Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
Dear MarkCC. Thank you for paying attention on my crackpottery article. I like your comment. Very like. ==. You say: Create a universe with no matter, a universe with different kinds of matter, a universe with 300 forces instead of the four that we see - and e and π won't change. =.. Now Euler's equation plays a role in quantum theory. In quantum theory there isn't constant firm quant particle. The Pi says that a point-particle or string-particle cannot be a quant particle. The Pi says that that quant particle can be a circle and it cannot be a perfect circle. If e and π belong to quant particle then these numbers can mutually change. Doesn't it mean that Pi ( a circle ) can be changed into sphere? Doesn't Euler's equationcosx + isinx in = e^ix can explain this transformation / fluctuation of quant particle ? You say: What things like e and π, and their relationship via Euler's equation tell us is that there's a fundamental relationship between numbers and shapes on a two-dimensional plane which does not and cannot really exist in the world we live in. =. But this 'a fundamental relationship between numbers and shapes on a two-dimensional plane' can really exist in two-dimensional vacuum. All the best. socratus. ==. On Mar 5, 9:57 pm, socra...@bezeqint.net socra...@bezeqint.net wrote: Euler's Equation Crackpottery Feb 18 2013 Published by MarkCC under Bad Math, Bad Physics One of my twitter followers sent me an interesting piece of crackpottery. I debated whether to do anything with it. The thing about crackpottery is that it really needs to have some content. Total incoherence isn't amusing. This bit is, frankly, right on the line. ==. Euler's Equation and the Reality of Nature. a) Euler's Equation as a mathematical reality. Euler's identity is the gold standard for mathematical beauty'. Euler's identity is the most famous formula in all mathematics. ' . . . this equation is the mathematical analogue of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa painting or Michelangelo's statue of David' 'It is God's equation', 'our jewel ', ' It is a mathematical icon'. . . . . etc. b) Euler's Equation as a physical reality. it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, . . . . .' ' Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence' ' Is Euler's Equation about fundamental matters?' 'It would be nice to understand Euler's Identity as a physical process using physics.' ' Is it possible to unite Euler's Identity with physics, quantum physics ?' My aim is to understand the reality of nature. Can Euler's equation explain me something about reality? To give the answer to this. question I need to bind Euler's equation with an object - particle. Can it be math- point or string- particle or triangle-particle? No, Euler's formula has quantity (pi) which says me that the particle must be only a circle . Now I want to understand the behavior of circle - particle and therefore I need to use spatial relativity and quantum theories. These two theories say me that the reason of circle - particle's movement is its own inner impulse (h) or (h*=h/2pi). a) Using its own inner impulse (h) circle - particle moves ( as a wheel) in a straight line with constant speed c = 1. We call such particle - 'photon'. From Earth - gravity point of view this speed is maximally . From Vacuum point of view this speed is minimally. In this movement quantum of light behave as a corpuscular (no charge). b) Using its own inner impulse / intrinsic angular momentum ( h* = h / 2pi ) circle - particle rotates around its axis. In such movement particle has charge, produce electric waves ( waves property of particle) and its speed ( frequency) is : c. 1. We call such particle - ' electron' and its energy is: E=h*f. In this way I can understand the reality of nature. ==. Best wishes. Israel Sadovnik Socratus. ==. Euler's equation says that . It's an amazingly profound equation. The way that it draws together fundamental concepts is beautiful and surprising. But it's not nearly as mysterious as our loonie-toon makes it out to be. The natural logarithm-base is deeply embedded in the structure of numbers, and we've known that, and we've known how it works for a long time. What Euler did was show the relationship between e and the fundamental rotation group of the complex numbers. There are a couple of ways of restating the definition of that make the meaning of that relationship clearer. For example: That's an alternative definition of what e is. If we use that, and we plug into it, we get: If you work out that limit, it's -1. Also, if you take values of N, and plot , , , and , ... on the complex plane, as N gets larger, the resulting curve gets closer and closer to a semicircle. An equivalent way of seeing it is that exponents of are rotations in the complex number plane. The reason that is because if you
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 15 Feb 2013, at 05:52, socra...@bezeqint.net wrote: The learned men confuse the mathematical tools with the physical reality and therefore we have math-physical fairy-tales. =. That happens too, and is of course even worst than confusing mathematical tools and the mathematical reality. Bruno On Feb 14, 5:39 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 14 Feb 2013, at 08:48, socra...@bezeqint.net wrote: Euler's Equation and the Reality of Nature. =. Mr. Dexter Sinister wrote: ‘ I understand Euler's Identity, and I know what it means, and I know how to prove it, there's nothing particularly mystical about it, it just demonstrates that exponential, trigonometric, and complex functions are related. Given what we know of mathematics it shouldn't surprise anyone that its various bits are connected. It would be much more surprising if they weren't, that would almost certainly mean something was badly wrong somewhere.’ Mr. Gary wrote: Mathematics is NOT science. Science is knowledge of the REAL world. Mathematics is an invention of the mind. This is of course false in the comp theory. It is also intuitively false for most mathematicians. It is usually asserted by people confusing the mathematical tools, that we invent indeed, and the mathematical reality, which is really a sequence of surprising facts, that we discover. The use of REAL world is dogmatic physicalism. It proposes as a fact what is a theological or metaphysical hypothesis, and this condemns any attempt to be rigorous on the subject. It is as bad as using God as a gap explanation. It is the same mistake. Bruno Many aspects of mathematics have found application in the real world, but there is no guarantee. Any correlation must meet the ultimate test: does it explain something about the real world? As an electrical engineer I used the generalized Euler's equation all the time in circuit analysis: exp(j*theta) = cos(theta) + j*sin(theta). So it works at that particular level in electricity. Does it work at other levels, too? Logic cannot prove it. It must be determined by experiment, not by philosophizing. .. Thinking about theirs posts I wrote brief article: Euler's Equation and Reality. =. a) Euler's Equation as a mathematical reality. Euler's identity is the gold standard for mathematical beauty'. Euler's identity is the most famous formula in all mathematics. ‘ . . . this equation is the mathematical analogue of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa painting or Michelangelo’s statue of David’ ‘It is God’s equation.’, ‘ It is a mathematical icon.’ . . . . etc. b) Euler's Equation as a physical reality. it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, . . . . .’ ‘ Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence’ ‘ Is Euler's Equation about fundamental matters?’ ‘It would be nice to understand Euler's Identity as a physical process using physics.‘ ‘ Is it possible to unite Euler's Identity with physics, quantum physics ?’ ==. My aim is to understand the reality of nature. Can Euler's equation explain me something about reality? To give the answer to this question I need to bind Euler's equation with an object - particle. Can it be math- point or string- particle or triangle-particle? No, Euler's formula has quantity (pi) which says me that the particle must be only a circle . Now I want to understand the behavior of circle - particle and therefore I need to use spatial relativity and quantum theories. These two theories say me that the reason of circle – particle’s movement is its own inner impulse (h) or (h*=h/2pi). a) Using its own inner impulse (h) circle - particle moves ( as a wheel) in a straight line with constant speed c = 1. We call such particle - ‘photon’. From Earth – gravity point of view this speed is maximally. From Vacuum point of view this speed is minimally. In this movement quantum of light behave as a corpuscular (no charge). b) Using its own inner impulse / intrinsic angular momentum ( h* = h / 2pi ) circle - particle rotates around its axis. In such movement particle has charge, produce electric waves ( waves property of particle) and its speed ( frequency) is : c1. We call such particle - ‘ electron’ and its energy is: E=h*f. In this way I (as a peasant ) can understand the reality of nature. ==. I reread my post. My God, that is a naïve peasant's explanation. It is absolutely not scientific, not professor's explanation. Would a learned man adopt such simple and naive explanation? Hmm, . . . problem. In any way, even Mr. Dexter Sinister and Mr. Gary wouldn't agree with me, I want to say them ' Thank you for emails and cooperation’ =. Best wishes. Israel Sadovnik Socratus. =. P.S. ' They would play a greater and greater role in mathematics – and then, with the advent of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century, in physics and engineering and any field that deals with cyclical
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
Intuitive Understanding Of Euler’s Formula http://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-understanding-of-eulers-formula/#comment-190704 =…. On Feb 14, 8:48 am, socra...@bezeqint.net socra...@bezeqint.net wrote: Euler's Equation and the Reality of Nature. =. Mr. Dexter Sinister wrote: ‘ I understand Euler's Identity, and I know what it means, and I know how to prove it, there's nothing particularly mystical about it, it just demonstrates that exponential, trigonometric, and complex functions are related. Given what we know of mathematics it shouldn't surprise anyone that its various bits are connected. It would be much more surprising if they weren't, that would almost certainly mean something was badly wrong somewhere.’ Mr. Gary wrote: Mathematics is NOT science. Science is knowledge of the REAL world. Mathematics is an invention of the mind. Many aspects of mathematics have found application in the real world, but there is no guarantee. Any correlation must meet the ultimate test: does it explain something about the real world? As an electrical engineer I used the generalized Euler's equation all the time in circuit analysis: exp(j*theta) = cos(theta) + j*sin(theta). So it works at that particular level in electricity. Does it work at other levels, too? Logic cannot prove it. It must be determined by experiment, not by philosophizing. .. Thinking about theirs posts I wrote brief article: Euler's Equation and Reality. =. a) Euler's Equation as a mathematical reality. Euler's identity is the gold standard for mathematical beauty'. Euler's identity is the most famous formula in all mathematics. ‘ . . . this equation is the mathematical analogue of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa painting or Michelangelo’s statue of David’ ‘It is God’s equation.’, ‘ It is a mathematical icon.’ . . . . etc. b) Euler's Equation as a physical reality. it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, . . . . .’ ‘ Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence’ ‘ Is Euler's Equation about fundamental matters?’ ‘It would be nice to understand Euler's Identity as a physical process using physics.‘ ‘ Is it possible to unite Euler's Identity with physics, quantum physics ?’ ==. My aim is to understand the reality of nature. Can Euler's equation explain me something about reality? To give the answer to this question I need to bind Euler's equation with an object - particle. Can it be math- point or string- particle or triangle-particle? No, Euler's formula has quantity (pi) which says me that the particle must be only a circle . Now I want to understand the behavior of circle - particle and therefore I need to use spatial relativity and quantum theories. These two theories say me that the reason of circle – particle’s movement is its own inner impulse (h) or (h*=h/2pi). a) Using its own inner impulse (h) circle - particle moves ( as a wheel) in a straight line with constant speed c = 1. We call such particle - ‘photon’. From Earth – gravity point of view this speed is maximally. From Vacuum point of view this speed is minimally. In this movement quantum of light behave as a corpuscular (no charge). b) Using its own inner impulse / intrinsic angular momentum ( h* = h / 2pi ) circle - particle rotates around its axis. In such movement particle has charge, produce electric waves ( waves property of particle) and its speed ( frequency) is : c1. We call such particle - ‘ electron’ and its energy is: E=h*f. In this way I (as a peasant ) can understand the reality of nature. ==. I reread my post. My God, that is a naïve peasant's explanation. It is absolutely not scientific, not professor's explanation. Would a learned man adopt such simple and naive explanation? Hmm, . . . problem. In any way, even Mr. Dexter Sinister and Mr. Gary wouldn't agree with me, I want to say them ' Thank you for emails and cooperation’ =. Best wishes. Israel Sadovnik Socratus. =. P.S. ' They would play a greater and greater role in mathematics – and then, with the advent of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century, in physics and engineering and any field that deals with cyclical phenomena such as waves that can be represented by complex numbers. For a complex number allows you to represent two processes such as phase and wavelenght simultaneously – and a complex exponential allows you to map a straight line onto a circle in a complex plane.' / Book: The great equations. Chapter four. The gold standard for mathematical beauty. Euler’s equation. Page 104. / # Euler's e-iPi+1=0 is an amazing equation, not in-and-of itself, but because it sharply points to our utter ignorance of the simplest mathematical and scientific fundamentals. The equation means that in flat Euclidean space, e and Pi happen to have their particular
