Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
Meh. The whole thing really just illustrates a fundamental problem with our current conception of AI -at least as it manifests in such 'tests'. It is perfectly clear that the Eliza-like program here just has some bunch of pre-prepared statements to regurgitate and the programmers have tried to wire these responses up to questions in such a way that they appear to be legitimate, spontaneous answers. But intelligence consists in the invention of those responses. This is always the problem with computer programs, at least as they exist today: they really just crystallize acts of human intelligence into strict, repeatable procedures. Even chess programs, which are arguably the closest thing we have to computer intelligence, depend on this crystallized intelligence, because the pruning rules and strategic heuristics they rely upon draw on deep human insights that the computer could never have arrived at itself. As humans we resemble computers to the extent that we have automated our behaviour - when we regurgitate a good how are you? in response to a social enquiry as to how we are we are fundamentally behaving like Eliza. But when we engage in real conversation or any other form of novel problem solving, we don't seem very computer-like at all, the point that Craig makes (ad nauseam). On Friday, June 13, 2014 5:20:16 AM UTC+10, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 4:22 PM, ghi...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: If the TT has been watered down, then the first question for me would be doesn't this logically pre-assume a set of explicit standards existed in the first place? My answer is no. So am I a human or a computer? Has there ever been a robust set of standards? No, except that whatever procedure you use to judge the level of intelligence of your fellow Human Beings it is only fair that you use the same procedure when judging machines. I admit this is imperfect, humans can turn out to be smarter or dumber than originally thought, but it's the only tool we have for judging such things. If the judge is a idiot then the Turing Test doesn't work very well, or if the subject is a genius but pretending to be a idiot you well also probably end up making the wrong judgement but such is life, you do the best you can with the tools at hand. By the way, for a long time machines have been able to beautifully emulate the behavior of two particular types of humans, those in a coma and those that are dead. 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
The closest I've seen to a computer programme behaving in what might be called an intelligent manner was in one of Douglas Hofstadter's books. (I think it designed fonts or something?) At least as he described it, it seemed to be doing something clever, but nowhere near the level needed to pass the Turing Test for real - but that's the point, I suppose. You can't expect to write a programme to pass the TT until you've written one that can do tiny bits of cleverness, and then another one that uses those tiny bits to be a bit more clever, and so on. In a way this is like the way that SF writers thought we'd have soon robot servants that were almost human, and might even rebel ... without realising that the process would have to be higely, mind-bogglingly incremental. On 13 June 2014 18:35, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: Meh. The whole thing really just illustrates a fundamental problem with our current conception of AI -at least as it manifests in such 'tests'. It is perfectly clear that the Eliza-like program here just has some bunch of pre-prepared statements to regurgitate and the programmers have tried to wire these responses up to questions in such a way that they appear to be legitimate, spontaneous answers. But intelligence consists in the invention of those responses. This is always the problem with computer programs, at least as they exist today: they really just crystallize acts of human intelligence into strict, repeatable procedures. Even chess programs, which are arguably the closest thing we have to computer intelligence, depend on this crystallized intelligence, because the pruning rules and strategic heuristics they rely upon draw on deep human insights that the computer could never have arrived at itself. As humans we resemble computers to the extent that we have automated our behaviour - when we regurgitate a good how are you? in response to a social enquiry as to how we are we are fundamentally behaving like Eliza. But when we engage in real conversation or any other form of novel problem solving, we don't seem very computer-like at all, the point that Craig makes (ad nauseam). On Friday, June 13, 2014 5:20:16 AM UTC+10, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 4:22 PM, ghi...@gmail.com wrote: If the TT has been watered down, then the first question for me would be doesn't this logically pre-assume a set of explicit standards existed in the first place? My answer is no. So am I a human or a computer? Has there ever been a robust set of standards? No, except that whatever procedure you use to judge the level of intelligence of your fellow Human Beings it is only fair that you use the same procedure when judging machines. I admit this is imperfect, humans can turn out to be smarter or dumber than originally thought, but it's the only tool we have for judging such things. If the judge is a idiot then the Turing Test doesn't work very well, or if the subject is a genius but pretending to be a idiot you well also probably end up making the wrong judgement but such is life, you do the best you can with the tools at hand. By the way, for a long time machines have been able to beautifully emulate the behavior of two particular types of humans, those in a coma and those that are dead. 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
or even hugely. On 13 June 2014 19:49, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: The closest I've seen to a computer programme behaving in what might be called an intelligent manner was in one of Douglas Hofstadter's books. (I think it designed fonts or something?) At least as he described it, it seemed to be doing something clever, but nowhere near the level needed to pass the Turing Test for real - but that's the point, I suppose. You can't expect to write a programme to pass the TT until you've written one that can do tiny bits of cleverness, and then another one that uses those tiny bits to be a bit more clever, and so on. In a way this is like the way that SF writers thought we'd have soon robot servants that were almost human, and might even rebel ... without realising that the process would have to be higely, mind-bogglingly incremental. On 13 June 2014 18:35, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: Meh. The whole thing really just illustrates a fundamental problem with our current conception of AI -at least as it manifests in such 'tests'. It is perfectly clear that the Eliza-like program here just has some bunch of pre-prepared statements to regurgitate and the programmers have tried to wire these responses up to questions in such a way that they appear to be legitimate, spontaneous answers. But intelligence consists in the invention of those responses. This is always the problem with computer programs, at least as they exist today: they really just crystallize acts of human intelligence into strict, repeatable procedures. Even chess programs, which are arguably the closest thing we have to computer intelligence, depend on this crystallized intelligence, because the pruning rules and strategic heuristics they rely upon draw on deep human insights that the computer could never have arrived at itself. As humans we resemble computers to the extent that we have automated our behaviour - when we regurgitate a good how are you? in response to a social enquiry as to how we are we are fundamentally behaving like Eliza. But when we engage in real conversation or any other form of novel problem solving, we don't seem very computer-like at all, the point that Craig makes (ad nauseam). On Friday, June 13, 2014 5:20:16 AM UTC+10, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 4:22 PM, ghi...@gmail.com wrote: If the TT has been watered down, then the first question for me would be doesn't this logically pre-assume a set of explicit standards existed in the first place? My answer is no. So am I a human or a computer? Has there ever been a robust set of standards? No, except that whatever procedure you use to judge the level of intelligence of your fellow Human Beings it is only fair that you use the same procedure when judging machines. I admit this is imperfect, humans can turn out to be smarter or dumber than originally thought, but it's the only tool we have for judging such things. If the judge is a idiot then the Turing Test doesn't work very well, or if the subject is a genius but pretending to be a idiot you well also probably end up making the wrong judgement but such is life, you do the best you can with the tools at hand. By the way, for a long time machines have been able to beautifully emulate the behavior of two particular types of humans, those in a coma and those that are dead. 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
Yes. But I have to wonder what we're doing wrong, because any sophisticated piece of modern software such as a modern OS or even this humble mailing list/forum software we are using is already hugely mind-bogglingly incremental. It has evolved over decades of incremental improvement involving thousands upon thousands of workers building up layers of increasing abstraction from the unfriendly silicon goings-on down below. And yet Siri, far from being a virtual Scarlett Johannson, is still pretty much dumb as dog-shit (though she has some neat bits of crystallised intelligence built in. Inspired by She I asked her what she was wearing, and she said, I can't tell you but it doesn't come off.). Well, I'm still agnostic on comp, so I don't have to decide whether this conspicuous failure represents evidence against computationalism. I do however consider the bullish predictions of the likes of Deutsch (and even our own dear Bruno) that we shall be uploading our brains or something by the end of the century or sooner to be deluded. Deutsch wrote once (BoI?) that the computational power required for human intelligence is already present in a modern laptop; we just haven't had the programming breakthrough yet. I think that is preposterous and can hardly credit he actually believes it. On Friday, June 13, 2014 6:07:56 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: or even hugely. On 13 June 2014 19:49, LizR liz...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: The closest I've seen to a computer programme behaving in what might be called an intelligent manner was in one of Douglas Hofstadter's books. (I think it designed fonts or something?) At least as he described it, it seemed to be doing something clever, but nowhere near the level needed to pass the Turing Test for real - but that's the point, I suppose. You can't expect to write a programme to pass the TT until you've written one that can do tiny bits of cleverness, and then another one that uses those tiny bits to be a bit more clever, and so on. In a way this is like the way that SF writers thought we'd have soon robot servants that were almost human, and might even rebel ... without realising that the process would have to be higely, mind-bogglingly incremental. On 13 June 2014 18:35, Pierz pie...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: Meh. The whole thing really just illustrates a fundamental problem with our current conception of AI -at least as it manifests in such 'tests'. It is perfectly clear that the Eliza-like program here just has some bunch of pre-prepared statements to regurgitate and the programmers have tried to wire these responses up to questions in such a way that they appear to be legitimate, spontaneous answers. But intelligence consists in the invention of those responses. This is always the problem with computer programs, at least as they exist today: they really just crystallize acts of human intelligence into strict, repeatable procedures. Even chess programs, which are arguably the closest thing we have to computer intelligence, depend on this crystallized intelligence, because the pruning rules and strategic heuristics they rely upon draw on deep human insights that the computer could never have arrived at itself. As humans we resemble computers to the extent that we have automated our behaviour - when we regurgitate a good how are you? in response to a social enquiry as to how we are we are fundamentally behaving like Eliza. But when we engage in real conversation or any other form of novel problem solving, we don't seem very computer-like at all, the point that Craig makes (ad nauseam). On Friday, June 13, 2014 5:20:16 AM UTC+10, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 4:22 PM, ghi...@gmail.com wrote: If the TT has been watered down, then the first question for me would be doesn't this logically pre-assume a set of explicit standards existed in the first place? My answer is no. So am I a human or a computer? Has there ever been a robust set of standards? No, except that whatever procedure you use to judge the level of intelligence of your fellow Human Beings it is only fair that you use the same procedure when judging machines. I admit this is imperfect, humans can turn out to be smarter or dumber than originally thought, but it's the only tool we have for judging such things. If the judge is a idiot then the Turing Test doesn't work very well, or if the subject is a genius but pretending to be a idiot you well also probably end up making the wrong judgement but such is life, you do the best you can with the tools at hand. By the way, for a long time machines have been able to beautifully emulate the behavior of two particular types of humans, those in a coma and those that are dead. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 01:44:25AM -0700, Pierz wrote: Yes. But I have to wonder what we're doing wrong, because any sophisticated piece of modern software such as a modern OS or even this humble mailing list/forum software we are using is already hugely mind-bogglingly incremental. It has evolved over decades of incremental improvement involving thousands upon thousands of workers building up layers of increasing abstraction from the unfriendly silicon goings-on down below. And yet Siri, far from being a virtual Scarlett Johannson, is still pretty much dumb as dog-shit (though she has some neat bits of crystallised intelligence built in. Inspired by She I asked her what she was wearing, and she said, I can't tell you but it doesn't come off.). Well, I'm still agnostic on comp, so I don't have to decide whether this conspicuous failure represents evidence against computationalism. I do however consider the bullish predictions of the likes of Deutsch (and even our own dear Bruno) that we shall be uploading our brains or something by the end of the century or sooner to be deluded. Deutsch wrote once (BoI?) that the computational power required for human intelligence is already present in a modern laptop; we just haven't had the programming breakthrough yet. I think that is preposterous and can hardly credit he actually believes it. It overstates the facts somewhat - a modern laptop is probably still about 3 orders of magnitude less powerful than a human brain, but with Moore's law, that gap will be closed in about 15 years. However, it is also true that having a 1000-fold more powerful computer does not get you human intelligence, so the programming breakthrough is still required. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Pluto bounces back!
