear meaning and is not gibberish, free will is. you have left unsupported by any evidence that the brain would go through all the trouble of producing the illusion just to make noise.. and that the evolutionary cost of maintaining this elaborate ruse is essentially non-existent. For the 99'th time FREE WILL IS NOT A ILLUSION! you need to convincingly show how free will necessarily arises as a by-product of some other necessary brain function And you need to convincingly show that when you make a free will noise with your mouth you know what you're talking about. I take it that your position is that free will and self awareness are necessary by-products of intelligence My position is that because I know for a fact that Evolution produce self awareness once (and who knows, maybe my fellow human beings are conscious too) and because Evolution can not directly see self awareness any better than I can see it in others, Evolution could not have made it, could not have selected for it unless self awareness was a byproduct of something else that Evolution could see, like intelligence. As for free will, my only position on that is that it is a noise that for unknown reasons some bipeds like to make with their mouth. Ducks are different, they prefer to say quack rather than free will. you cannot show how these are necessary by products of intelligence If consciousness is fundamental, and I think it probably is, then after saying that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed there is simply nothing more to say on the subject, if there were then it wouldn't be fundamental. even if you like to state that free will is just a string of ASCII characters to you -- can be generated within our brains at no extra cost Random number generators cost very little and can produce gibberish like xudb-eyjq or free-will very efficiently. both the direct costs of all the brain activity required in order to generate it and all the ancillary costs for the survival of the individuals who have it and who now must wrestle with self awareness, personal death -- i.e. our own mortality, The awareness of death, the fear it engenders and the wish to avoided it has such a strong Evolutionary justification that I won't insult your intelligence by spelling it out. and free will Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII sequence free will means. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless... Sure, whatever, I was speaking colloquially, I wasn't using it in a technical fashion. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire mmhmm, what's your evidence of this? This seems to be an empirical statement and arguing seems to be going nowhere. How are you determining if a given set of rules exhibits desires? That is, supposing (although apparently it is impossible [can you see my eyes rolling?]) someone dropped the rules on your lap that produce desire, how would you tell? Are there sets of rules that do not produce desire that you are likely to confuse as exhibiting desire? Would you deny or accept the claim, No matter what behavior the rules produce, since the behavior emanates from rules, it cannot be desire? And essentially, what would convince you your thesis is wrong? Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. me: ...therefore there can be no such rules [that could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities]. I didn't claim that that you thought there were no rules period. On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 11:36:29 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless. No particular determination need be justified by our expectations, but determinism in general is an expectation of a logic of causality - an airtight logic of perfect correspondence. Rationality is more of a broad term which I would not apply to determinism in the strict sense of a deterministic cosmology. Rationality implies more tolerance of humanistic dimensions like free will. A person can freely choose to act rationally or irrationally, but in a deterministic universe, the logic would be that a person always acts to complete effects set into motion by prior cause. Logic is scripted and automated. Rationality can be responsive. You're welcome to use words in whatever way you like, but I don't want to dwell on word definitions. If by introducing rationality as a logic equivalence you mean to soften determinism, then I think we should stick to the word logic, since the determinism that I argue against has a zero tolerance for soft reasoning. Determinism is a closed shop of locked steps with all novelty being a pseudo-novelty derived from recombination. this is what i mean by determined doesn't mean logical. none of my desires seem to me logically justified, but that doesnt imply they are not deterministic. The fact that you have desires at all does not make sense in a deterministic universe. It gets confusing if you pull examples from real life. If we are going to talk about the fantasy world of determinism, we should refer only to those things which we can justify as being logically deterministic. 2) your thesis is essentially, i cant see how a set of rules could lead to to desire, No, my thesis is not that I can't see something, it is that I can see something that others may not. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire. My thesis is that fact, along with many others, suggests that 'rules' are an abstraction which are fictional and derived from experience, whereas desire is a concrete fact from which abstractions can be derived. My thesis is that there is an important difference between presentations and representations, such that a natural presence has a coherent footprint across multiple levels of sense, which is itself multi-coherent and self-generated. By contrast, a representation, such as a 'rule', 'function', 'process', 'pattern', 'figure', or 'information' is a second order, symbiotic phenomenon within a natural presentation. Representations are not whole and are not grounded in the totality of nature (space, time, matter, energy, significance, entropy, sense, motive) but are rather a facade, like a hologram, which makes sense only from a particular set of externally defined perspectives. i cant see how a set of rules could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities, therefore there can be no such rules. Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. Why would the impotence of 'rules' to create natural phenomena mean that there can be no rules? When did I imply that there can't be any rules? that's fine i suppose, but I'm unable to pretend that your blindness is some sort of insight. i just think you havent looked hard enough I can tell from your responses that you haven't looked at my