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 14 Feb 2013, at 08:48, socra...@bezeqint.net wrote: Euler's Equation and the Reality of Nature. =. Mr. Dexter Sinister wrote: ‘ I understand Euler's Identity, and I know what it means, and I know how to prove it, there's nothing particularly mystical about it, it just demonstrates that exponential, trigonometric, and complex functions are related. Given what we know of mathematics it shouldn't surprise anyone that its various bits are connected. It would be much more surprising if they weren't, that would almost certainly mean something was badly wrong somewhere.’ Mr. Gary wrote: Mathematics is NOT science. Science is knowledge of the REAL world. Mathematics is an invention of the mind. This is of course false in the comp theory. It is also intuitively false for most mathematicians. It is usually asserted by people confusing the mathematical tools, that we invent indeed, and the mathematical reality, which is really a sequence of surprising facts, that we discover. The use of REAL world is dogmatic physicalism. It proposes as a fact what is a theological or metaphysical hypothesis, and this condemns any attempt to be rigorous on the subject. It is as bad as using God as a gap explanation. It is the same mistake. Bruno Many aspects of mathematics have found application in the real world, but there is no guarantee. Any correlation must meet the ultimate test: does it explain something about the real world? As an electrical engineer I used the generalized Euler's equation all the time in circuit analysis: exp(j*theta) = cos(theta) + j*sin(theta). So it works at that particular level in electricity. Does it work at other levels, too? Logic cannot prove it. It must be determined by experiment, not by philosophizing. .. Thinking about theirs posts I wrote brief article: Euler's Equation and Reality. =. a) Euler's Equation as a mathematical reality. Euler's identity is the gold standard for mathematical beauty'. Euler's identity is the most famous formula in all mathematics. ‘ . . . this equation is the mathematical analogue of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa painting or Michelangelo’s statue of David’ ‘It is God’s equation.’, ‘ It is a mathematical icon.’ . . . . etc. b) Euler's Equation as a physical reality. it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, . . . . .’ ‘ Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence’ ‘ Is Euler's Equation about fundamental matters?’ ‘It would be nice to understand Euler's Identity as a physical process using physics.‘ ‘ Is it possible to unite Euler's Identity with physics, quantum physics ?’ ==. My aim is to understand the reality of nature. Can Euler's equation explain me something about reality? To give the answer to this question I need to bind Euler's equation with an object - particle. Can it be math- point or string- particle or triangle-particle? No, Euler's formula has quantity (pi) which says me that the particle must be only a circle . Now I want to understand the behavior of circle - particle and therefore I need to use spatial relativity and quantum theories. These two theories say me that the reason of circle – particle’s movement is its own inner impulse (h) or (h*=h/2pi). a) Using its own inner impulse (h) circle - particle moves ( as a wheel) in a straight line with constant speed c = 1. We call such particle - ‘photon’. From Earth – gravity point of view this speed is maximally. From Vacuum point of view this speed is minimally. In this movement quantum of light behave as a corpuscular (no charge). b) Using its own inner impulse / intrinsic angular momentum ( h* = h / 2pi ) circle - particle rotates around its axis. In such movement particle has charge, produce electric waves ( waves property of particle) and its speed ( frequency) is : c1. We call such particle - ‘ electron’ and its energy is: E=h*f. In this way I (as a peasant ) can understand the reality of nature. ==. I reread my post. My God, that is a naïve peasant's explanation. It is absolutely not scientific, not professor's explanation. Would a learned man adopt such simple and naive explanation? Hmm, . . . problem. In any way, even Mr. Dexter Sinister and Mr. Gary wouldn't agree with me, I want to say them ' Thank you for emails and cooperation’ =. Best wishes. Israel Sadovnik Socratus. =. P.S. ' They would play a greater and greater role in mathematics – and then, with the advent of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century, in physics and engineering and any field that deals with cyclical phenomena such as waves that can be represented by complex numbers. For a complex number allows you to represent two processes such as phase and wavelenght simultaneously – and a complex exponential allows you to map a straight line onto a circle in a complex plane.' / Book: The great equations. Chapter four. The gold standard for mathematical beauty. Euler’s equation. Page 104.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 6:39 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: So far, nobody has been able to figure out a learning algorithm as generic as the one our brains contains. The developers of Watson have come very close to doing exactly that. What I mean by a generic learning algorithm is one that can program itself using very high-level feedback signals, something equivalent to pleasure/pain. That allows the same algorithm to learn how to drive a car and learn to speak new languages, and even learn new ways to learn. I think it's possible, but I'm not convinced Watson is it. there is definitely room for generalists. Then why don't family doctors recommend that their patient see a generalists when they run into a particular problem they can't handle? Because you don't want brain surgery performed by an amateur, and also to avoid law suits. But if I had to chose just one doctor for the rest of my life, I would chose a generalist. I'm not saying that specialists are not valuable, just that we've gone too far in fetishising them. Or, put another way, there aren't as many brain surgeon-level fields that require maniacal focus for competence as people seem to think. But everyone wants to believe that of their own field because specialisation is currently viewed as high status. Einstein might have been a great scientist in any field. Perhaps Einstein could have been great in ANY field, but he most certainly could not have been great in EVERY field. Agreed, mainly because of lack of time. Immortal Einstein would probably get bored of theoretical physics at some point and explore something else. Watson and Deep Blue cannot change their minds. The great thing about computers is that every time they run a new program they quite literally CHANGE THEIR MINDS. In a sense, but not in the sense I was alluding to. Deep Blue beat the world human chess champion and it required a supercomputer to do so, but that was 16 years ago and Moore's law marches on; Sort of. There is no sort of about it, Moore's law marches on. In 1994 I bought one of the most powerful PC's in the world, it had a one core microprocessor running at 5 *10^7 cycles per second with 8*10^6 bytes of solid state memory and a 2*10^8 byte hard drive and cost me $4000 in expensive 1994 dollars; Today I am using a 4 core microprocessor running at 3.4 *10^9 cycles per second with 1.6 *10^10 bytes of solid state memory and a 2*10^12 byte hard drive and it cost me $2000 in in much cheaper 2012 dollars. The Moore's law marches on if you allow for multi-cores after