On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 7:47 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 12 Jun 2014, at 13:39, Telmo Menezes wrote: The inconceivable freedom is in your heart, but give time to time, You are right and I'll shut up now :) Please don't shut up! As long as we stay polite the fun is in the conversation, ... in the detours sometimes. My main motivation for shutting up here is that I fully agree, but sometimes forget, that freedom is 1p. I do feel bad for going off-topic. I think that you and others, who contribute a lot to the main topic of this mailing list, deserve more leeway than me in going off-topic. So since you're asking, I feel comfortable with arguing a bit more. (I was being sarcastic when I said the politician misspeak. I was referring to the sort of doublespeak and euphemisms they employ. Of course they lie.) The reason why I suspect that democracy is not stable, is that it might always degrade to a Keynesian beauty contest. Modern democracy originated from enlightenment ideals, of raising human potential -- raising the average. The trouble is that, the best strategy to win elections is to pander to the average. A political movement that attempts to raise the average will lose to the Keynesian beauty contest players in the long term. So I am arguing that democracy contains in itself the evolutionary pressure that generates its own demise. I hope I'm missing something. Best, Telmo. Thanks I thank you, Bruno it is not that easy when we are two, saying nothing about three and more. -- 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 13 June 2014 01:27, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: But although we may speculate that consciousness and physical events both depend on computation (perhaps only in the sense of being consistently described) it doesn't follow that a UD exists or the conscious/physical world is an illusion. People throw around it's an illusion so freely that it ceases to distinguish rhinoceri from unicorns. You're right, oftentimes they do. But I wouldn't include Bruno in people here (if you see what I mean). Once one assumes the existence of the UD (or rather its infinite trace) the hard problem then becomes one of justifying in detail every aspect of the *appearance* of matter through its interaction with mind. Then, as Bruno is wont to say, the problem turns out to be (at least) twice as hard as we might have feared. As to the admissibility of the UD, for me, in the end, it's just another theoretical posit. As it happens, it strikes me as sufficiently motivated, because once computation is fixed as the base, I don't see how one would justify restricting its scope to certain computations in particular. It also suits my Everything-ist predilection (when I'm wearing that hat) to see the world-problem formulated in terms of a self-interpreting Programmatic Library of Babel. But my preferences are neither here or there, of course. What counts, as always, is how fruitful a theory turns out to be. So the proof of the comp pudding, in the end, will lie in its ultimate utility. By that point, should it come, I guess most people will have stopped quibbling about the existence, or otherwise, of the number 2. It should be clear then, under such assumptions, that neither a conscious state, nor any local physical mechanism through which it is manifested, can any longer be considered basic; Aren't conscious thoughts epistemologically basic. They are things of which we have unmediated knowledge. Yes, they are. But on the comp assumption, they're still in a specific sense derivative. Admittedly this is a subtle distinction that must be handled with care. For example, I don't think that it wouldn't be accurate to say that conscious thoughts are caused by arithmetic or computation. It's more that the epistemological consequences turn out to be a logical entailment of the original ontological assumptions. And part of that entailment is that there is indeed a we that can have unmediated knowledge of certain truths. rather, *both* must (somehow) be complex artefacts (albeit with distinctive derivations) of a more primitive (in this case, by assumption, computational) ontology. The relevant distinction, then, is between this set of relations and the alternative, in which both consciousness and computation are assumed to be derivative on a more basic (hence primitive) formulation of matter. I can agree with that. It is consistent with my point that primitive matter is undefined and could be anything if we just called it ur-stuff instead of matter. Good. Perhaps that's all a little clearer, then. David -- 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/d/optout.
Re: The Really Real Part of Reality
On Thursday, June 12, 2014 5:54:41 PM UTC+1, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 12 Jun 2014, at 01:48, ghi...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: On Monday, June 9, 2014 2:20:26 AM UTC+1, Kim Jones wrote: In the Is Conscious Computable? and Suicide Words God and Ideas threads there is considerable overlap of discussion of primitive materialism. This is the place where the Neoplatonists and the Aristotelians get to slug it out, so to speak. I feel the quality of the discussion between David Nyman and Bruno is worth signalling. Perhaps the time is ripe for a revision of Bruno’s version of CTM and I take the liberty to provide this. In 2013 he released a summary version to a Biomathics website which I thought was very good. I then redacted it into what I believe is the first Plain English version of comp available. Note that this is the short version of the SANE 2004 paper. This may help you to check your understanding or to consolidate/change your stance vis à vis Bruno’s core ideas. It is designed to read as fluently as possible. The link has been set up to download the .pdf file direct to your download folder *Comp 2013 Redux* http://www.kmjcommp.com/COMP%202013%20Redux.pdf thanks for taking the trouble to do this. I did read it through once again, but I suppose with some amount of trepidation shall have to report no status change as the result. Then to highlight the issues as I see them: 1. Nothing wrong with logic on its own terms. His points are reason and - allowing I probably miss some of the deeper layerings of significance - easy to understand and even 'obvious' (in a good way). Emphasis once more on 'that of it I could make out' as it were. 2. The issue - as I see it - is logical nonetheless, which may seem contradictory but just isn'tnot once one appreciates the nature of the UDA is that of successive levels of logical deduction, each one building on the last (or summation of all previous taken together or subset or whatever). The logical nature of *that* kind of structure, must/should always include - cumulative with each further layer - appreciation and allowance for what might be termed 'exo-logic'. That is, say from the perspective of the initial conditions, or in this case the initial assumption (comp), the logical implications of not just what is in the assumption, but what 'sense', by what 'degree' what (a given thing) is in the assumption. all the way to what s not in the assumption at all despite appearing to be. All from the *retrospective* vantage point of whatever direction the layered deductive structure actually converges to. Specifically? If an implicit assumption is used at some steps, please tell the step and the missing assumption. Why can't you see this is not a question of what assumptions you do or don't make within your logic? Ste outside out your box briefly, outside your logic. Or just explore the logic native in the conception of deriving large impications fromtry making a logically parallel metaphor using completely different objects...describe one of these you regard as legitimate I will create one for you. Let's say, someone got wrapped up with 'origin of life', as in abiogenesis. Then had a similar idea based on another universal principle - conservation of energy. So...reasoning his cogwheels turnsenergy is conserved always it is thought, and so origin happened energy-symmetrically. So then, assuming cons-e for origin of life Bruno...what logic is now available OrI just constructed a physical test for you: Bruno I have just placed 'something' into a black-box. It is associated with 'concepts' which are vague, and may or may not exhibit physicality, but I'm not saying. Assuming it's emulableBrunowhat are your logical deductions? Can you deduce any non-trivial information what is in the box? How about the innards of Jupitor...assuming comp, is anything new available to you? Test it...get a friend to put something in a box, then you assump comp and get deducing. If you manage to generate non-trivial new knowledge on a statistically significant basis, I think you'll find yourself winning a large prize for supernatural powers. Or just from a straight appreciation ofwhy go elsewhere let's stick with conservation of energy. New knowledge, because it's information, is thought to be *energetic* in character. Now, we're still trying to work out how it squares off.and indeed this is one of THE huge baffling questions of the scientific revolution. Philosophers gravitate to this. The centre piece of philosophical odyssey was an epistemology of knowledge. There are unresolved problems with exactly how energy conserves knowledge creation processes...we're not there yet. But nevertheless we assume the answer will obey conservation of energy. So, I suppose, no one can tell anyone else they can't have their own theory. But I think
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
An intuition pump I use to think about the level of effort required to achieve true AI is that it takes a human brain at least a year or two of continuous training before it results in a talking human. Several more years before you get to to the point where you can't easily trick that little human into believing just about anything. Even if we're talking about an AI whose principle workings are not inspired by biological brains, I still think this is a useful measuring stick, for what it suggests about the amount of organization that must occur - however it occurs - to enable a computing device to respond in a generally intelligent way to its given environment. Terren On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 7:35 AM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 01:44:25AM -0700, Pierz wrote: Yes. But I have to wonder what we're doing wrong, because any sophisticated piece of modern software such as a modern OS or even this humble mailing list/forum software we are using is already hugely mind-bogglingly incremental. It has evolved over decades of incremental improvement involving thousands upon thousands of workers building up layers of increasing abstraction from the unfriendly silicon goings-on down below. And yet Siri, far from being a virtual Scarlett Johannson, is still pretty much dumb as dog-shit (though she has some neat bits of crystallised intelligence built in. Inspired by She I asked her what she was wearing, and she said, I can't tell you but it doesn't come off.). Well, I'm still agnostic on comp, so I don't have to decide whether this conspicuous failure represents evidence against computationalism. I do however consider the bullish predictions of the likes of Deutsch (and even our own dear Bruno) that we shall be uploading our brains or something by the end of the century or sooner to be deluded. Deutsch wrote once (BoI?) that the computational power required for human intelligence is already present in a modern laptop; we just haven't had the programming breakthrough yet. I think that is preposterous and can hardly credit he actually believes it. It overstates the facts somewhat - a modern laptop is probably still about 3 orders of magnitude less powerful than a human brain, but with Moore's law, that gap will be closed in about 15 years. However, it is also true that having a 1000-fold more powerful computer does not get you human intelligence, so the programming breakthrough is still required. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 12 Jun 2014, at 18:28, jr...@trexenterprises.com wrote: I am well aware of the two slit experiment. You can't send tronnies one-by-one anywhere. They exist in twosomes and threesomes as electrons, positrons or entrons. The entron is the energy-mass of each photon. Photons are self propelled by internal Coulomb forces of their entrons. In the two-slit experiment the entron goes through one slit but its Coulomb force wave goes through both slits. Like Bohm and de Broglie. Today, this is known to introduce non local physical action. My theory does not deal with consciousness. It might the grain of dust which forces us to revise our opinion on Plato, on mind and physics. I argue that if the brain works like a machine, that is mainly in a local causal way (no magic), then Plato is right and the physical reality is the border of the universal mind, i.e. the mind of the universal machine (Turing, Church, Post, ...). I am afraid that the Ross theory is still in the frame of taking Aristotle theology for granted. Bruno On 08 Jun 2014, at 20:33, John Ross wrote: I am not trying to prove quantum mechanics incorrect. I am trying to prove my theory is correct. If my theory is correct, and quantum mechanics is inconsistent withmy theory then quantum mechanics may very well be incorrect. There is also a possibility that on some issues the two theories may both be correct. QM is the only theory (or scheme of theories) which has not been refuted for more than a century. All others theories in physics have been shown wrong in less than few years, when they are not suspected to be wrong at the start (wrong does not imply not useful in some context). So my question, which has been already asked, is simply what happens when you send tronnies, one by one, (or compounds of tronnies) on a plate with two close small holes? (have you heard and think about Young two slits experience?). You lost me with Turing emulable. We can come back on this later, but as you seem not so much interested in consciousness, that might be out of your topic, at least for now. Taking consciousness into account + the hypothesis that the brain is a natural computer might force us to make physics into a sort of illusion entirely reducible to the study of machine's psychology or theology. See my URL or post, if interested. Bruno JR From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com ] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Sunday, June 08, 2014 2:35 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: TRONNIES - SPACE On 07 Jun 2014, at 22:18, John Ross wrote: I do not explain consciousness. Fair enough. You are not searching to explain everything. Unfortunately, consciousness has something to say on the very origin of the beliefs in the physical laws. You are still an Aristotelian theologian (taking matter for primitive or granted with the naive identity relation (brain/mind)). To defend that relation, between brain and mind, you will need some special sort of actual infinities. With the thesis that a brain (or body) is Turing emulable, you can still attach consciousness to a brain, but you cannot attach a brain to consciousness, you can only attach an infinity of relative universal machine states to a consciousness. This might explain the many-world aspect of quantum mechanics. It is not yet clear to me what is your position on quantum mechanics, or your explanation of the two slits experiment. Bruno Jr From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com ] On Behalf Of LizR Sent: Friday, June 06, 2014 6:02 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: TRONNIES - SPACE On 7 June 2014 04:12, John Ross jr...@trexenterprises.com wrote: There is a theory of everything - my theory, The Ross Model. You are a smart person and you are extremely interested in this subject, so sooner or later you will get around to reading my book. And I predict you will be forced to agree with me. I haven't yet managed to discover what the ontology of the RM is - is the idea primitive materialism - that space, time, matter and energy are fundamental? Do you attempt to explain consciousness? -- 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/d/optout. -- 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
Re: Selecting your future branch