Inappropriate For Children
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Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 1:46:14 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless... Sure, whatever, I was speaking colloquially, I wasn't using it in a technical fashion. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire mmhmm, what's your evidence of this? This seems to be an empirical statement and arguing seems to be going nowhere. How are you determining if a given set of rules exhibits desires? That is, supposing (although apparently it is impossible [can you see my eyes rolling?]) someone dropped the rules on your lap that produce desire, how would you tell? Are there sets of rules that do not produce desire that you are likely to confuse as exhibiting desire? Would you deny or accept the claim, No matter what behavior the rules produce, since the behavior emanates from rules, it cannot be desire? And essentially, what would convince you your thesis is wrong? Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything. They are abstractions we use to analyze experiences after the fact. To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon ;) is not actually happy. The evidence is in our shared understanding (as is all evidence). What would convince you that your thesis is wrong? Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. me: ...therefore there can be no such rules [that could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities]. I didn't claim that that you thought there were no rules period. Sorry, I see what you mean. It was more of the same claim twice. Since I don't believe X can exist, I also don't believe that X can exist (at all). My view is that since I understand why X doesn't yield Y, I'm not swayed by the counter argument 'maybe you don't understand X as much as you think'...which leads us back to 'maybe you don't understand my understanding as much as you want me to think'... Thanks, Craig On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 11:36:29 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless. No particular determination need be justified by our expectations, but determinism in general is an expectation of a logic of causality - an airtight logic of perfect correspondence. Rationality is more of a broad term which I would not apply to determinism in the strict sense of a deterministic cosmology. Rationality implies more tolerance of humanistic dimensions like free will. A person can freely choose to act rationally or irrationally, but in a deterministic universe, the logic would be that a person always acts to complete effects set into motion by prior cause. Logic is scripted and automated. Rationality can be responsive. You're welcome to use words in whatever way you like, but I don't want to dwell on word definitions. If by introducing rationality as a logic equivalence you mean to soften determinism, then I think we should stick to the word logic, since the determinism that I argue against has a zero tolerance for soft reasoning. Determinism is a closed shop of locked steps with all novelty being a pseudo-novelty derived from recombination. this is what i mean by determined doesn't mean logical. none of my desires seem to me logically justified, but that doesnt imply they are not deterministic. The fact that you have desires at all does not make sense in a deterministic universe. It gets confusing if you pull examples from real life. If we are going to talk about the fantasy world of determinism, we should refer only to those things which we can justify as being logically deterministic. 2) your thesis is essentially, i cant see how a set of rules could lead to to desire, No, my thesis is not that I can't see something, it is that I can see something that others may not. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire. My thesis is that fact, along with many others, suggests that 'rules' are an abstraction which are fictional and derived from experience, whereas desire is a concrete fact from which abstractions can be derived. My thesis is that there is an important difference between presentations and representations, such that a natural presence has a coherent footprint across multiple levels of sense, which is itself multi-coherent and self-generated. By contrast, a representation, such as a 'rule', 'function', 'process', 'pattern',
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything What about something like Conway's Game of Life? Why is it wrong to see the behavior of the game as produced by the rules of the game and initial conditions? To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon... So are you or are you not making a predictive statement about what can be done using a system of rules? What exactly is it you are saying cannot be done? (Not what cannot be *explained*, but what cannot be done). What are the practical implications? On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 1:46:14 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless... Sure, whatever, I was speaking colloquially, I wasn't using it in a technical fashion. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire mmhmm, what's your evidence of this? This seems to be an empirical statement and arguing seems to be going nowhere. How are you determining if a given set of rules exhibits desires? That is, supposing (although apparently it is impossible [can you see my eyes rolling?]) someone dropped the rules on your lap that produce desire, how would you tell? Are there sets of rules that do not produce desire that you are likely to confuse as exhibiting desire? Would you deny or accept the claim, No matter what behavior the rules produce, since the behavior emanates from rules, it cannot be desire? And essentially, what would convince you your thesis is wrong? Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything. They are abstractions we use to analyze experiences after the fact. To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon ;) is not actually happy. The evidence is in our shared understanding (as is all evidence). What would convince you that your thesis is wrong? Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. me: ...therefore there can be no such rules [that could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities]. I didn't claim that that you thought there were no rules period. Sorry, I see what you mean. It was more of the same claim twice. Since I don't believe X can exist, I also don't believe that X can exist (at all). My view is that since I understand why X doesn't yield Y, I'm not swayed by the counter argument 'maybe you don't understand X as much as you think'...which leads us back to 'maybe you don't understand my understanding as much as you want me to think'... Thanks, Craig On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 11:36:29 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless. No particular determination need be justified by our expectations, but determinism in general is an expectation of a logic of causality - an airtight logic of perfect correspondence. Rationality is more of a broad term which I would not apply to determinism in the strict sense of a deterministic cosmology. Rationality implies more tolerance of humanistic dimensions like free will. A person can freely choose to act rationally or irrationally, but in a deterministic universe, the logic would be that a person always acts to complete effects set into motion by prior cause. Logic is scripted and automated. Rationality can be responsive. You're welcome to use words in whatever way you like, but I don't want to dwell on word definitions. If by introducing rationality as a logic equivalence you mean to soften determinism, then I think we should stick to the word logic, since the determinism that I argue against has a zero tolerance for soft reasoning. Determinism is a closed shop of locked steps with all novelty being a pseudo-novelty derived from recombination. this is what i mean by determined doesn't mean logical. none of my desires seem to me logically justified, but that doesnt imply they are not deterministic. The fact that you have desires at all does not make sense in a deterministic universe. It gets confusing if you pull examples from real life. If we are going to talk about the fantasy world of determinism, we should refer only to those things which we can justify as being logically deterministic. 2) your thesis is essentially, i cant see how a set of rules could lead to to desire, No, my thesis is not that I can't see something, it is that I can see something that others may not.
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On 9/4/2013 9:58 AM, John Clark wrote: If consciousness is fundamental, and I think it probably is, then after saying that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed there is simply nothing more to say on the subject, if there were then it wouldn't be fundamental. I don't disagree with that, but while consciousness may just the data processing feels, there are obviously going to be different feelings about different data processing (e.g. hope, fear, lust,...) and not all data processing is going to produce these feelings (since we know our brains do a lot of data processing unconsciously). So I think the interesting question is which data processing goes with which feeling. If I make a robot that does processing X, what will it feel? And in the more specific case, what processing corresponds to will. I suspect that it corresponds to conflicts in some subprocesses such that they want different actions and the processes corresponding to conscious evaluations is triggered to resolve this. When there is no conflict, you just do the action without thinking. So unfree will is when you perceive an external agent as coercing your decision. This is essentially the legal definition: free will = absence of coercion. This is a vague standard with a big gray area, but it is clear enough at the extremes. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On 9/4/2013 10:00 AM, Chris de Morsella wrote: *From:* meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net *To:* everything-list@googlegroups.com *Sent:* Tuesday, September 3, 2013 4:43 PM *Subject:* Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test? On 9/3/2013 3:43 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: By the way the brain produces high fidelity illusions for us most of our waking lives. For example the way we perceive our sight is very different from the intermittent stream of neural signals that begin their journey from our retinas. Did you know that every time you shift your eyes from one focus point to another that during the period of time the eyeball is in movement from one focus to the next no visual signals are being sent down the optic nerve. That if the brain was not producing an illusion for us the world we see should