On 12 Jun 2014, at 18:33, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 9:33 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: the randomness (in the sense of normal statistical testing) of that deterministic chaos has no other rôle in free-will than [...] Before you start lecturing about what does and does not have a role in free will you first must explain what the hell free will is supposed to mean. We have already agreed on the definition; more than one. You said it was not interesting, but I took that as a subjective opinion, relative to what we are interested in. We have agree that free will = will = ability to make an image of an uncertain local future (will I drink tea or coffee?), and to make choice relatively to some high or higher level goal(s) (thirst, diet, economy, ...). its necessary self-indeterminacy We have self-indeterminacy?? I could not fail to disagree with you less. This astonished me What astonishes you? That you dismiss the Turing indeterminacy. Usually you dismiss the first person indeterminacy. Randomness adds nothing, as you see well I have no idea what you mean by that, randomness clearly adds a whole lot of stuff, usually more than we'd like. I meant randomness adds nothing in the free will That's not surprising, I've been on this list for several years and I've yet to find one person who could add anything of interest to the free will noise, a sound that many like to make with their mouth. There are endless debates about if human beings have free will or not but both sides of the argument quite literally don't know what they're arguing about. It's as if geometers where debating if squares were klogneated or unklogneated but nobody thinks to ask what klogneated means. Only bad philosophers do that. Scientists start from the general idea, usually inconsistent, and propose definition which make sense, and develop theories, and prove theorems in those theories. Interesting or not is relative to the problem you to try to solve. Bruno John K Clark except that it can augment the freedom spectrum, and it might diminish the complexity of the task or of comparing the possible tasks. I just defend the (well known in philosophy) compatibilist theory of free-will. It is (simply) the will of a subject in a free (virtual or real) environment, or in a structured set of such free (virtual or real) environments (emulated in arithmetic, for example). Bruno 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- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 13 June 2014 03:52, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I think you are assuming the point in question, i.e. that all the physical interactions of brains with the painting and the rest of the world are irrelevant and that the physical description of the painting is *just* the pigment on the canvas. You take all that other interaction, which also has both physical and psychological description and leave it out and then you say the physical description leaves out something essential. That seems to imply that you believe philosophical zombies are possible? No, I think it just means that I pushed this particular metaphor beyond its breaking point. You are, of course, correct to say that an adequate physical description must include the relevant context. And I agree that what is relevant in context may be moot. However, my basic point was that, under physicalism, the ultimate goal is to be able to give an exhaustive, contextualised account of a given system exclusively in terms of its *physical relations*. And this is the case whether or not we wish to distinguish one descriptive level as ontological and another as epistemological. In the final analysis it's all - ex hypothesi - physics. We seem to have agreed that physicalism and computationalism rely on different assumptions about what one might call the hierarchy of derivation. So, under physicalism, both computation and mind are assumed to derive from (in the sense of being alternative descriptions of) some ultimately basic formulation of matter (to whatever depths that might have to descend). Under computationalism, by contrast, both matter and mind are assumed to derive from some ultimately basic formulation of computation. The crucial dissimilarity is then that mind is not appealed to, under physicalism, in accounting for the origin of matter (which is basic). This makes it coherent, at least in principle, to ask for an exhaustive physical accounting of any given state of affairs. In the final analysis *everything* must be reducible, by assumption, to one or another description of some basic set of underlying physical relations. Under computationalism, by contrast, the epistemological logic is absolutely central in differentiating the lawful appearances of matter from the exhaustive redundancy of the computational base. Hence on these assumptions, even in principle, no state of affairs above the level of the basic ontology could ever be exhaustively accounted for by any catalogue of descriptions, however sophisticated or multi-levelled, of its merely physical dispositions, absent the selective logic of its epistemology. David -- 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 12 Jun 2014, at 18:51, jr...@trexenterprises.com wrote: I don't see how consciousness is important is describing how our Universe was created and how it works. Our Universe existed for billions of years before there was intelligent life to be conscious. IF there is a universe. We don't know that. But we do know that the computations exists in arithmetic, and that from the machine's points of view, an infinity of universal machines competes to continue them, below our substitution level. It explains intuitively and formally some quantum weirdness. Quantum mechanics is ok so long as it is consistent with my model. If the people are not happy, change the people! (Stalin, I think). If my theory does not fit nature, change nature! QM is not just positively confirmed since a long time, but it is confirmed in its most startling aspects. It is also the only theory which makes sense of liquid, solid, gaz, atoms and molecules, stars and black holes, particles and their relations (bosons, fermions, fractional spins, condensed states theory). My theory includes an explanation of the results of the two-slit experiment. If is not a MW theory, or a Many Dream theory, I am afraid you will need non local indeterminist sort of magic. Bruno On 07 Jun 2014, at 22:18, John Ross wrote: I do not explain consciousness. Fair enough. You are not searching to explain everything. Unfortunately, consciousness has something to say on the very origin of the beliefs in the physical laws. You are still an Aristotelian theologian (taking matter for primitive or granted with the naive identity relation (brain/mind)). To defend that relation, between brain and mind, you will need some special sort of actual infinities. With the thesis that a brain (or body) is Turing emulable, you can still attach consciousness to a brain, but you cannot attach a brain to consciousness, you can only attach an infinity of relative universal machine states to a consciousness. This might explain the many-world aspect of quantum mechanics. It is not yet clear to me what is your position on quantum mechanics, or your explanation of the two slits experiment. Bruno Jr From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com ] On Behalf Of LizR Sent: Friday, June 06, 2014 6:02 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: TRONNIES - SPACE On 7 June 2014 04:12, John Ross jr...@trexenterprises.com wrote: There is a theory of everything - my theory, The Ross Model. You are a smart person and you are extremely interested in this subject, so sooner or later you will get around to reading my book. And I predict you will be forced to agree with me. I haven't yet managed to discover what the ontology of the RM is - is the idea primitive materialism - that space, time, matter and energy are fundamental? Do you attempt to explain consciousness? -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. 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- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. 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
Re: Selecting your future branch
On 12 Jun 2014, at 18:54, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 9:33 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: It [free will] is (simply) the will of a subject I have no trouble understanding what will means, it's when free is stuck in front of it that trouble arises. I agree. Many times that prefix adds nothing, and I drop it from my mind. Free will is just the will, with an emphasis that it is supposed to be used in a context with minimal coercion, and enough degrees of freedom. in a free (virtual or real) environment According to your definition X has free will if and only if X is completely unaffected by it's environment, That does not follow from the definition. You have will in dream but also when awake. therefore a free neutron has free will because there is a 50% chance it will decay in 10 minutes regardless of what its environment is as long as its free of the nucleus. I on the other hand do not have free will and I'm very very glad I do not, I find the information from my eyes and ears quite helpful and I would not enjoy constantly walking into walls. Free-will or will are high level cognitive ability of machine having enough introspective ability. Bruno 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout.
Re: Selecting your future branch
On 13 Jun 2014, at 01:00, meekerdb wrote: On 6/12/2014 6:33 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Actually Grim and another guy studied version of Gödel and Löb theorem in fuzzy logic (meaning that they use the closed interval [0, 1] has set of truth values. They illustrate that the truth values of most fixed points in self-reference logic describe chaotic trajectories (in the set of truth value). I don't understand what they a fixed points of, if not truth value? In the (classical) self-reference logic, they are sentences, and they are fixed point in the sense of being a solution of a self-reference. The self-reference x - ~[]x has solution the sentence f (beweisbar(0=1)). (Gödel 1931) The self-reference x - []x has solution the sentence t (or 0=0) (Löb 1955) The self-reference x - []~x has solution the sentence []f (beweisbar(0=0)) (Jeroslow, Smullyan) The self-reference x - ~[]~x has solution the sentence f (or 0=1). (Gödel) But in fuzzy logic, some of those fixed points are not fixed, and moves in the truth set in a chaotic way, with a variety of attractors. Bruno 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 13 Jun 2014, at 01:23, meekerdb wrote: On 6/12/2014 8:03 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: That said, we might still at this stage wish to point out - and indeed it might seem at first blush to be defensible - that such fictions, or artefacts, could, at least in principle, be redeemable in virtue of their evident epistemological undeniability. Indeed this is FAPP the default a posteriori strategy, though often only tacitly. It might even be persuasive were it not that no first-person epistemological consequence has ever been shown to be predictable or derivable from basic relations defined strictly physically, as distinct from computationally, nor indeed is any such consequence appealed to, ex hypothesi, in accounting rather exhaustively for any state of affairs that is defined strictly physically. (The single candidate I can adduce as a counter example to the latter, by the way, is the collapse hypothesis which, far from being such a consequence, is rather an ad hoc interpolation.) That's from David. But that's an instructive example. It shows that there is no absolute barrier to such explanation. And with the further development of decoherence theory it not be so ad hoc. I think the barrier itself is an illusion engendered by criteria of explanation that are not met even by the most widely accepted theories. The confusion might remain as long as we don't explain the alternate conception of reality. Scientists should be neutral on this. Just taking the theory seriously until a contradiction occurs, or a misfit with observation. Bruno 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 13 Jun 2014, at 01:29, meekerdb wrote: On 6/12/2014 9:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Further more, I'm not even sure that the reductionist program of looking for what's most fundamental (in a TOE) and reifying it is the right way to look at things. It leads to making strings or numbers, which we never experience, real and everything we experience (on which we base or theories) illusory. I think this called the error of the misplaced concrete. In that case we are just no machine and should never accept an artificial brain (or UDA is invalid of course). That doesn't follow. The doctor can still make a prosthetic brain. Then you have to assume matter, and some magical non Turing emulable essential property, like its real existence to get consciousness (and prevent it in the arithmetical reality). that is akin to non-comp. That's confusing (computation theory of mind)-(doctor can make artificial brain) with (doctor can make artificial brain)- (computational theory of mind). Well, I was assuming you intended the guy to survive with the prosthetic brain. We have by definition: comp theory of mind - doctor can make (in principle) a successful artificial brain. Bruno 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 13 Jun 2014, at 02:11, David Nyman wrote: On 12 June 2014 04:09, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Of course most physicists think the mind/body problem is too ill defined a problem to tackle right now. But this is Bruno's whole point and aim, isn't it? Given that the whole subject area is indeed a quagmire of confusion, he sets out his stall to formulate the problem in a way that is sufficiently well-defined, unambiguous, and mathematically precise to be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. As you know, he originally expected it to break immediately under the resulting strain, but in practice it hasn't yet done so. That said, I think your remarks about primitive matter rather miss the point. The UDA starts with the most general assumption of a computational theory of mind: i.e. the brain is some sort of mechanism and that the relation between consciousness and this mechanism depends on some (unknown) set of computational relations obtaining between some (unknown) finite collection of its physical components. One might then say of this state of affairs that the mechanism itself is physically instantiated, whereas the resultant conscious states are computationally instantiated (aka consciousness qua computatio). Step 8 is then intended, on this assumption, to make explicit the (in retrospect, rather obvious) point that any given net physical behaviour of such a mechanism (i.e. the disposition of its components through any given set of physical states) can be fortuitously preserved even after every trace of its original, purportedly computational, architecture has been evacuated. If this be the case, it would seem to make little sense to continue in the view that any conscious states correlated with the net physical behaviour of the mechanism are still *computationally instantiated*. Consequently, either consciousness qua computatio is false (Maudlin's conclusion), or it is at least persuasive that both conscious states and their correlative physical mechanisms alike depend on computation in some rather deeper and more general formulation. This is what opens the conceptual gap for the reversal to bite and the UD to exert its baleful influence. It should be clear then, under such assumptions, that neither a conscious state, nor any local physical mechanism through which it is manifested, can any longer be considered basic; rather, *both* must (somehow) be complex artefacts (albeit with distinctive derivations) of a more primitive (in this case, by assumption, computational) ontology. The relevant distinction, then, is between this set of relations and the alternative, in which both consciousness and computation are assumed to be derivative on a more basic (hence primitive) formulation of matter. Hope Brent read well those lines. Sometimes, I think some people are just not interested in the subject (everything including consciousness and beyond). Bruno David -- 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout.