vanish each time we move our eyes (or blink them) Does the world disappear each time you blink or move your eyes? Of course it doesn't. Your mind maintains a steady and beautifully rendered illusion of the world in your mind that is seamlessly stitched into the new stream of optic signals as they arrive. There is no discontinuity. That seems to look at it the wrong way around. Our model of the world is one in which objects are persistent even when we don't look at them. That's a better model than one in which they only exist when we look at them. So our brain is creating the better model instead of the worse. I see no reason to call that an illusion. First note that I only wrote the three lines above - which is hard to tell from your reply. It is an illusion in the sense that it is manufactured by the brain. The brain fills in the gaps in the stream of visual signals with a manufactured world that does not in fact exist -- as a stream of in-coming sense data. But you are correct that it is a better way to model the world; I am not arguing that it isn't. I agree that evolution would favor a vision that did not suddenly switch off every time the eye stopped sending signals. My point is that the world we see is in many ways a manufactured illusion -- and model (we agree on that term) -- of the world. The same is true for how when we turn our heads the world does not spin but rather our brain cleverly re-renders our visual world by changing our own inner viewpoint from which we perceive our sight -- as our brains have served it up to us. This is also a better way to model a change in the direction of vision. Instead of spinning the world as would be the case if the brain had not re-interpreted the visual data stream and re-rendered it in this alternate manner; we perceive our visual field as being stable and our perception of this stable field being the factor that shifts instead. This brain illusion -- after all, it is manufactured internally by the brain itself and is a different and highly interpretive rendition of the raw data going into the brain -- also seems a clearly superior way to model vision than the alternative of staying true to reality, which would have the world radically spin each time you shifted your gaze from here to there or turned your head... imagine how disorienting that would be. We both agree that it makes evolutionary sense for the brain to model reality like it does -- in terms of these visual tricks the mind is doing. My point was that the mind is clearly capable of producing masterful illusions and does so each and every single day in healthy individuals. We depend on our minds innate ability to produce high fidelity illusions -- or models if you will -- of the underlying world that we are perceiving via our senses, and we depend on our conjuring mental acrobats each and every day of our lives. In general, we need on our brains to filter out by far most of what impinges on our senses, and if it did not, we would suffer under a cacophony of sensorial overload. Our brains however are masters of illusion (or if you prefer of models that while tied to and dependent on reality are also fundamentally divergent form how reality would present to us if it were not reified by our brains into the way we sense it). You're still looking at it backwards, as though there were some alternative that would be *really real* and not an illusion; as though a video camera just recording everything would capture the reall real and the would really would spin around when the camera turned and there would be no illusion. My point is that neither one is reality but the model your brain (via evolution) is closer approximation to what we denominate reality. We want reality to have point-of-view invariance, i.e. to be something that is the same from different points of view and as viewed by different people. That's what we mean by reality, and the brain automatically produces a good approximation of that form middle sized things not moving to fast. For atomic size things or things moving near the speed of light - not so good. Brent -- You
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 3:22 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: You're still looking at it backwards, as though there were some alternative that would be *really real* and not an illusion; as though a video camera just recording everything would capture the reall real and the would really would spin around when the camera turned and there would be no illusion. My point is that neither one is reality but the model your brain (via evolution) is closer approximation to what we denominate reality. We want reality to have point-of-view invariance, i.e. to be something that is the same from different points of view and as viewed by different people. That's what we mean by reality, and the brain automatically produces a good approximation of that form middle sized things not moving to fast. For atomic size things or things moving near the speed of light - not so good. Brent Exactly... the subjective reality we experience is transformed in so many ways from the impulses we get from our sensory neurons. For instance, a tennis player that sees the ball as he hits it with his racket is experiencing a reality that is impossible to justify in terms of notions like direct experience. The time it takes for light from the ball to be transduced into neural signals, the signals to be routed to the visual cortex, and for the outputs of the visual cortex to be communicated to the rest of the neocortex and motor cortex takes at least a tenth of a second or more... too slow to enable the reactions needed to reliably strike a tennis ball moving at 120 mph. Therefore it must be that the model the brain produces (and that we experience) is actually a prediction that is a couple tenths of a second *ahead* of the sensory signals the tennis ball ultimately produces. We are experiencing a virtual reality that enables us to move with precision in time *as if* our senses could process stimuli instantaneously, which of course, they can't. The model is further transformed by incorporating sensory impulses from other modes - such as sound - that arrive at times slightly later than the visual data, but the presentation we experience is that these stimuli of separate modalities, timings, and sources are bound up in an integrated reality. A great example of this is when you notice a plane flying high overhead. The sound you are hearing from it was generated at a point well behind where the plane appears visually. Yet you will never notice this unless you close your eyes before you locate the plane. Next time you hear a cruising-altitude jet, close your eyes and try to guess where the plane is coming from based on the sound and then open your eyes. Terren -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 2:45:30 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything What about something like Conway's Game of Life? Why is it wrong to see the behavior of the game as produced by the rules of the game and initial conditions? Because something has to be able to 1) privately sense the conditions which are being 'ruled', 2) respond to those conditions with a public facing motive-strategy, and 3) have the power to cause a public effect using 2 (i.e. the power to influence distant 1 experiences). Otherwise it's rules, schmules. What cares about the rules, and how is the more fundamental issue. Once we have the factory, the workers, the raw materials, then sure, policies and procedures can be said to 'produce' a product, but what policies can produce an effect ab initio? To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon... So are you or are you not making a predictive statement about what can be done using a system of rules? What exactly is it you are saying cannot be done? (Not what cannot be *explained*, but what cannot be done). What are the practical implications? One practical implication is that we don't have to worry about accidentally creating AI which can feel or suffer. Otherwise I suppose the practical consequences are to do with how we live individually and socially - to see clearly where private and public approaches are appropriate and avoid the pathological extremes. I mean the implications are huge, ultimately...the reconciliation of religion, philosophy, and science, the dawn of a new era of understanding, blah blah blah, but that's anybody's guess. Systems of rules are great, and they can only be better if we understand more about what it is that we are ruling. Or if/when they aren't great, we can understand that there is a whole other half of the universe we can look to for ways to escape them. The effects of over-signifying the quantitative are so pervasive and invasive that its going to take a miracle for people to adjust to a different view. It's like a hardcore meth addict considering for the first time that maybe there is a down-side to the drug. On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 1:46:14 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless... Sure, whatever, I was speaking colloquially, I wasn't using it in a technical fashion. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire mmhmm, what's your evidence of this? This seems to be an empirical statement and arguing seems to be going nowhere. How are you determining if a given set of rules exhibits desires? That is, supposing (although apparently it is impossible [can you see my eyes rolling?]) someone dropped the rules on your lap that produce desire, how would you tell? Are there sets of rules that do not produce desire that you are likely to confuse as exhibiting desire? Would you deny or accept the claim, No matter what behavior the rules produce, since the behavior emanates from rules, it cannot be desire? And essentially, what would convince you your thesis is wrong? Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything. They are abstractions we use to analyze experiences after the fact. To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon ;) is not actually happy. The evidence is in our shared understanding (as is all evidence). What would convince you that your thesis is wrong? Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. me: ...therefore there can be no such rules [that could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities]. I didn't claim that that you thought there were no rules period. Sorry, I see what you mean. It was more of the same claim twice. Since I don't believe X can exist, I also don't believe that X can exist (at all). My view is that since I understand why X doesn't yield Y, I'm not swayed by the counter argument 'maybe you don't understand X as much as you think'...which leads us back to 'maybe you don't understand my understanding as much as you want me to think'... Thanks, Craig On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 11:36:29 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless. No particular