Re: Selecting your future branch
On 13 Jun 2014, at 05:06, LizR wrote: On 13 June 2014 05:11, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 12 Jun 2014, at 00:30, LizR wrote: So a person would be a garden of forking paths laid out by deterministic physics, within which their conscious mind could move around (within limits). So the p-zombies are, so to speak, the materialist / eliminativist versions of people, while consciousness is something that can flow through the network provided by the p-zombies. Well, it is simpler to admit the p-zombies are conscious. But then you can't select your branch, because you end up in all of them! Yes. That's the point. It makes the outcome non determinable. That's the FPI. Bruno -- 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On 13 Jun 2014, at 10:44, Pierz wrote: Yes. But I have to wonder what we're doing wrong, because any sophisticated piece of modern software such as a modern OS or even this humble mailing list/forum software we are using is already hugely mind-bogglingly incremental. It has evolved over decades of incremental improvement involving thousands upon thousands of workers building up layers of increasing abstraction from the unfriendly silicon goings-on down below. And yet Siri, far from being a virtual Scarlett Johannson, is still pretty much dumb as dog- shit (though she has some neat bits of crystallised intelligence built in. Inspired by She I asked her what she was wearing, and she said, I can't tell you but it doesn't come off.). Well, I'm still agnostic on comp, so I don't have to decide whether this conspicuous failure represents evidence against computationalism. I do however consider the bullish predictions of the likes of Deutsch (and even our own dear Bruno) that we shall be uploading our brains or something by the end of the century or sooner to be deluded. Deutsch wrote once (BoI?) that the computational power required for human intelligence is already present in a modern laptop; we just haven't had the programming breakthrough yet. I think that is preposterous and can hardly credit he actually believes it. I think we had the programming breakthrough, by discovering the universal machine, and I begin to think she is already conscious and intelligent (perhaps even maximally). Perhaps even Löbianity is already part of the fall. I take Löbian machines, like PA or ZF, as conscious as you and me. (yet more dissociated with respect to our local reality). Uploading our mind might take one or two centuries, by nanotechnologies, but this does not mean we will understand our mind. Copying is just infinitely more easy than understanding. Not all people will bet on the same level, also. Bruno On Friday, June 13, 2014 6:07:56 PM UTC+10, Liz R wrote: or even hugely. On 13 June 2014 19:49, LizR liz...@gmail.com wrote: The closest I've seen to a computer programme behaving in what might be called an intelligent manner was in one of Douglas Hofstadter's books. (I think it designed fonts or something?) At least as he described it, it seemed to be doing something clever, but nowhere near the level needed to pass the Turing Test for real - but that's the point, I suppose. You can't expect to write a programme to pass the TT until you've written one that can do tiny bits of cleverness, and then another one that uses those tiny bits to be a bit more clever, and so on. In a way this is like the way that SF writers thought we'd have soon robot servants that were almost human, and might even rebel ... without realising that the process would have to be higely, mind-bogglingly incremental. On 13 June 2014 18:35, Pierz pie...@gmail.com wrote: Meh. The whole thing really just illustrates a fundamental problem with our current conception of AI -at least as it manifests in such 'tests'. It is perfectly clear that the Eliza-like program here just has some bunch of pre-prepared statements to regurgitate and the programmers have tried to wire these responses up to questions in such a way that they appear to be legitimate, spontaneous answers. But intelligence consists in the invention of those responses. This is always the problem with computer programs, at least as they exist today: they really just crystallize acts of human intelligence into strict, repeatable procedures. Even chess programs, which are arguably the closest thing we have to computer intelligence, depend on this crystallized intelligence, because the pruning rules and strategic heuristics they rely upon draw on deep human insights that the computer could never have arrived at itself. As humans we resemble computers to the extent that we have automated our behaviour - when we regurgitate a good how are you? in response to a social enquiry as to how we are we are fundamentally behaving like Eliza. But when we engage in real conversation or any other form of novel problem solving, we don't seem very computer-like at all, the point that Craig makes (ad nauseam). On Friday, June 13, 2014 5:20:16 AM UTC+10, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 4:22 PM, ghi...@gmail.com wrote: If the TT has been watered down, then the first question for me would be doesn't this logically pre-assume a set of explicit standards existed in the first place? My answer is no. So am I a human or a computer? Has there ever been a robust set of standards? No, except that whatever procedure you use to judge the level of intelligence of your fellow Human Beings it is only fair that you use the same procedure when judging machines. I admit this is imperfect, humans can turn out to be smarter or dumber than originally thought, but it's the
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 2:35 AM, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: The whole thing really just illustrates a fundamental problem with our current conception of AI -at least as it manifests in such 'tests'. If there is a fundamental problem with determining the level of intelligence in something the problem is not restricted to computers, it's just as severe in determining the intelligence of our fellow humans. It is perfectly clear that the Eliza-like program here just has some bunch of pre-prepared statements to regurgitate and the programmers have tried to wire these responses up to questions in such a way that they appear to be legitimate, spontaneous answers. True, and that's why Eliza is a joke. Why do you think Eliza is a joke? Because unlike a AI program like Watson, which could actually help you write a PHD dissertation, Eliza knows nothing and just repeats the input in a slightly modified way. Why do you say Eliza knows nothing and just repeats the input in a slightly modified way? Because Eliza is an idiot. That's interesting, tell me more. Flapjacks restrict tubular doghouses in the genome of spacetime. Why do you think flapjacks restrict tubular doghouses in the genome of spacetime? And unlike Watson when Eliza gets stuck it keeps changing the subject to avoid looking stupid. Tell me about your mother. Even chess programs, which are arguably the closest thing we have to computer intelligence, depend on this crystallized intelligence, because the pruning rules and strategic heuristics they rely upon draw on deep human insights That's a classic example of the sore loser syndrome, those humans with their deep human insights will get clobbered by the computer in just a few moves. And I don't want to hear about how that doesn't count because of blah blah and all the machine is really doing is blah and blah, because at the end of the day the machine won and the human lost. It may be true that the computer solved the chess problem differently than the human did, but given that the human lost it's rather silly to say that the human way was better. that the computer could never have arrived at itself. And human beings could never design new computer chips by themselves without the help of computers that already exist, it's just too complicated. And the same is true of software; imagine if you had to write a new modern operating system from scratch but couldn't use C or C++ or assembly language or even hexadecimal and had to write it directly in machine code using nothing but lots and lots of ones and zeros! When the very first computers were made there was no choice, that's the only way it could be done, but programs were vastly smaller and simpler than now, today even a army of geniuses couldn't do it without computers. 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/d/optout.
Re: Pluto bounces back!
On 13 Jun 2014, at 15:41, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 7:47 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 12 Jun 2014, at 13:39, Telmo Menezes wrote: The inconceivable freedom is in your heart, but give time to time, You are right and I'll shut up now :) Please don't shut up! As long as we stay polite the fun is in the conversation, ... in the detours sometimes. My main motivation for shutting up here is that I fully agree, but sometimes forget, that freedom is 1p. I do feel bad for going off-topic. I think that you and others, who contribute a lot to the main topic of this mailing list, deserve more leeway than me in going off-topic. So since you're asking, I feel comfortable with arguing a bit more. (I was being sarcastic when I said the politician misspeak. I was referring to the sort of doublespeak and euphemisms they employ. Of course they lie.) The reason why I suspect that democracy is not stable, is that it might always degrade to a Keynesian beauty contest. Modern democracy originated from enlightenment ideals, of raising human potential -- raising the average. The trouble is that, the best strategy to win elections is to pander to the average. A political movement that attempts to raise the average will lose to the Keynesian beauty contest players in the long term. So I am arguing that democracy contains in itself the evolutionary pressure that generates its own demise. I hope I'm missing something. Democracies are not stable, like all living beings are not stable, and somehow they always generate their own demises. But we make children and dialogs, and we can hope, and work for, that the children will not commit our mistakes. I see democracy as the zero stage of democracy, and it is well capable of making us see the omega stars, but like a rocket, it is unstable, and it can crash ,just after starting, ... so well, we build a new rocket and try again, hoping we fix the preceding mistake, a bit like in the crash investigation series. No reason to fear the average, as the average cultivated man like the differences and can respect different life styles. In a non-democracy you get mafias all the time, in democracy you get mafia only when the democracy is sick. Democracies are young on this planet, you just miss again the time factor. Of course it is our work and responsibility to denounce the injustice, but today the net is useful for that. Let us keep it that way! Bruno Best, Telmo. Thanks I thank you, Bruno it is not that easy when we are two, saying nothing about three and more. -- 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- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On 6/13/2014 12:49 AM, LizR wrote: The closest I've seen to a computer programme behaving in what might be called an intelligent manner was in one of Douglas Hofstadter's books. (I think it designed fonts or something?) At least as he described it, it seemed to be doing something clever, but nowhere near the level needed to pass the Turing Test for real - but that's the point, I suppose. You can't expect to write a programme to pass the TT until you've written one that can do tiny bits of cleverness, and then another one that uses those tiny bits to be a bit more clever, and so on. Or implement a good learning program and then take twenty years to train it. 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/d/optout.
Re: Selecting your future branch
Citeren Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be: On 13 Jun 2014, at 05:06, LizR wrote: On 13 June 2014 05:11, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 12 Jun 2014, at 00:30, LizR wrote: So a person would be a garden of forking paths laid out by deterministic physics, within which their conscious mind could move around (within limits). So the p-zombies are, so to speak, the materialist / eliminativist versions of people, while consciousness is something that can flow through the network provided by the p-zombies. Well, it is simpler to admit the p-zombies are conscious. But then you can't select your branch, because you end up in all of them! Yes. That's the point. It makes the outcome non determinable. That's the FPI. Bruno The persons in the different branches are not the same persons and neither of them is the same as the original. You only exist at each instant of time, a moment later who exists is no longer the orignal you. In case there is no slitting, you can reconstruct the original from the new as the inverse time evolution will reconver the original person. When there has been a splitting into dofferent branches, you need all the branches to recover the original person. Saibal -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Pluto bounces back!
On 6/13/2014 6:41 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 7:47 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 12 Jun 2014, at 13:39, Telmo Menezes wrote: The inconceivable freedom is in your heart, but give time to time, You are right and I'll shut up now :) Please don't shut up! As long as we stay polite the fun is in the conversation, ... in the detours sometimes. My main motivation for shutting up here is that I fully agree, but sometimes forget, that freedom is 1p. I do feel bad for going off-topic. I think that you and others, who contribute a lot to the main topic of this mailing list, deserve more leeway than me in going off-topic. So since you're asking, I feel comfortable with arguing a bit more. (I was being sarcastic when I said the politician misspeak. I was referring to the sort of doublespeak and euphemisms they employ. Of course they lie.) The reason why I suspect that democracy is not stable, is that it might always degrade to a Keynesian beauty contest. Modern democracy originated from enlightenment ideals, of raising human potential -- raising the average. The trouble is that, the best strategy to win elections is to pander to the average. A political movement that attempts to raise the average will lose to the Keynesian beauty contest players in the long term. So I am arguing that democracy contains in itself the evolutionary pressure that generates its own demise. I hope I'm missing something. I think what you're missing is that the voters idea of beauty is malleable and given enough money can be maninpulated. And when it takes a lot of money to win elected office the elected officers are likely to be indebted to very rich people. You seem to worry that democracy is unstable against populism, but it may also be unstable against plutocracy. 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/d/optout.