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 4:54:20 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: but what policies can produce an effect ab initio? then is there anything wrong with saying the *implementation* of the rules of GOL produce the behavior of the game? Nothing wrong with that, no, just like there's nothing wrong with saying that the implementation of a cookie cutter produces the shape of the cookie. I'm pointing out that it's still the metal and the cookie dough, and the intent of the baker that are doing the heavy lifting. i think you missed the nuance of what i was asking. (i was trying fecklessly to make it clear with few words) i dont want moral implications, but empirical ones. I might observe identical outputs from an AI that doesn't really feel and a human or something else that uncontroversially does feel. I might observe the exact same thing whether or not the ai has a true inner life. what can i predict i might see or hear that is a consequence of your position bring true that isnt merely a consequence of your position being believed to be true? (obstensibly, we wouldnt worry about building ai's that can feel if we believed your position, even if it was false) My position would suggest that the more mechanistic the conditions of the test, the more it stacks the test in favor of not being able to tell the difference. If you want to fool someone into thinking an AI is alive, get a small group of people who lean toward aspberger's traits and show them short, unrelated examples in a highly controlled context. If you want to really bring out the differences between the two, use a diverse audience and have them interact freely for a long time in many different contexts, often without oversight. What you are looking for is aesthetic cues that may not even be able to be named - intuitions of something about the AI being off or untrustworthy, continuity gaps, non-fluidity, etc. It's sort of like taking a video screen out into the sunlight. You get a better view of what it isn't when you can see more of what it is. On Wednesday, September 4, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 2:45:30 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything What about something like Conway's Game of Life? Why is it wrong to see the behavior of the game as produced by the rules of the game and initial conditions? Because something has to be able to 1) privately sense the conditions which are being 'ruled', 2) respond to those conditions with a public facing motive-strategy, and 3) have the power to cause a public effect using 2 (i.e. the power to influence distant 1 experiences). Otherwise it's rules, schmules. What cares about the rules, and how is the more fundamental issue. Once we have the factory, the workers, the raw materials, then sure, policies and procedures can be said to 'produce' a product, but what policies can produce an effect ab initio? To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon... So are you or are you not making a predictive statement about what can be done using a system of rules? What exactly is it you are saying cannot be done? (Not what cannot be *explained*, but what cannot be done). What are the practical implications? One practical implication is that we don't have to worry about accidentally creating AI which can feel or suffer. Otherwise I suppose the practical consequences are to do with how we live individually and socially - to see clearly where private and public approaches are appropriate and avoid the pathological extremes. I mean the implications are huge, ultimately...the reconciliation of religion, philosophy, and science, the dawn of a new era of understanding, blah blah blah, but that's anybody's guess. Systems of rules are great, and they can only be better if we understand more about what it is that we are ruling. Or if/when they aren't great, we can understand that there is a whole other half of the universe we can look to for ways to escape them. The effects of over-signifying the quantitative are so pervasive and invasive that its going to take a miracle for people to adjust to a different view. It's like a hardcore meth addict considering for the first time that maybe there is a down-side to the drug. On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 1:46:14 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless... Sure, whatever, I was speaking colloquially, I wasn't using it in a technical fashion. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire mmhmm, what's your evidence of this? This seems to be an empirical statement and arguing seems to be going nowhere. How are you
Kant's disproof of materialism and empiricism
Kant's disproof of materialism and empiricism Materialists argue that in essence we are no more than our bodies. Empiricists such as Hume ruled out the possible influence of anything transcendental in our perception of objects. But that position was disproven by Kant, for example in his transcdendent deduction of the role of the self in perception http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental/ in which cognitive science and philosophers such as Dennett and Chalmers seems to have overlooked the critical importance of the transcendental. As a result, Kant gave this argument against materialism and empiricism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant Kant proposed a Copernican Revolution-in-reverse, saying that: Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects [materialism and positivism] but ... let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition[transcendental idealism]. Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (ret.) [1/1/2000] See my Leibniz site at http://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: The Nazi History of the Muslim Brotherhood
For a pure economic study of the crises of the middle ages, I recommend The rise of the western world http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Western-World-Economic/dp/0521290996 It is plenty of insights about why happened what. It is a bit hard for non economists but it worth the pain. 2013/8/29 spudboy...@aol.com So very true. During that time we had the Black Plague (1st of 4) and even before this we had the start of the Little Ice Age, which caused starvation, and weakend the populations of Asia, Africa, and Europe (hunger produces children with weaker immune systems) and again a high death rate. Perhaps 25%-33% of the continent. It was a time of calamities-human and otherwise. And yet the greatest mass murderer of all history remains Genghis Khan… lest we forget. The Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan murdered so many people that there was a corresponding measurable drop in humanities global carbon footprint, because so many people were wiped out that huge areas reverted back to forest because there was no one to farm the land. Human brutality to other humans (and our planet) has a long and bloody history, and the champion genocidalist (if I may coin the word) of all time committed his crimes more than 800 years ago, and without modern technology. -Chris -Original Message- From: Chris de Morsella cdemorse...@yahoo.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tue, Aug 27, 2013 12:34 pm Subject: RE: The Nazi History of the Muslim Brotherhood And yet the greatest mass murderer of all history remains Genghis Khan… lest we forget. The Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan murdered so many people that there was a corresponding measurable drop in humanities global carbon footprint, because so many people were wiped out that huge areas reverted back to forest because there was no one to farm the land. Human brutality to other humans (and our planet) has a long and bloody history, and the champion genocidalist (if I may coin the word) of all time committed his crimes more than 800 years ago, and without modern technology. -Chris *From:* everything-list@googlegroups.com [ mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.comeverything-list@googlegroups.com?] *On Behalf Of *spudboy...@aol.com *Sent:* Tuesday, August 27, 2013 4:29 AM *To:* everything-list@googlegroups.com *Subject:* Re: The Nazi History of the Muslim Brotherhood As someone who voted for Al Gore in 2000 (he liked hydrogen cars, what can I say?) I don't believe it was corruption that won Bush jr. his election, but the idiocies of the electoral process. Hanging chads or accusations of Deibold voting machines not withstanding. Democracy, is not a thing most Muslims seem to like, or like the communists and the Nazis, appear to see it as a stepping stone to power and what they wanted in its ultimate form. What most governments today are not Republics-although the voting methods still are, we are corporatist governments. Corporatism is not just corporations, but something else. Please view Wikipedia's corporatism article its splendid because its informative. What is lacking from this forum/thread is the awareness of the perfidies of socialism, as well as capitalism-a one way street. If we want to lambast capitalists for mass murder (and you guys do!) the look no further than Belgium's rubber plantations in central Africa. (sorry Bruno!) where 8 million Africans were worked to death, because of incentives offered by the Belgian government at the time-an incredible history there. Finally, the Nazis couldn't have gained power without the German communists cooperation with the SA, where as they began to stage street battles SA v. the Red Scarves in order to undermine Weimar, as being ineffective to make the streets safe. For an intense look at the Nazi-Soviet ear, please consider reading Tim Snyder's The Bloodlands-Between Stalin and Hitler. Siding with totalitarian Al Qaeda, is also foolish, as their goals are Sharia Law worldwide. Secondly even is Saibal's view is accurate (attack the military only) it wound up have the US push the Taleban from power, and the wars in the middle east gather so many fanatical jihadists there that it was a magnet for their destruction (unintentionally) because the US and Nato forces turned many of them into non-combative corpses-reducing the jihadist troops. Under Obama, with his policies-their fortunes have reversed. I am guessing they are planning some nasty surprises for the US, which will no doubt make Smitra all jolly. -Original Message- From: chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Sun, Aug 25, 2013 8:22 pm Subject: RE: The Nazi History of the Muslim Brotherhood corruption in politics (US elections 2000) is good in hind sight because it led to democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq. or one more up Saibal's street: In hind sight the end of the Raj was a bad thing
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
From: meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Wednesday, September 4, 2013 12:22 PM Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test? On 9/4/2013 10:00 AM, Chris de Morsella wrote: From: meekerdb mailto:meeke...@verizon.net To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tuesday, September 3, 2013 4:43 PM Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test? On 9/3/2013 3:43 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: By the way the brain produces high fidelity illusions for us most of our waking lives. For example the way we perceive our sight is very different from the intermittent stream of neural signals that begin their journey from our retinas. Did you know that every time you shift your eyes from one focus point to another that during the period of time the eyeball is in movement from one focus to the next no visual signals are being sent down the optic nerve. That if the brain was not producing an illusion for us the world we see should vanish each time we move our eyes (or blink them) Does the world disappear each time you blink or move your eyes? Of course it doesn't. Your mind maintains a steady and beautifully rendered illusion of the world in your mind that is seamlessly stitched into the new stream of optic signals as they arrive. There is no discontinuity. That seems to look at it the wrong way around. Our model of the world is one in which objects are persistent even when we don't look at them. That's a better model than one in which they only exist when we look at them. So our brain is creating the better model instead of the worse. I see no reason to call that an illusion. First note that I only wrote the three lines above - which is hard to tell from your reply. It is an illusion in the sense that it is manufactured by