Re: Selecting your future branch
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 11:52 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: We have agree that free will = will If free will just means will then why stick on the free ? = ability to make an image of an uncertain local future (will I drink tea or coffee?), and to make choice Did you really think you could sneak in a word like choice without me noticing? The ability to make a choice = the ability to have free will and the ability to have free will = ability to make a choice. And round and round we go. We have self-indeterminacy?? I could not fail to disagree with you less. This astonished me What astonishes you? That you dismiss the Turing indeterminacy. I could not fail to disagree with you less. Indeterminacy means not known and in general there is no way to know what a Turing Machine will do other than just watch it and see even though there is not one ounce of randomness in it. Usually you dismiss the first person indeterminacy. I have never in my life said that first person indeterminacy does not exist, what I dismissed is that the discovery I sometimes don't know what I'm going to do or see next is profound and was first made by Bruno Marchal I've been on this list for several years and I've yet to find one person who could add anything of interest to the free will noise, a sound that many like to make with their mouth. There are endless debates about if human beings have free will or not but both sides of the argument quite literally don't know what they're arguing about. It's as if geometers where debating if squares were klogneated or unklogneated but nobody thinks to ask what klogneated means. Only bad philosophers do that. OK I won't argue the point, but that is exactly what happens whenever the subject of free will comes up on this list. And if only bad philosophers do that then, well,... I will leave it as a exercise to the reader to form a conclusion from that fact. 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/d/optout.
Re: Pluto bounces back!
Telmo: I am a multilinguist (similar to you I suppose) and consider the word 'democracy' as the rule Cratos of DEMOS. the totality of people. You (and probably others, too) mean It as a practical political format based on expression of desire by MANY (majority - called) 'voters'. Although it sounds commendable, it also is an oxymoron: not T W O people want the same (interest, policy, advantage, style and 1000 more, if you wish) so the 'voting' (hoax) is a compromise about those lies of the candidates: which are LESS controversial compromise - as formulated during the campaign. (It has little impact on the real activities an elected politician will abide by indeed). One thing is for sure: a MAJORITY vote implies a subdued MINORITY as a rule (in the US lately arond close to half and half). Furthermore I see no so callable democracy neither in authoritarian (religious, fascistic) systems, nor in extreme 'populist' attempts, like the Marxist-base, communist, or socialist (called in these parts: liberal) systems. The CAPITA:ISTIC (evolved slavery?) variations are aristocratic/feudal at best, if not aristocratic/fascistic, ie. plutocratic. (I call it Global Economic Feudalism). One more request: could we mark this discussion AWAY from a bouncing back Pluto? Regards John Mikes On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 9:41 AM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 7:47 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 12 Jun 2014, at 13:39, Telmo Menezes wrote: The inconceivable freedom is in your heart, but give time to time, You are right and I'll shut up now :) Please don't shut up! As long as we stay polite the fun is in the conversation, ... in the detours sometimes. My main motivation for shutting up here is that I fully agree, but sometimes forget, that freedom is 1p. I do feel bad for going off-topic. I think that you and others, who contribute a lot to the main topic of this mailing list, deserve more leeway than me in going off-topic. So since you're asking, I feel comfortable with arguing a bit more. (I was being sarcastic when I said the politician misspeak. I was referring to the sort of doublespeak and euphemisms they employ. Of course they lie.) The reason why I suspect that democracy is not stable, is that it might always degrade to a Keynesian beauty contest. Modern democracy originated from enlightenment ideals, of raising human potential -- raising the average. The trouble is that, the best strategy to win elections is to pander to the average. A political movement that attempts to raise the average will lose to the Keynesian beauty contest players in the long term. So I am arguing that democracy contains in itself the evolutionary pressure that generates its own demise. I hope I'm missing something. Best, Telmo. Thanks I thank you, Bruno it is not that easy when we are two, saying nothing about three and more. -- 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Pluto bounces back!
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 7:02 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 13 Jun 2014, at 15:41, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 7:47 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 12 Jun 2014, at 13:39, Telmo Menezes wrote: The inconceivable freedom is in your heart, but give time to time, You are right and I'll shut up now :) Please don't shut up! As long as we stay polite the fun is in the conversation, ... in the detours sometimes. My main motivation for shutting up here is that I fully agree, but sometimes forget, that freedom is 1p. I do feel bad for going off-topic. I think that you and others, who contribute a lot to the main topic of this mailing list, deserve more leeway than me in going off-topic. So since you're asking, I feel comfortable with arguing a bit more. (I was being sarcastic when I said the politician misspeak. I was referring to the sort of doublespeak and euphemisms they employ. Of course they lie.) The reason why I suspect that democracy is not stable, is that it might always degrade to a Keynesian beauty contest. Modern democracy originated from enlightenment ideals, of raising human potential -- raising the average. The trouble is that, the best strategy to win elections is to pander to the average. A political movement that attempts to raise the average will lose to the Keynesian beauty contest players in the long term. So I am arguing that democracy contains in itself the evolutionary pressure that generates its own demise. I hope I'm missing something. Democracies are not stable, like all living beings are not stable, and somehow they always generate their own demises. But we make children and dialogs, and we can hope, and work for, that the children will not commit our mistakes. Ok, but my fear is the opposite: that democracies stabilise too early and in a way that removes choice (because the available choices converge due to the beauty contest). I see democracy as the zero stage of democracy, Only a logician would say something like this :) and it is well capable of making us see the omega stars, but like a rocket, it is unstable, and it can crash ,just after starting, ... so well, we build a new rocket and try again, hoping we fix the preceding mistake, a bit like in the crash investigation series. Ok, but then I start to suspect that our disagreement is on terminology. I think you have a broader definition of democracy than me. No reason to fear the average, as the average cultivated man like the differences and can respect different life styles. My fear is not of the average person but of the averaging of available choices and the subsequent deadlock that this can introduce on any further progress. In a non-democracy you get mafias all the time, in democracy you get mafia only when the democracy is sick. Democracies are young on this planet, you just miss again the time factor. Fair enough. Of course it is our work and responsibility to denounce the injustice, but today the net is useful for that. Let us keep it that way! Completely agree. Telmo. Bruno Best, Telmo. Thanks I thank you, Bruno it is not that easy when we are two, saying nothing about three and more. -- 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/d/optout. 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout. 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
RE: Pluto bounces back!
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2014 10:06 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Pluto bounces back! Yes, cycles absolutely can be broken, last things first, but first, people have to see in themselves that something is wrong. This, we must conclude is fairly, rare. The kind of people I am referring to, are the kind of people, that over your dead body, get to heaven in a little green boat, as the kiddie ditty went. On top of this we have unmedicated, and undermedicated, people with deep personality disorders. The Hatfield-McCoy thing when applied elsewhere in the world lack the cultural background. Also, there's no reward to stopping a bad habit, and there's no sufficient incentive to starting good ones. With the mental problem aspect there is something we can do, which is medication and therapy. With cultural-religious driven attacks, this is more complicated. But first, one must have the will and desire to radically change things, on the ground. The ruling elites, have no great incentive to do things which halt what is going on, nor, is there a great enough punishment, if they are doing political malpractice. Thus, the world rolls on as it has. It seems to me that you are ignoring a massive incentive to violence arising from the utter fragmentation of all social structures resulting from an unending state of war, imposed on the suffering goat herders you seem to enjoy demonizing in the most colorful language. Afghanistan - which I have lived in before the Russians - has suffered war imposed on it by the great powers (of the era) since the British Raj. It is easy to blame these victims of a forty year state of war - counting from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; it is a little bit harder to understand the degree to which their lives have become shattered by war. Maybe because it is uncomfortable to admit our national complicity in the deaths of so many goat and sheep herders. Observe the insanity unleashed now in Syria (in which we are again heavily involved) the monsters on the loose over there and in the Sunni areas of Iraq - who do you think is backing and funding them (even if through Saudi etc. proxies). No doubt monsters are created in war. But more war merely begets more monsters in an endless and ultimately futile cycle of blood spilling blood. Have you ever lived in a war zone? I have. I have witnessed the horror of modern war (as a young teenager); I have looked into empty soul dead eyes of profoundly traumatized people. have you ever had such experiences? Those who have truly experienced war tend not to be so enthusiastic about violence as a means to solving problems, unless they are psychopaths who enjoy it that is. Chris You assume people do violence for no reason other than that they are vastly different (whatever that really means). This is a faulty assumption -- IMO. People do violence, in almost every case because violence was done to them. Violence begets violence... it is a self-perpetuating cycle; a Hatfield and McCoy wheel that goes endlessly around greased by the bloodshed and carefully nurtured hatred of a really good feud. (and the Hatfield and McCoy feud is the stuff of legend in the US at least) It is a very rare event that anyone visits terrible deadly violence upon others out of the blue; it is either driven by a criminal profit motive or for blood revenge because of some grievous perceived or actual injury that violence occurs in real life. I am also a little curious what you mean by vastly different. Are other folk not like you? Is their DNA different? Do their brains work differently? Or could it be that their own tribal call to violence mirrors your own (apparent call for violence to be visited upon these hypothetical others)? If we stopped feeding into it maybe there would be less of this bad shit, making a bloody mess of the peaceful enjoyment of the many diverse pleasures of life and the exquisite sensation of being. The default is for cycles to keep rolling, but they can be broken. Chris -Original Message- From: 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Thu, Jun 12, 2014 1:43 am Subject: RE: Pluto bounces back! You assume people do violence for no reason other than that they are vastly different (whatever that really means). This is a faulty assumption -- IMO. People do violence, in almost every case because violence was done to them. Violence begets violence... it is a self-perpetuating cycle; a Hatfield and McCoy wheel that goes endlessly around greased by the bloodshed and carefully nurtured hatred of a really good feud. (and the Hatfield and McCoy feud is the stuff of legend in the US at least) It is a very rare event that anyone visits terrible deadly violence upon others out of the blue; it is either driven by a criminal profit motive or
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 6/13/2014 8:55 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 13 June 2014 03:52, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I think you are assuming the point in question, i.e. that all the physical interactions of brains with the painting and the rest of the world are irrelevant and that the physical description of the painting is *just* the pigment on the canvas. You take all that other interaction, which also has both physical and psychological description and leave it out and then you say the physical description leaves out something essential. That seems to imply that you believe philosophical zombies are possible? No, I think it just means that I pushed this particular metaphor beyond its breaking point. You are, of course, correct to say that an adequate physical description must include the relevant context. And I agree that what is relevant in context may be moot. However, my basic point was that, under physicalism, the ultimate goal is to be able to give an exhaustive, contextualised account of a given system exclusively in terms of its *physical relations*. And this is the case whether or not we wish to distinguish one descriptive level as ontological and another as epistemological. In the final analysis it's all - ex hypothesi - physics. We seem to have agreed that physicalism and computationalism rely on different assumptions about what one might call the hierarchy of derivation. So, under physicalism, both computation and mind are assumed to derive from (in the sense of being alternative descriptions of) some ultimately basic formulation of matter (to whatever depths that might have to descend). Under computationalism, by contrast, both matter and mind are assumed to derive from some ultimately basic formulation of computation. How is that different from physicalism? Computation is 3p and I see no other way to define physical except that which we have intersubjective agreement about. That's my point about physical and matter just being placeholder names for ur-stuff, and computation is another one. There is 1p stuff that we can't share. You keep insisting that physics explain *everything*, implying that something is left out but not saying what it is. I think that's because it can't be given a positive definition and can't be part of a shared explanation of the world. Once you can explain everything 3p in terms of whatever name you give to ur-stuff, I think you're done. The crucial dissimilarity is then that mind is not appealed to, And what is mind except the unsharable part. under physicalism, in accounting for the origin of matter (which is basic). This makes it coherent, at least in principle, to ask for an exhaustive physical accounting of any given state of affairs. In the final analysis *everything* must be reducible, by assumption, to one or another description of some basic set of underlying physical relations. Under computationalism, by contrast, the epistemological logic is absolutely central in differentiating the lawful appearances of matter from the exhaustive redundancy of the computational base. Hence on these assumptions, even in principle, no state of affairs above the level of the basic ontology could ever be exhaustively accounted for by any catalogue of descriptions, however sophisticated or multi-levelled, of its merely physical dispositions, absent the selective logic of its epistemology. ?? Too dense for me. I think logic can be accounted for in 3p and can be observed in brains, as in computers. Brent David -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Pluto bounces back!