the brain. The brain fills in the gaps in the stream of visual signals with a manufactured world that does not in fact exist -- as a stream of in-coming sense data. But you are correct that it is a better way to model the world; I am not arguing that it isn't. I agree that evolution would favor a vision that did not suddenly switch off every time the eye stopped sending signals. My point is that the world we see is in many ways a manufactured illusion -- and model (we agree on that term) -- of the world. The same is true for how when we turn our heads the world does not spin but rather our brain cleverly re-renders our visual world by changing our own inner viewpoint from which we perceive our sight -- as our brains have served it up to us. This is also a better way to model a change in the direction of vision. Instead of spinning the world as would be the case if the brain had not re-interpreted the visual data stream and re-rendered it in this alternate manner; we perceive our visual field as being stable and our perception of this stable field being the factor that shifts instead. This brain illusion -- after all, it is manufactured internally by the brain itself and is a different and highly interpretive rendition of the raw data going into the brain -- also seems a clearly superior way to model vision than the alternative of staying true to reality, which would have the world radically spin each time you shifted your gaze from here to there or turned your head... imagine how disorienting that would be. We both agree that it makes evolutionary sense for the brain to model reality like it does -- in terms of these visual tricks the mind is doing. My point was that the mind is clearly capable of producing masterful illusions and does so each and every single day in healthy individuals. We depend on our minds innate ability to produce high fidelity illusions -- or models if you will -- of the underlying world that we are perceiving via our senses, and we depend on our conjuring mental acrobats each and every day of our lives. In general, we need on our brains to filter out by far most of what impinges on our senses, and if it did not, we would suffer under a cacophony of sensorial overload. Our brains however are masters of illusion (or if you prefer of models that while tied to and dependent on reality are also fundamentally divergent form how reality would present to us if it were not reified by our brains into the way we sense it). You're still looking at it backwards, as though there were some alternative that would be *really real* and not an illusion; as though a video camera just recording everything would capture the reall real and the would really would spin around when the camera turned and there would be no illusion. My point is that neither one is reality but the model your brain (via evolution) is closer approximation to what we denominate reality. We want reality
Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On 9/4/2013 2:55 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: Our brain's are supplying us with our reality and two people immersed in the same environment will often come away with different descriptions of that environment and will experience different realities when immersed in that environmental stream of sense data. Even though the raw sense stream is the same in both cases; the inner mental experience that is lived can be very different indeed. But the interesting point is that we can, given enough data, agree on an intersubjective reality. Whether we feel threatened by a big black guy on a lonely street is subjective. But whether said figure actually is a big black guy we can find out. The latter is part of reality, because that's how reality is defined - intersubjective agreement. But feeling threatened is a subjective reaction. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
RE: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2013 4:41 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test? On 9/4/2013 2:55 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote: Our brain's are supplying us with our reality and two people immersed in the same environment will often come away with different descriptions of that environment and will experience different realities when immersed in that environmental stream of sense data. Even though the raw sense stream is the same in both cases; the inner mental experience that is lived can be very different indeed. But the interesting point is that we can, given enough data, agree on an intersubjective reality. Whether we feel threatened by a big black guy on a lonely street is subjective. But whether said figure actually is a big black guy we can find out. The latter is part of reality, because that's how reality is defined - intersubjective agreement. But feeling threatened is a subjective reaction. Yes, I agree that to some extent we can carefully reconstruct a shared perceptive experience and in a process of conscious re-examination and comparison of each subjects perceptive experience remove the layers of subjective coloration we have overlaid over it - but this is assuming our brain did not suppress the perception entirely, but rather characterized it in some subjective manner. The person who failed to see the man in the gorilla suit walking across their field of view - perhaps because they were mentally focused on a near field complex visual task - will never get to see that perception, in fact they will never even know that they missed seeing it in their mind's eye - for clearly at some level the brain sees the man in the gorilla suit walking across the field - unless they are shown a video of their field of view or are otherwise convinced that they somehow failed to see the outrageous image of a man in a gorilla suit walking across their field of view. -Chris Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