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 8:26 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/13/2014 6:41 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 7:47 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 12 Jun 2014, at 13:39, Telmo Menezes wrote: The inconceivable freedom is in your heart, but give time to time, You are right and I'll shut up now :) Please don't shut up! As long as we stay polite the fun is in the conversation, ... in the detours sometimes. My main motivation for shutting up here is that I fully agree, but sometimes forget, that freedom is 1p. I do feel bad for going off-topic. I think that you and others, who contribute a lot to the main topic of this mailing list, deserve more leeway than me in going off-topic. So since you're asking, I feel comfortable with arguing a bit more. (I was being sarcastic when I said the politician misspeak. I was referring to the sort of doublespeak and euphemisms they employ. Of course they lie.) The reason why I suspect that democracy is not stable, is that it might always degrade to a Keynesian beauty contest. Modern democracy originated from enlightenment ideals, of raising human potential -- raising the average. The trouble is that, the best strategy to win elections is to pander to the average. A political movement that attempts to raise the average will lose to the Keynesian beauty contest players in the long term. So I am arguing that democracy contains in itself the evolutionary pressure that generates its own demise. I hope I'm missing something. I think what you're missing is that the voters idea of beauty is malleable and given enough money can be maninpulated. And when it takes a lot of money to win elected office the elected officers are likely to be indebted to very rich people. You seem to worry that democracy is unstable against populism, but it may also be unstable against plutocracy. I worry about both, and tend to think that they are two aspects of the same thing. Take the rise of fascism in XX century Europe. In Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal and other countries fascist republics with the superficial appearance of democracies where introduced by populism, and this power was used to maintain corporatism, which ultimately placed the means of production in the hands of the usual few rich families. So I would argue that populism and plutocracy are synergistic in corrupting democracies. Worryingly, the UE is showing signs of vulnerability to populism once again... Telmo. 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Selecting your future branch
On 6/13/2014 9:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Free-will or will are high level cognitive ability of machine having enough introspective ability. But not to much! :-) 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/d/optout.
Re: Selecting your future branch
On 6/13/2014 9:23 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Jun 2014, at 01:00, meekerdb wrote: On 6/12/2014 6:33 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Actually Grim and another guy studied version of Gödel and Löb theorem in fuzzy logic (meaning that they use the closed interval [0, 1] has set of truth values. They illustrate that the truth values of most fixed points in self-reference logic describe chaotic trajectories (in the set of truth value). I don't understand what they a fixed points of, if not truth value? In the (classical) self-reference logic, they are sentences, and they are fixed point in the sense of being a solution of a self-reference. The self-reference x - ~[]x has solution the sentence f (beweisbar(0=1)). (Gödel 1931) The self-reference x - []x has solution the sentence t (or 0=0) (Löb 1955) The self-reference x - []~x has solution the sentence []f (beweisbar(0=0)) (Jeroslow, Smullyan) The self-reference x - ~[]~x has solution the sentence f (or 0=1). (Gödel) But in fuzzy logic, some of those fixed points are not fixed, and moves in the truth set in a chaotic way, with a variety of attractors. Ok, so it's some chaotic attractor that is fixed, not a point. I understood a fixed point to be the the value of f(x) where x=f(x) when the value exists in the sense of convergence in the limit of iterating f. 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 6/13/2014 9:30 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 13 Jun 2014, at 01:29, meekerdb wrote: On 6/12/2014 9:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Further more, I'm not even sure that the reductionist program of looking for what's most fundamental (in a TOE) and reifying it is the right way to look at things. It leads to making strings or numbers, which we never experience, real and everything we experience (on which we base or theories) illusory. I think this called the error of the misplaced concrete. In that case we are just no machine and should never accept an artificial brain (or UDA is invalid of course). That doesn't follow. The doctor can still make a prosthetic brain. Then you have to assume matter, and some magical non Turing emulable essential property, like its real existence to get consciousness (and prevent it in the arithmetical reality). that is akin to non-comp. That's confusing (computation theory of mind)-(doctor can make artificial brain) with (doctor can make artificial brain)-(computational theory of mind). Well, I was assuming you intended the guy to survive with the prosthetic brain. We have by definition: comp theory of mind - doctor can make (in principle) a successful artificial brain. But I think you equivocate on comp theory of mind. Your eight step argument is trying to get from (doctor can make an artificial brain) to (comp theory of mind); so it's circular to assume it by definition unless you mean two different things by comp theory of mind depending on which way the - or - goes. 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On 6/13/2014 9:53 AM, John Clark wrote: That's a classic example of the sore loser syndrome, those humans with their deep human insights will get clobbered by the computer in just a few moves. And I don't want to hear about how that doesn't count because of blah blah and all the machine is really doing is blah and blah, because at the end of the day the machine won and the human lost. It may be true that the computer solved the chess problem differently than the human did, but given that the human lost it's rather silly to say that the human way was better. And interestingly neither the human nor the computer can actually say how they did it. 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 13 June 2014 20:44, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: under physicalism, in accounting for the origin of matter (which is basic). This makes it coherent, at least in principle, to ask for an exhaustive physical accounting of any given state of affairs. In the final analysis *everything* must be reducible, by assumption, to one or another description of some basic set of underlying physical relations. Under computationalism, by contrast, the epistemological logic is absolutely central in differentiating the lawful appearances of matter from the exhaustive redundancy of the computational base. Hence on these assumptions, even in principle, no state of affairs above the level of the basic ontology could ever be exhaustively accounted for by any catalogue of descriptions, however sophisticated or multi-levelled, of its merely physical dispositions, absent the selective logic of its epistemology. ?? Too dense for me. I think logic can be accounted for in 3p and can be observed in brains, as in computers. I'm sorry if it's hard to follow my drift, but I'm also a little flummoxed that we're still flogging this particular horse. Why is such a fundamental distinction between physicalism and computationalism still so contentious after all the to-ing and fro-ing on this very point on this list over the years? We are not debating the correctness of either of the theories under discussion, but rather the distinctively different role that is played by their various conceptual elements. To summarise, then: physicalism is the hypothesis that an exhaustively reduced account of any state of affairs whatsoever can, in principle, be rendered by reference to a particular, restricted class of fundamental entities and relations. Given this scope, it must be true, ex hypothesi, that any and all higher-order derivatives, for example computational or neurological states, are re-descriptions (known or unknown) of the basic entities and relations and hence always fully reducible to them. Consequently such higher-order concepts, though explanatorily indispensible, are ontologically disposable; IOW, it's the basic physics that, by assumption, is doing all the work. By contrast, computationalism, as formulated in the UDA, leads to the hypothesis of an arithmetical ontology resulting in a vastly redundant computational infinity. This being the case, there is a dependency from the outset on a fundamental selective principle in order to justify the appearance of a lawlike observational physics; IOW before it can advance to the stage that physicalism has already assumed at the outset. That selective principle is a universal observational psychology, based on the universal digital machine, whose primary role is to justify the singularisation of a particular, lawlike physics that comports with observation. It should be clear, therefore, that the psychology of observation is not itself reducible to basic physics in this scheme of things. That would be an egregious confusion of levels. Moreover, it is not straightforwardly reducible to the underlying arithmetical entities and relations, because the selective principle in question *depends on complex, computationally-instantiated epistemological states and their relation to modes of arithmetical truth. Absent those states and modes, there would be no physics, no observer and nothing to observe. Consequently, neither computation, nor the epistemological states it emulates, are dispensable (i.e. fully reducible) in this schema. David -- 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 6/13/2014 2:22 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 13 June 2014 20:44, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: under physicalism, in accounting for the origin of matter (which is basic). This makes it coherent, at least in principle, to ask for an exhaustive physical accounting of any given state of affairs. In the final analysis *everything* must be reducible, by assumption, to one or another description of some basic set of underlying physical relations. Under computationalism, by contrast, the epistemological logic is absolutely central in differentiating the lawful appearances of matter from the exhaustive redundancy of the computational base. Hence on these assumptions, even in principle, no state of affairs above the level of the basic ontology could ever be exhaustively accounted for by any catalogue of descriptions, however sophisticated or multi-levelled, of its merely physical dispositions, absent the selective logic of its epistemology. ?? Too dense for me. I think logic can be accounted for in 3p and can be observed in brains, as in computers. I'm sorry if it's hard to follow my drift, but I'm also a little flummoxed that we're still flogging this particular horse. Why is such a fundamental distinction between physicalism and computationalism still so contentious after all the to-ing and fro-ing on this very point on this list over the years? We are not debating the correctness of either of the theories under discussion, but rather the distinctively different role that is played by their various conceptual elements. To summarise, then: physicalism is the hypothesis that an exhaustively reduced account of any state of affairs whatsoever can, in principle, be rendered by reference to a particular, restricted class of fundamental entities and relations. So those fundamental entities can be numbers and the relations can be functions in arithmetic? Given this scope, it must be true, ex hypothesi, that any and all higher-order derivatives, for example computational or neurological states, are re-descriptions (known or unknown) of the basic entities and relations and hence always fully reducible to them. Consequently such higher-order concepts, though explanatorily indispensible, are ontologically disposable; IOW, it's the basic physics that, by assumption, is doing all the work. I see nothing in your explication that really defines or distinguishes physicalism from any other 'ism that proposes to explain everything in terms of some fundamental entities. I tried to give a definition that physical meant sharable in an operational sense. Did you reject that definition? In the above you seem to just assume that we know what is meant by physicalism and physics and we just know it's inadequate. By contrast, computationalism, as formulated in the UDA, leads to the hypothesis of an arithmetical ontology resulting in a vastly redundant computational infinity. And this is different from string theory because string theory assumes real numbers which makes it bigger than a computational infinity? This being the case, there is a dependency from the outset on a fundamental selective principle Which is? in order to justify the appearance of a lawlike observational physics The justification of lawlike observation in physics is a topic of research, mostly centered around hopes that decoherence theory will explain the appearance of the classical world, which is necessary for observation. ; IOW before it can advance to the stage that physicalism has already assumed at the outset. That selective principle is a universal observational psychology, based on the universal digital machine, whose primary role is to justify the singularisation of a particular, lawlike physics that comports with observation. You use singularisation a lot. I don't know what it means. I don't think said selective principle exists. It just something Bruno says must exist for his theory to work. So he assumes is a posteriori instead of a priori. It should be clear, therefore, that the psychology of observation is not itself reducible to basic physics in this scheme of things. That would be an egregious confusion of levels. Only because you have assumed (which was the question) that psychology cannot be realized on the level of physics. Suppose (as I think happens in one of Smullyan's stories) you are connected to a brain scanner and this scanner can then predict what you will do, including such thoughts as you remember, over the next 30sec or some short period over which you external experience is predictable. Would this imply that your psychology was reducible to physics? I expect you will object that this isn't *everything* and that something is missed - but what is it and is it something that can be shared in any conceivable theory or is it simply ineffable 1p? Moreover, it is not straightforwardly reducible to the underlying arithmetical entities and relations, because the selective
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On Thursday, June 12, 2014 8:20:16 PM UTC+1, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 4:22 PM, ghi...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: If the TT has been watered down, then the first question for me would be doesn't this logically pre-assume a set of explicit standards existed in the first place? My answer is no. So am I a human or a computer? Well the engagement's OFF if you're human. It's off anyway because I'm not really a woman. Sorry...wrong list. k I'd be interested in the highlights of why you think no. I obviously am aware of plenty of literal reading instances of 'no'. But they are all cases of being 'beside' the point. Not everything is suitable to be left generic. A detailed test won't in the tray of what is. It seems to me one doesn't have to envisage very far down the path of what designing a proper test would entail to fairly sure the task itself would be extremely hard, and not necessarily possible absent some major theoretical work. Which makes the conception unviable probably for at least preceding 40 years, since much easier, more objective and arguably more to the heart of the matter tests are plausibly available (also via some theory) from hardware/software signals So if the way you mean 'no' is along the lines of someone had a big vision and so and so failed to realize the 'spirit'. A.no. Not in my view, because failing to do the work on the detail pretty much guarantees that outcome, or makes it vastly more likely. . Has there ever been a robust set of standards? No, except that whatever procedure you use to judge the level of intelligence of your fellow Human Beings it is only fair that you use the same procedure when judging machines. I admit this is imperfect, humans can turn out to be smarter or dumber than originally thought, but it's the only tool we have for judging fthings. If the judge is a idiot then the Turing Test doesn't work very well, or if the subject is a genius but pretending to be a idiot you well also probably end up making the wrong judgement but such is life, you do the best you can with the tools at hand. I'd certain concur these would be some major issues. By the way, for a long time machines have been able to beautifully emulate the behavior of two particular types of humans, those in a coma and those that are dead. Didn't know that, but was reminded something that was said about Game Theory...it only predicted statisticians and psychopaths. ~Don't know if it's true, but if it was, why the bloody hell was that a reason to stop using it or restrict its useful domain of usage? That was a rhetorical question you psycho. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 13 June 2014 23:01, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: and their relation to modes of arithmetical truth. Absent those states and modes, there would be no physics, no observer and nothing to observe. At least that's Bruno's theory. Well yes, it was Bruno's theory that I originally commented on. I said that it had originally troubled me that it seemed as vulnerable to the reduction/elimination impasse as any other ism based on purportedly fundamental entities but, on further reflection, I thought it might be able to escape that impasse, essentially for the reasons encapsulated in my remark above. It seemed to me that this was, at least, an important conceptual distinction. Wasn't that what we were discussing? Anyway, I think I've said my piece for now. I'm sure there will be other occasions ;-) David -- 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 14 June 2014 10:01, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/13/2014 2:22 PM, David Nyman wrote: On 13 June 2014 20:44, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: under physicalism, in accounting for the origin of matter (which is basic). This makes it coherent, at least in principle, to ask for an exhaustive physical accounting of any given state of affairs. In the final analysis *everything* must be reducible, by assumption, to one or another description of some basic set of underlying physical relations. Under computationalism, by contrast, the epistemological logic is absolutely central in differentiating the lawful appearances of matter from the exhaustive redundancy of the computational base. Hence on these assumptions, even in principle, no state of affairs above the level of the basic ontology could ever be exhaustively accounted for by any catalogue of descriptions, however sophisticated or multi-levelled, of its merely physical dispositions, absent the selective logic of its epistemology. ?? Too dense for me. I think logic can be accounted for in 3p and can be observed in brains, as in computers. I'm sorry if it's hard to follow my drift, but I'm also a little flummoxed that we're still flogging this particular horse. Why is such a fundamental distinction between physicalism and computationalism still so contentious after all the to-ing and fro-ing on this very point on this list over the years? We are not debating the correctness of either of the theories under discussion, but rather the distinctively different role that is played by their various conceptual elements. To summarise, then: physicalism is the hypothesis that an exhaustively reduced account of any state of affairs whatsoever can, in principle, be rendered by reference to a particular, restricted class of fundamental entities and relations. So those fundamental entities can be numbers and the relations can be functions in arithmetic? It appears so, so far, from observation of how physical theories that work have been constructed. E.g. Physical theory with words: GOD DID IT Physical theory with numbers and so on: -- 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 14 June 2014 10:01, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/13/2014 2:22 PM, David Nyman wrote: Moreover, it is not straightforwardly reducible to the underlying arithmetical entities and relations, because the selective principle in question *depends on complex, computationally-instantiated epistemological states What's an epistemological state of an arithmetical entity? Sounds like an egregious confusion of levels to me. :-) Well, our knowledge is, if comp is correct! :-) -- 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 14 June 2014 10:01, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Consequently, neither computation, nor the epistemological states it emulates, are dispensable (i.e. fully reducible) in this schema. It's not clear what emulates means. I think Bruno proposes that arithmetical computation actually instantiates modal states like belief. But I think that may be stretching the meaning of belief. If belief is defined in terms of propensity to act certain ways in certain contexts, then it seems it can be physically instantiated too. Yes, as a propensity to act in a certain way, a belief is doubtless a complex data structure. (But if comp is correct it's a finite one.) Of course saying physically instantiated is assuming what you're trying to prove. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 6/13/2014 4:48 PM, LizR wrote: On 14 June 2014 10:01, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Consequently, neither computation, nor the epistemological states it emulates, are dispensable (i.e. fully reducible) in this schema. It's not clear what emulates means. I think Bruno proposes that arithmetical computation actually instantiates modal states like belief. But I think that may be stretching the meaning of belief. If belief is defined in terms of propensity to act certain ways in certain contexts, then it seems it can be physically instantiated too. Yes, as a propensity to act in a certain way, a belief is doubtless a complex data structure. (But if comp is correct it's a finite one.) Of course saying physically instantiated is assuming what you're trying to prove. Proof is for logicians and mathematicians who come armed with assumptions they call axioms. Physically instantiated isn't even a sentence, so you must be referring to If belief is defined in terms of propensity to act certain ways in certain contexts, then it seems it can be physically instantiated too. I don't think that's just an assumption, it's an inductive inference given some ostensive definitions. 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 14 June 2014 12:26, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/13/2014 4:48 PM, LizR wrote: On 14 June 2014 10:01, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Consequently, neither computation, nor the epistemological states it emulates, are dispensable (i.e. fully reducible) in this schema. It's not clear what emulates means. I think Bruno proposes that arithmetical computation actually instantiates modal states like belief. But I think that may be stretching the meaning of belief. If belief is defined in terms of propensity to act certain ways in certain contexts, then it seems it can be physically instantiated too. Yes, as a propensity to act in a certain way, a belief is doubtless a complex data structure. (But if comp is correct it's a finite one.) Of course saying physically instantiated is assuming what you're trying to prove. Proof is for logicians and mathematicians who come armed with assumptions they call axioms. That's right, which is why maths and logic appear to be the only things we can know about for sure. The question is whether that has any ontological implications. I don't know of any way to prove that it does or doesn't, which is why I remain agnostic. Physically instantiated isn't even a sentence, so you must be referring to If belief is defined in terms of propensity to act certain ways in certain contexts, then it seems it can be physically instantiated too. I don't think that's just an assumption, it's an inductive inference given some ostensive definitions. Do you want me to wear my fingers out? Obviously I'm referring to the quote immediately above, that's why it's there! Anyway, if that's an inductive inference it appears to be one that assumes the materialist position, unless you are being explicitly agnostic on what physically means (but most people who use it like that aren't, so I'd expect you to say so). The materialist position is the starting point of comp, so it will trip over the reversal unless you can point out where Bruno's gone wrong. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On 13 June 2014 20:44, Pierz pier...@gmail.com wrote: Yes. But I have to wonder what we're doing wrong, because any sophisticated piece of modern software such as a modern OS or even this humble mailing list/forum software we are using is already hugely mind-bogglingly incremental. It has evolved over decades of incremental improvement involving thousands upon thousands of workers building up layers of increasing abstraction from the unfriendly silicon goings-on down below. And yet Siri, far from being a virtual Scarlett Johannson, is still pretty much dumb as dog-shit (though she has some neat bits of crystallised intelligence built in. Inspired by She I asked her what she was wearing, and she said, I can't tell you but it doesn't come off.). Well, I'm still agnostic on comp, so I don't have to decide whether this conspicuous failure represents evidence against computationalism. I do however consider the bullish predictions of the likes of Deutsch (and even our own dear Bruno) that we shall be uploading our brains or something by the end of the century or sooner to be deluded. Deutsch wrote once (BoI?) that the computational power required for human intelligence is already present in a modern laptop; we just haven't had the programming breakthrough yet. I think that is preposterous and can hardly credit he actually believes it. This looks like a more realistic estimate... http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-second-of-human-brain-activity-takes-82944-processors -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On 13 June 2014 23:35, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 01:44:25AM -0700, Pierz wrote: Yes. But I have to wonder what we're doing wrong, because any sophisticated piece of modern software such as a modern OS or even this humble mailing list/forum software we are using is already hugely mind-bogglingly incremental. It has evolved over decades of incremental improvement involving thousands upon thousands of workers building up layers of increasing abstraction from the unfriendly silicon goings-on down below. And yet Siri, far from being a virtual Scarlett Johannson, is still pretty much dumb as dog-shit (though she has some neat bits of crystallised intelligence built in. Inspired by She I asked her what she was wearing, and she said, I can't tell you but it doesn't come off.). Well, I'm still agnostic on comp, so I don't have to decide whether this conspicuous failure represents evidence against computationalism. I do however consider the bullish predictions of the likes of Deutsch (and even our own dear Bruno) that we shall be uploading our brains or something by the end of the century or sooner to be deluded. Deutsch wrote once (BoI?) that the computational power required for human intelligence is already present in a modern laptop; we just haven't had the programming breakthrough yet. I think that is preposterous and can hardly credit he actually believes it. It overstates the facts somewhat - a modern laptop is probably still about 3 orders of magnitude less powerful than a human brain, but with Moore's law, that gap will be closed in about 15 years. However, it is also true that having a 1000-fold more powerful computer does not get you human intelligence, so the programming breakthrough is still required. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On 13 June 2014 23:35, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 01:44:25AM -0700, Pierz wrote: Yes. But I have to wonder what we're doing wrong, because any sophisticated piece of modern software such as a modern OS or even this humble mailing list/forum software we are using is already hugely mind-bogglingly incremental. It has evolved over decades of incremental improvement involving thousands upon thousands of workers building up layers of increasing abstraction from the unfriendly silicon goings-on down below. And yet Siri, far from being a virtual Scarlett Johannson, is still pretty much dumb as dog-shit (though she has some neat bits of crystallised intelligence built in. Inspired by She I asked her what she was wearing, and she said, I can't tell you but it doesn't come off.). Well, I'm still agnostic on comp, so I don't have to decide whether this conspicuous failure represents evidence against computationalism. I do however consider the bullish predictions of the likes of Deutsch (and even our own dear Bruno) that we shall be uploading our brains or something by the end of the century or sooner to be deluded. Deutsch wrote once (BoI?) that the computational power required for human intelligence is already present in a modern laptop; we just haven't had the programming breakthrough yet. I think that is preposterous and can hardly credit he actually believes it. It overstates the facts somewhat - a modern laptop is probably still about 3 orders of magnitude less powerful than a human brain, but with Moore's law, that gap will be closed in about 15 years. Moore's law appears to have stopped working about 10 years ago, going by a comparison of modern home computers with old ones. That is, the processors haven't increased much in speed, but they have gained more cores, i.e. they've been parallelised, and more memory and more storage. But the density of the components on the chips hasn't increased by the predicted amount (or so I'm told). However, it is also true that having a 1000-fold more powerful computer does not get you human intelligence, so the programming breakthrough is still required. Yes, you have to know how people do it. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 01:52:01PM +1200, LizR wrote: Moore's law appears to have stopped working about 10 years ago, going by a comparison of modern home computers with old ones. That is, the processors haven't increased much in speed, but they have gained more cores, i.e. they've been parallelised, and more memory and more storage. But the density of the components on the chips hasn't increased by the predicted amount (or so I'm told). Moore's law was never about GHz. It was originally about number of transistors per dollar, and with greater transistor counts per CPU, that has been turned into bigger caches and multiple cores (with 50+ core chips now on the market). But of real interest is processing power per dollar as a function of time. This has been exponential since the start of the computing age (perhaps even with a reduction of the time constant sometime in the '90s), and shows no sign of slowing down. The rate of 1 order of magnitude of performance improvement at a given price point every 5 years has held throughout my professional life. In my career, the following purchases were made*: 1992 CM5, 4GFlops $1.5M 1996 SGI Power Challenge, 8GFlops, $800K 2000 SGI Origin 56 GFlops $1.2M 2004 Dell cluster, 1TF, $500K 2013 HP GPU cluster, 300TF, $500K * subject to a certain amount uncertainty due to my recall of the facts Attached is an image of the performance per dollar plotted as a function of year. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
Oh, OK, obviously I was misinformed. I will smack Charles' bottom later. On 14 June 2014 14:27, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 01:52:01PM +1200, LizR wrote: Moore's law appears to have stopped working about 10 years ago, going by a comparison of modern home computers with old ones. That is, the processors haven't increased much in speed, but they have gained more cores, i.e. they've been parallelised, and more memory and more storage. But the density of the components on the chips hasn't increased by the predicted amount (or so I'm told). Moore's law was never about GHz. It was originally about number of transistors per dollar, and with greater transistor counts per CPU, that has been turned into bigger caches and multiple cores (with 50+ core chips now on the market). But of real interest is processing power per dollar as a function of time. This has been exponential since the start of the computing age (perhaps even with a reduction of the time constant sometime in the '90s), and shows no sign of slowing down. The rate of 1 order of magnitude of performance improvement at a given price point every 5 years has held throughout my professional life. In my career, the following purchases were made*: 1992 CM5, 4GFlops $1.5M 1996 SGI Power Challenge, 8GFlops, $800K 2000 SGI Origin 56 GFlops $1.2M 2004 Dell cluster, 1TF, $500K 2013 HP GPU cluster, 300TF, $500K * subject to a certain amount uncertainty due to my recall of the facts Attached is an image of the performance per dollar plotted as a function of year. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 02:22:56PM +1200, LizR wrote: Oh, OK, obviously I was misinformed. I will smack Charles' bottom later. On 14 June 2014 14:27, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 01:52:01PM +1200, LizR wrote: Moore's law appears to have stopped working about 10 years ago, going by a comparison of modern home computers with old ones. That is, the processors haven't increased much in speed, but they have gained more cores, i.e. they've been parallelised, and more memory and more storage. But the density of the components on the chips hasn't increased by the predicted amount (or so I'm told). Moore's law was never about GHz. It was originally about number of transistors per dollar, and with greater transistor counts per CPU, that has been turned into bigger caches and multiple cores (with 50+ core chips now on the market). But of real interest is processing power per dollar as a function of time. This has been exponential since the start of the computing age (perhaps even with a reduction of the time constant sometime in the '90s), and shows no sign of slowing down. The rate of 1 order of magnitude of performance improvement at a given price point every 5 years has held throughout my professional life. In my career, the following purchases were made*: 1992 CM5, 4GFlops $1.5M 1996 SGI Power Challenge, 8GFlops, $800K 2000 SGI Origin 56 GFlops $1.2M 2004 Dell cluster, 1TF, $500K 2013 HP GPU cluster, 300TF, $500K * subject to a certain amount uncertainty due to my recall of the facts Attached is an image of the performance per dollar plotted as a function of year. Incidently, the kink at 2000 was caused by the move from proprietry systems to commodity systems running Linux. I tried to make the 2000 purchase a Linux-based purchase, but was unable to convince my colleagues. If I'd been successful, the curve would have been a lot flatter! Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
We all have our little kinks :) On 14 June 2014 14:38, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 02:22:56PM +1200, LizR wrote: Oh, OK, obviously I was misinformed. I will smack Charles' bottom later. On 14 June 2014 14:27, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 01:52:01PM +1200, LizR wrote: Moore's law appears to have stopped working about 10 years ago, going by a comparison of modern home computers with old ones. That is, the processors haven't increased much in speed, but they have gained more cores, i.e. they've been parallelised, and more memory and more storage. But the density of the components on the chips hasn't increased by the predicted amount (or so I'm told). Moore's law was never about GHz. It was originally about number of transistors per dollar, and with greater transistor counts per CPU, that has been turned into bigger caches and multiple cores (with 50+ core chips now on the market). But of real interest is processing power per dollar as a function of time. This has been exponential since the start of the computing age (perhaps even with a reduction of the time constant sometime in the '90s), and shows no sign of slowing down. The rate of 1 order of magnitude of performance improvement at a given price point every 5 years has held throughout my professional life. In my career, the following purchases were made*: 1992 CM5, 4GFlops $1.5M 1996 SGI Power Challenge, 8GFlops, $800K 2000 SGI Origin 56 GFlops $1.2M 2004 Dell cluster, 1TF, $500K 2013 HP GPU cluster, 300TF, $500K * subject to a certain amount uncertainty due to my recall of the facts Attached is an image of the performance per dollar plotted as a function of year. Incidently, the kink at 2000 was caused by the move from proprietry systems to commodity systems running Linux. I tried to make the 2000 purchase a Linux-based purchase, but was unable to convince my colleagues. If I'd been successful, the curve would have been a lot flatter! Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: The Really Real Part of Reality
On 14 Jun 2014, at 1:20 am, ghib...@gmail.com wrote: when you never read anything I say (and have *never* responded directly explicitly to anything I say). I don't think you can get away with that. That reeks of something or other on the emotional level. I would say that people generally make the best effort to read and understand your posts many of which are highly detailed and yes, verbose. I actually find Bruno easier to understand than you on a plain english language level and you are the native English speaker. Now just wrap your head around that. I would like to understand what you are on about a whole lot better but am usually stonkered by your writing style. A good rule of thumb to adopt is to not write anything in a white heat of passion but to write the shortest possible sentences and use the minimal amount of words. Throw out all unnecessary adjectives. These are just personal value judgement-laden objects anyway and say far more about the writer than what the writer is trying to communicate. This is a plea for simplicity. If people don't respond In a way you might want, I am suggesting that they may be finding you a tad tedious. Having said that, I sincerely mean it when I say that I believe you have something important to say and would like to come to grips with it. Kim -- 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
On 6/13/2014 5:45 PM, LizR wrote: On 14 June 2014 12:26, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/13/2014 4:48 PM, LizR wrote: On 14 June 2014 10:01, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Consequently, neither computation, nor the epistemological states it emulates, are dispensable (i.e. fully reducible) in this schema. It's not clear what emulates means. I think Bruno proposes that arithmetical computation actually instantiates modal states like belief. But I think that may be stretching the meaning of belief. If belief is defined in terms of propensity to act certain ways in certain contexts, then it seems it can be physically instantiated too. Yes, as a propensity to act in a certain way, a belief is doubtless a complex data structure. (But if comp is correct it's a finite one.) Of course saying physically instantiated is assuming what you're trying to prove. Proof is for logicians and mathematicians who come armed with assumptions they call axioms. That's right, which is why maths and logic appear to be the only things we can know about for sure. The question is whether that has any ontological implications. I don't know of any way to prove that it does or doesn't, which is why I remain agnostic. Physically instantiated isn't even a sentence, so you must be referring to If belief is defined in terms of propensity to act certain ways in certain contexts, then it seems it can be physically instantiated too. I don't think that's just an assumption, it's an inductive inference given some ostensive definitions. Do you want me to wear my fingers out? Obviously I'm referring to the quote immediately above, that's why it's there! Anyway, if that's an inductive inference it appears to be one that assumes the materialist position, unless you are being explicitly agnostic on what physically means (but most people who use it like that aren't, so I'd expect you to say so). I thought I'd been pretty clear that it's ill defined, a point on which I agree with Bruno. I tried to define it in the exchange with David, but he seemed to reject my definition and just assumed everybody knows what it means. The materialist position is the starting point of comp, so it will trip over the reversal unless you can point out where Bruno's gone wrong. I wrote several paragraphs on why I don't find Bruno's arguments very persuasive. 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On 6/13/2014 6:52 PM, LizR wrote: On 13 June 2014 23:35, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au mailto:li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 01:44:25AM -0700, Pierz wrote: Yes. But I have to wonder what we're doing wrong, because any sophisticated piece of modern software such as a modern OS or even this humble mailing list/forum software we are using is already hugely mind-bogglingly incremental. It has evolved over decades of incremental improvement involving thousands upon thousands of workers building up layers of increasing abstraction from the unfriendly silicon goings-on down below. And yet Siri, far from being a virtual Scarlett Johannson, is still pretty much dumb as dog-shit (though she has some neat bits of crystallised intelligence built in. Inspired by She I asked her what she was wearing, and she said, I can't tell you but it doesn't come off.). Well, I'm still agnostic on comp, so I don't have to decide whether this conspicuous failure represents evidence against computationalism. I do however consider the bullish predictions of the likes of Deutsch (and even our own dear Bruno) that we shall be uploading our brains or something by the end of the century or sooner to be deluded. Deutsch wrote once (BoI?) that the computational power required for human intelligence is already present in a modern laptop; we just haven't had the programming breakthrough yet. I think that is preposterous and can hardly credit he actually believes it. It overstates the facts somewhat - a modern laptop is probably still about 3 orders of magnitude less powerful than a human brain, but with Moore's law, that gap will be closed in about 15 years. Moore's law appears to have stopped working about 10 years ago, going by a comparison of modern home computers with old ones. That is, the processors haven't increased much in speed, but they have gained more cores, i.e. they've been parallelised, and more memory and more storage. But the density of the components on the chips hasn't increased by the predicted amount (or so I'm told). I have a theory that no matter how fast they make the processors Microsoft will devise an operating system to slow them down. Brent The first time Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck will be when they build vacuum cleaners. --- Anon -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 08:41:42PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: On 6/13/2014 6:52 PM, LizR wrote: Moore's law appears to have stopped working about 10 years ago, going by a comparison of modern home computers with old ones. That is, the processors haven't increased much in speed, but they have gained more cores, i.e. they've been parallelised, and more memory and more storage. But the density of the components on the chips hasn't increased by the predicted amount (or so I'm told). I have a theory that no matter how fast they make the processors Microsoft will devise an operating system to slow them down. That was true for quite some time, but they do seem to have reversed that trend in the last couple of releases. Win 7 seems a little snappier than XP, and Win 8 is reportedly even more so (though I've never used it). Conversely, Linux appears to have become more bloated over the years, although not as dramatically as Windows did. Just saying - I happen to use Linux as my primary OS, and will quite possibly remain doing so for the rest of my life. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) -- 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/d/optout.
Re: Turing test passed? Another sucker born every minute
On 14 June 2014 15:41, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I have a theory that no matter how fast they make the processors Microsoft will devise an operating system to slow them down. Brent The first time Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck will be when they build vacuum cleaners. Teehee. -- 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/d/optout.
Re: TRONNIES - SPACE
OK looks like I will have to find more time to read the small print, i.e. all the posts on here, or give up trying. Well, unless you'd care to summarise the reasons you don't find Bruno's arguments very persuasive (On days with an R I could do with some support for my instinctive feeling that That can't be right! But I can't see why not...) On 14 June 2014 15:32, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/13/2014 5:45 PM, LizR wrote: On 14 June 2014 12:26, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 6/13/2014 4:48 PM, LizR wrote: On 14 June 2014 10:01, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Consequently, neither computation, nor the epistemological states it emulates, are dispensable (i.e. fully reducible) in this schema. It's not clear what emulates means. I think Bruno proposes that arithmetical computation actually instantiates modal states like belief. But I think that may be stretching the meaning of belief. If belief is defined in terms of propensity to act certain ways in certain contexts, then it seems it can be physically instantiated too. Yes, as a propensity to act in a certain way, a belief is doubtless a complex data structure. (But if comp is correct it's a finite one.) Of course saying physically instantiated is assuming what you're trying to prove. Proof is for logicians and mathematicians who come armed with assumptions they call axioms. That's right, which is why maths and logic appear to be the only things we can know about for sure. The question is whether that has any ontological implications. I don't know of any way to prove that it does or doesn't, which is why I remain agnostic. Physically instantiated isn't even a sentence, so you must be referring to If belief is defined in terms of propensity to act certain ways in certain contexts, then it seems it can be physically instantiated too. I don't think that's just an assumption, it's an inductive inference given some ostensive definitions. Do you want me to wear my fingers out? Obviously I'm referring to the quote immediately above, that's why it's there! Anyway, if that's an inductive inference it appears to be one that assumes the materialist position, unless you are being explicitly agnostic on what physically means (but most people who use it like that aren't, so I'd expect you to say so). I thought I'd been pretty clear that it's ill defined, a point on which I agree with Bruno. I tried to define it in the exchange with David, but he seemed to reject my definition and just assumed everybody knows what it means. The materialist position is the starting point of comp, so it will trip over the reversal unless you can point out where Bruno's gone wrong. I wrote several paragraphs on why I don't find Bruno's arguments very persuasive. 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/d/optout. -- 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/d/optout.