a certain date and not before a certain date. Now it's progressing due to multi-core architectures, which one could consider cheating If I grew up on a farm and was retarded I might consider that cheating too, but I didn't and I'm not so I don't. Funnily enough you're still vulnerable to basic formal fallacies, as the sentence above illustrates. because algorithm parallelisation is frequently non-trivial. Few things worth doing are trivial, You wanted a touché but settled for a cliché? but fortunately for us most physical processes are inherently parallel as are most algorithms that are of interest such as video and audio processing, playing chess, making quantum mechanical calculations, understanding speech, language translation, weather forecasting, car driving, Higgs particle hunting, and the sort of thinking Watson did on Jeopardy. Yes, and in Nature they run on inherently parallel hardware. With von Neumann class computers we are stitching together sequential machines and trying to make them operate in a parallel way. This leads to very though problems like race conditions and deadlocks. One possible way out is the use of purely functional languages like Haskel, but implementing I/O in a purely functional way is also tough. Also, the CAP theorem imposes a theoretical limit on the capabilities of distributed computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem Most of these difficulties can be surmounted, but at a cost. The higher the number of cores, the higher the cost. To make Moore's law work, people apply simple arithmetics (like adding the number of transistors) and ignore all these problems. I believe you're underestimating the complexity of a good chess program A chess program good enough to beat the best human player could be run on very primitive 1997 hardware, therefore I am not underestimating the complexity of a good chess program. QED. It cannot be achieved with a few tweaks on a completely different program like Watson, which was what you were implying. It's not like the developers of Watson just said: hey, we've created a very intelligent system, let's just throw some grand-master level chess playing capabilities in there. can Watson, for example, introspect on the chess game and update his view of the world
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: there aren't as many brain surgeon-level fields that require maniacal focus for competence as people seem to think. I would maintain that for the last 200 years every major advance in science or mathematics has come from specialists. The Moore's law marches on if you allow for multi-cores after a certain date and not before a certain date. I have no idea what that means, but I do know that the human brain is a multi-core machine, we know there are at least 2 million cortical columns in it and probably more. Also, the CAP theorem imposes a theoretical limit on the capabilities of distributed computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem So what? All parts of the human brain can't see the same data at the same time either, and if one cortical column can send a signal to another cortical column indicating that data has or has not been successfully received nobody has ever found it, probably because it doesn't exist. Most of these difficulties can be surmounted, but at a cost. The higher the number of cores, the higher the cost. Unless the cost per core falls faster than the number of cores increases, so you can double the number of cores every 18 months and keep the cost constant. To make Moore's law work, people apply simple arithmetics (like adding the number of transistors) and ignore all these problems. Yes, but you almost make that sound like a bad thing. A chess program good enough to beat the best human player could be run on very primitive 1997 hardware, therefore I am not underestimating the complexity of a good chess program. QED. It cannot be achieved with a few tweaks on a completely different program like Watson, Now you're just being silly. There are chess playing programs that you could download and run in 2 minutes that would turn the very computer you're reading this message on into a machine that could beat Deep Blue of 1997 at Chess. Are you trying to tell me that mighty Watson couldn't do what your puny little Walmart special can do??! It's not like the developers of Watson just said: hey, we've created a very intelligent system, let's just throw some grand-master level chess playing capabilities in there. You are entirely incorrect, IT IS EXACTLY PRECISELY LIKE THAT! The inability of humans to grasp this basic abillity that computers have that they themselves do not is what causes them to VASTLY underrate the changes that computers will make to society and even changes in what species is at the top of the food chain. Can he read a text about learning strategies and update his own learning strategy accordingly? No Watson can't do that and I can't either, I read a lot but I've never read a learning strategies self help book that was worth a bucket of warm spit. Watson can however learn new algorithms. I'm making a distinction between generic and domain-specific intelligence. Watson can play Chess better than anyone, Watson can diagnose diseases better than most doctors, Watson can solve equations you couldn't dream of solving and Watson is the world champion at Jeopardy which means he's at least as good a conversationalist and can engage in small talk at least as well as a autistic human being like Gregory Perelman and probably a good deal better than one of the principle founders of quantum mechanics Paul Dirac. So exactly what is this grand difference between generic and domain-specific intelligence that you're trying to make? I actually care about the goal of AGI I care about AI but I care little about Adjusted Gross Income or the American Geological Institute. Turns out that autism can really make you focused. Yes. So what? So saying that Watson is autistic is very different from saying Watson is unintelligent. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
The learned men confuse the mathematical tools with the physical reality and therefore we have math-physical fairy-tales. =. On Feb 14, 5:39 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 14 Feb 2013, at 08:48, socra...@bezeqint.net wrote: Euler's Equation and the Reality of Nature. =. Mr. Dexter Sinister wrote: ‘ I understand Euler's Identity, and I know what it means, and I know how to prove it, there's nothing particularly mystical about it, it just demonstrates that exponential, trigonometric, and complex functions are related. Given what we know of mathematics it shouldn't surprise anyone that its various bits are connected. It would be much more surprising if they weren't, that would almost certainly mean something was badly wrong somewhere.’ Mr. Gary wrote: Mathematics is NOT science. Science is knowledge of the REAL world. Mathematics is an invention of the mind. This is of course false in the comp theory. It is also intuitively false for most mathematicians. It is usually asserted by people confusing the mathematical tools, that we invent indeed, and the mathematical reality, which is really a sequence of surprising facts, that we discover. The use of REAL world is dogmatic physicalism. It proposes as a fact what is a theological or metaphysical hypothesis, and this condemns any attempt to be rigorous on the subject. It is as bad as using God as a gap explanation. It is the same mistake. Bruno Many aspects of mathematics have found application in the real world, but there is no guarantee. Any correlation must meet the ultimate test: does it explain something about the real world? As an electrical engineer I used the generalized Euler's equation all the time in circuit analysis: exp(j*theta) = cos(theta) + j*sin(theta). So it works at that particular level in electricity. Does it work at other levels, too? Logic cannot prove it. It must be determined by experiment, not by philosophizing. .. Thinking about theirs posts I wrote brief article: Euler's Equation and Reality. =. a) Euler's Equation as a mathematical reality. Euler's identity is the gold standard for mathematical beauty'. Euler's identity is the most famous formula in all mathematics. ‘ . . . this equation is the mathematical analogue of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa painting or Michelangelo’s statue of David’ ‘It is God’s equation.’, ‘ It is a mathematical icon.’ . . . . etc. b) Euler's Equation as a physical reality. it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, . . . . .’ ‘ Euler's Equation reaches down into the very depths of existence’ ‘ Is Euler's Equation about fundamental matters?’ ‘It would be nice to understand Euler's Identity as a physical process using physics.‘ ‘ Is it possible to unite Euler's Identity with physics, quantum physics ?’ ==. My aim is to understand the reality of nature. Can Euler's equation explain me something about reality? To give the answer to this question I need to bind Euler's equation with an object - particle. Can it be math- point or string- particle or triangle-particle? No, Euler's formula has quantity (pi) which says me that the particle must be only a circle . Now I want to understand the behavior of circle - particle and therefore I need to use spatial relativity and quantum theories. These two theories say me that the reason of circle – particle’s movement is its own inner impulse (h) or (h*=h/2pi). a) Using its own inner impulse (h) circle - particle moves ( as a wheel) in a straight line with constant speed c = 1. We call such particle - ‘photon’. From Earth – gravity point of view this speed is maximally. From Vacuum point of view this speed is minimally. In this movement quantum of light behave as a corpuscular (no charge). b) Using its own inner impulse / intrinsic angular momentum ( h* = h / 2pi ) circle - particle rotates around its axis. In such movement particle has charge, produce electric waves ( waves property of particle) and its speed ( frequency) is : c1. We call such particle - ‘ electron’ and its energy is: E=h*f. In this way I (as a peasant ) can understand the reality of nature. ==. I reread my post. My God, that is a naïve peasant's explanation. It is absolutely not scientific, not professor's explanation. Would a learned man adopt such simple and naive explanation? Hmm, . . . problem. In any way, even Mr. Dexter Sinister and Mr. Gary wouldn't agree with me, I want to say them ' Thank you for emails and cooperation’ =. Best wishes. Israel Sadovnik Socratus. =. P.S. ' They would play a greater and greater role in mathematics – and then, with the advent of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century, in physics and engineering and any field that deals with cyclical phenomena such as
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:49 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/12/2013 2:40 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: I don't know what sort of computer your typed you post on but by 1997 standards it is almost certainly a supercomputer, probably the most powerful supercomputer in the world. I'll wager it would take you less than five minutes to find and download a free chess playing program on the internet that if run on the very machine you're writing your posts on that would beat the hell out of you. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Watson had a sub sub sub routine that enabled it to play Chess at least as well as Depp Blue, Maybe (although I believe you're underestimating the complexity of a good chess program). But can Watson, for example, introspect on the chess game and update his view of the world accordingly? Can he read a new text and figure out how to play better? I'm not saying that these things are impossible, just that they haven't been achieved yet. after all you never know when the subject of Jeopardy will turn out to be Chess. And if Watson didn't already have this capability it could be added at virtually no cost. But could you ask Watson to go and learn by himself? Because you could ask that of a person. Or to go and learn to fish. I have no doubt that Watson is quite competent, but I don't see any of its behavior as reflecting intelligence. If a person did half of what Watson did you would not hesitate for one second in calling him intelligent, but Watson is made of silicon not carbon so you don't. Nor for another second in considering him/her profoundly autistic. The main reason Watson and similar programs fail to have human like intelligence is that they lack human like values and motivations True, but they could have generic intelligence -- the ability to learn something new in a new domain, just by being told to do it. Such slaves would be tremendously useful and free us from labor. There is no lack of motivation to create such things. - and deliberately so Deliberately implies that we have the option. I'm pretty sure a lot of people would very much like to create an artificial human, but they failed so far. because we don't want them to be making autonomous decisions based on their internal values. That's why I usually take something like an advanced Mars rover as an example of intelligence. I agree, but not general intelligence. Telmo. Being largely autonomous a Mars rover must have a hierarchy of values that it acts on. Bretn -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/13/2013 3:10 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: The main reason Watson and similar programs fail to have human like intelligence is that they lack human like values and motivations True, but they could have generic intelligence -- the ability to learn something new in a new domain, just by being told to do it. I don't know if that could work. If you wanted the robot to learn to do some task you'd have stand there and say learn this, no learn that, learn this,... Being able to learn already requires some degree of generality. Such slaves would be tremendously useful and free us from labor. There is no lack of motivation to create such things. - and deliberately so Deliberately implies that we have the option. I'm pretty sure a lot of people would very much like to create an artificial human, but they failed so far. As Bruno would say, the want to create human level *competence*. But they haven't thought about the problem of that entailing human level intelligence (although some have, c.f. John McCarthy's website). because we don't want them to be making autonomous decisions based on their internal values. That's why I usually take something like an advanced Mars rover as an example of intelligence. I agree, but not general intelligence. I as my professor used to say, Artificial intelligence is just whatever can't be done yet. Brent -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: So far, nobody has been able to figure out a learning algorithm as generic as the one our brains contains. The developers of Watson have come very close to doing exactly that. there is definitely room for generalists. Then why don't family doctors recommend that their patient see a generalists when they run into a particular problem they can't handle? Einstein might have been a great scientist in any field. Perhaps Einstein could have been great in ANY field, but he most certainly could not have been great in EVERY field. Watson and Deep Blue cannot change their minds. The great thing about computers is that every time they run a new program they quite literally CHANGE THEIR MINDS. Deep Blue beat the world human chess champion and it required a supercomputer to do so, but that was 16 years ago and Moore's law marches on; Sort of. There is no sort of about it, Moore's law marches on. In 1994 I bought one of the most powerful PC's in the world, it had a one core microprocessor running at 5 *10^7 cycles per second with 8*10^6 bytes of solid state memory and a 2*10^8 byte hard drive and cost me $4000 in expensive 1994 dollars; Today I am using a 4 core microprocessor running at 3.4 *10^9 cycles per second with 1.6 *10^10 bytes of solid state memory and a 2*10^12 byte hard drive and it cost me $2000 in in much cheaper 2012 dollars. Now it's progressing due to multi-core architectures, which one could consider cheating If I grew up on a farm and was retarded I might consider that cheating too, but I didn't and I'm not so I don't. because algorithm parallelisation is frequently non-trivial. Few things worth doing are trivial, but fortunately for us most physical processes are inherently parallel as are most algorithms that are of interest such as video and audio processing, playing chess, making quantum mechanical calculations, understanding speech, language translation, weather forecasting, car driving, Higgs particle hunting, and the sort of thinking Watson did on Jeopardy. I believe you're underestimating the complexity of a good chess program A chess program good enough to beat the best human player could be run on very primitive 1997 hardware, therefore I am not underestimating the complexity of a good chess program. QED. can Watson, for example, introspect on the chess game and update his view of the world accordingly? Can he read a new text and figure out how to play better? Yes, Watson can and does learn from his mistakes could you ask Watson to go and learn by himself? Yes, Watson spent many many hours organizing the vast amount of information it contained and figuring out what it did wrong when it provided incorrect answers in the past and trying new ways to improve performance. As a result even the programers of Watson had no way of knowing what that machine would do next; when Watson was asked a question they had to just watch and wait to see what sort of response he would give just like everybody else. The only way to know what Watson would do is to just watch him and see. If a person did half of what Watson did you would not hesitate for one second in calling him intelligent, but Watson is made of silicon not carbon so you don't. Nor for another second in considering him/her profoundly autistic. Gregory Perelman is a mathematical genius who made the most important advance in pure mathematics in the last 10 years, Perelman is also autistic. Perelman is certainly not a genius about every aspect of human endeavor, he recently turned down a $1,000,000 prize for proving the Poincare Conjecture even though he's almost homeless. Perelman has his faults but would you really want to say he is not intelligent? Another example is Richard Borcherds, he is also a mathematician and he won the Field's Medal, in prestige it is the mathematical equivalent to the Nobel Prize. Borcherds admits that he has been officially diagnosed with having Asperger's syndrome, a condition closely related to autism. John K Clark -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 11 Feb 2013, at 18:30, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote The Watson program is competent, but I doubt it makes sense to say it is intelligent. Just like with God and atheist it looks like we're back at the tired old game of redefining words. Using the normal meaning of intelligent if somebody can beat you at checkers and chess and equation solving and Jeopardy then they are more intelligent than you at those activities. It is better to use the term competence. Competence depends on domain. I use intelligence for a deeper ability which does not need to be domain dependent. Yet it is needed to develop many sort of competence. So if Watson isn't intelligent he's something better than intelligent. It is competent in jeopardy. And just today news was released that Watson is well on its way at becoming better than human doctors at diagnosing disease. http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-helps-doctors-fight-cancer/240148236 Making it competent in that domain. Intelligence is a more general mind state making it possible to be flexible, to get jokes, to get bored, to take distance, to be curious, to find new questions, to develop modesty, ... I am open to the idea that universal number are initially intelligent, but lost that intelligence when specializing too much (as they might lost also their universality). Intelligence is something emotional, and it relates consciousness and the many possible competence. Like universality, intelligence is domain independent. He lacks the self-reference needed to make sense of intelligence, Watson can do even better than make sense out of intelligence, Watson can make concrete actions out of intelligence, among many other things Watson can move chess pieces around in such a way as to beat you or any other human in a game. I can beat Watson in chess. Watson, if I remember correctly, is competent in Jeopardy, and only in Jeopardy. But that's besides the point. I have no doubt that Watson is quite competent, but I don't see any of its behavior as reflecting intelligence. Today I see this in animals and humans. Perhaps plants on some different scales. Intelligence, like consciousness, cannot be judged by others, unlike competence. But it can be locally appreciated, though. 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So if Watson isn't intelligent he's something better than intelligent. It is competent in jeopardy. And the enormously impressive thing about Watson is that unlike Chess Jeopardy is not a specialized game, you could get asked about anything from cosmology to cosmetology. And even if the language used to communicate with Watson is far more convoluted than everyday speech and is full of analogies poetic allusions and even very bad puns Watson can still figure out what information you desire and then provide it. just today news was released that Watson is well on its way at becoming better than human doctors at diagnosing disease. http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-helps-doctors-fight-cancer/240148236 Making it competent in that domain. How many domains does something need to have genius level competence in before you admit it's pretty damn smart? Even human polymaths, those who are a genius at everything have gone extinct. In the days of Leonardo da Vinci one smart man could know all the science and mathematics that there was in the world to know, but that stopped being possible about 200 years ago. Today humans need to specialize, the best even the brightest among us can hope for is to be a genius in one domain, be pretty good in another, know a little bit about 2 or 3 others, and be almost clueless about everything else. I can beat Watson in chess. I doubt that very very much. Watson, if I remember correctly, is competent in Jeopardy, and only in Jeopardy. Bruno, Deep Blue beat the world human chess champion and it required a supercomputer to do so, but that was 16 years ago and Moore's law marches on; I don't know what sort of computer your typed you post on but by 1997 standards it is almost certainly a supercomputer, probably the most powerful supercomputer in the world. I'll wager it would take you less than five minutes to find and download a free chess playing program on the internet that if run on the very machine you're writing your posts on that would beat the hell out of you. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Watson had a sub sub sub routine that enabled it to play Chess at least as well as Depp Blue, after all you never know when the subject of Jeopardy will turn out to be Chess. And if Watson didn't already have this capability it could be added at virtually no cost. I have no doubt that Watson is quite competent, but I don't see any of its behavior as reflecting intelligence. If a person did half of what Watson did you would not hesitate for one second in calling him intelligent, but Watson is made of silicon not carbon so you don't. Intelligence, like consciousness, cannot be judged by others That is ridiculous, I'll bet you personally have made that judgement at least 10 times a day every single day of your life. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
Hi John, On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 7:53 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: So if Watson isn't intelligent he's something better than intelligent. It is competent in jeopardy. And the enormously impressive thing about Watson is that unlike Chess Jeopardy is not a specialized game, you could get asked about anything from cosmology to cosmetology. They operate in two completely different domains (min-max trees vs. semantic networks) and they are both highly specialised for their respective domains. And even if the language used to communicate with Watson is far more convoluted than everyday speech and is full of analogies poetic allusions and even very bad puns Watson can still figure out what information you desire and then provide it. just today news was released that Watson is well on its way at becoming better than human doctors at diagnosing disease. http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-helps-doctors-fight-cancer/240148236 Making it competent in that domain. How many domains does something need to have genius level competence in before you admit it's pretty damn smart? It's not the number of domains, it's the potential to learn to operate in new ones. So far, nobody has been able to figure out a learning algorithm as generic as the one our brains contains. Even human polymaths, those who are a genius at everything have gone extinct. In the days of Leonardo da Vinci one smart man could know all the science and mathematics that there was in the world to know, but that stopped being possible about 200 years ago. Today humans need to specialize, Some think that specialisation is for insects. Nobody needs' to do anything except to conform to some social norm. I see the benefits of specialisation (beyond being able to secure a job, which is a good part of it), but there is definitely room for generalists. the best even the brightest among us can hope for is to be a genius in one domain, be pretty good in another, know a little bit about 2 or 3 others, and be almost clueless about everything else. But they can chose which ones along the way. Intuitively, Einstein might have been a great scientist in any field. Watson and Deep Blue cannot change their minds and chose something else. I can beat Watson in chess. I doubt that very very much. Watson, if I remember correctly, is competent in Jeopardy, and only in Jeopardy. Bruno, Deep Blue beat the world human chess champion and it required a supercomputer to do so, but that was 16 years ago and Moore's law marches on; Sort of. Now it's progressing due to multi-core architectures, which one could consider cheating because algorithm parallelisation is frequently non-trivial. I don't know what sort of computer your typed you post on but by 1997 standards it is almost certainly a supercomputer, probably the most powerful supercomputer in the world. I'll wager it would take you less than five minutes to find and download a free chess playing program on the internet that if run on the very machine you're writing your posts on that would beat the hell out of you. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Watson had a sub sub sub routine that enabled it to play Chess at least as well as Depp Blue, Maybe (although I believe you're underestimating the complexity of a good chess program). But can Watson, for example, introspect on the chess game and update his view of the world accordingly? Can he read a new text and figure out how to play better? I'm not saying that these things are impossible, just that they haven't been achieved yet. after all you never know when the subject of Jeopardy will turn out to be Chess. And if Watson didn't already have this capability it could be added at virtually no cost. But could you ask Watson to go and learn by himself? Because you could ask that of a person. Or to go and learn to fish. I have no doubt that Watson is quite competent, but I don't see any of its behavior as reflecting intelligence. If a person did half of what Watson did you would not hesitate for one second in calling him intelligent, but Watson is made of silicon not carbon so you don't. Nor for another second in considering him/her profoundly autistic. Telmo. Intelligence, like consciousness, cannot be judged by others That is ridiculous, I'll bet you personally have made that judgement at least 10 times a day every single day of your life. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/12/2013 2:40 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: I don't know what sort of computer your typed you post on but by 1997 standards it is almost certainly a supercomputer, probably the most powerful supercomputer in the world. I'll wager it would take you less than five minutes to find and download a free chess playing program on the internet that if run on the very machine you're writing your posts on that would beat the hell out of you. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Watson had a sub sub sub routine that enabled it to play Chess at least as well as Depp Blue, Maybe (although I believe you're underestimating the complexity of a good chess program). But can Watson, for example, introspect on the chess game and update his view of the world accordingly? Can he read a new text and figure out how to play better? I'm not saying that these things are impossible, just that they haven't been achieved yet. after all you never know when the subject of Jeopardy will turn out to be Chess. And if Watson didn't already have this capability it could be added at virtually no cost. But could you ask Watson to go and learn by himself? Because you could ask that of a person. Or to go and learn to fish. I have no doubt that Watson is quite competent, but I don't see any of its behavior as reflecting intelligence. If a person did half of what Watson did you would not hesitate for one second in calling him intelligent, but Watson is made of silicon not carbon so you don't. Nor for another second in considering him/her profoundly autistic. The main reason Watson and similar programs fail to have human like intelligence is that they lack human like values and motivations - and deliberately so because we don't want them to be making autonomous decisions based on their internal values. That's why I usually take something like an advanced Mars rover as an example of intelligence. Being largely autonomous a Mars rover must have a hierarchy of values that it acts on. Bretn -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Tuesday, February 12, 2013 5:49:04 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/12/2013 2:40 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: I don't know what sort of computer your typed you post on but by 1997 standards it is almost certainly a supercomputer, probably the most powerful supercomputer in the world. I'll wager it would take you less than five minutes to find and download a free chess playing program on the internet that if run on the very machine you're writing your posts on that would beat the hell out of you. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Watson had a sub sub sub routine that enabled it to play Chess at least as well as Depp Blue, Maybe (although I believe you're underestimating the complexity of a good chess program). But can Watson, for example, introspect on the chess game and update his view of the world accordingly? Can he read a new text and figure out how to play better? I'm not saying that these things are impossible, just that they haven't been achieved yet. after all you never know when the subject of Jeopardy will turn out to be Chess. And if Watson didn't already have this capability it could be added at virtually no cost. But could you ask Watson to go and learn by himself? Because you could ask that of a person. Or to go and learn to fish. I have no doubt that Watson is quite competent, but I don't see any of its behavior as reflecting intelligence. If a person did half of what Watson did you would not hesitate for one second in calling him intelligent, but Watson is made of silicon not carbon so you don't. Nor for another second in considering him/her profoundly autistic. The main reason Watson and similar programs fail to have human like intelligence is that they lack human like values and motivations - and deliberately so because we don't want them to be making autonomous decisions based on their internal values. That's why I usually take something like an advanced Mars rover as an example of intelligence. Being largely autonomous a Mars rover must have a hierarchy of values that it acts on. Just because something performs actions doesn't mean that it has values or motivations. As you say, we don't want them to be making autonomous decisions based on their internal values - and they don't, and they wouldn't even if we did want that, because there is no internal value possible with a machine. Values arise directly and indirectly through experience, but a machine is just a collection of parts which embody very simple experiences that never evolve or grow. Craig Bretn -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/12/2013 4:53 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, February 12, 2013 5:49:04 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/12/2013 2:40 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: I don't know what sort of computer your typed you post on but by 1997 standards it is almost certainly a supercomputer, probably the most powerful supercomputer in the world. I'll wager it would take you less than five minutes to find and download a free chess playing program on the internet that if run on the very machine you're writing your posts on that would beat the hell out of you. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Watson had a sub sub sub routine that enabled it to play Chess at least as well as Depp Blue, Maybe (although I believe you're underestimating the complexity of a good chess program). But can Watson, for example, introspect on the chess game and update his view of the world accordingly? Can he read a new text and figure out how to play better? I'm not saying that these things are impossible, just that they haven't been achieved yet. after all you never know when the subject of Jeopardy will turn out to be Chess. And if Watson didn't already have this capability it could be added at virtually no cost. But could you ask Watson to go and learn by himself? Because you could ask that of a person. Or to go and learn to fish. I have no doubt that Watson is quite competent, but I don't see any of its behavior as reflecting intelligence. If a person did half of what Watson did you would not hesitate for one second in calling him intelligent, but Watson is made of silicon not carbon so you don't. Nor for another second in considering him/her profoundly autistic. The main reason Watson and similar programs fail to have human like intelligence is that they lack human like values and motivations - and deliberately so because we don't want them to be making autonomous decisions based on their internal values. That's why I usually take something like an advanced Mars rover as an example of intelligence. Being largely autonomous a Mars rover must have a hierarchy of values that it acts on. Just because something performs actions doesn't mean that it has values or motivations. As you say, we don't want them to be making autonomous decisions based on their internal values - and they don't, and they wouldn't even if we did want that, because there is no internal value possible with a machine. Values arise directly and indirectly through experience, but a machine is just a collection of parts which embody very simple experiences that never evolve or grow. More fallacious and unsupported assertions. Machines can grow and learn - though of course in applications we try to give them as much knowledge as we can initially. But that's why Mars rovers are a good example. The builders and programmers have only limited knowledge of what will be encountered and so instead of trying to anticipate every possibility they have to provide for some ability to learn from experience. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 10 Feb 2013, at 19:38, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:30 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Consciousness might be the unconscious Okey dokey, and if you allow that X is not X you can prove or disprove anything you like. Please, quote the entire sentence. It was: Consciousness might be the unconscious, i.e. instinctive and automated, belief or bet in a reality, or self-consistency (for machine expressing their beliefs in first order languages) And OK, I should have said might be the result of the unconscious instinctive bet in a reality. Consciousness accelerates the growing of intelligence Then it would be easier to make a intelligent conscious computer than a intelligent unconscious computer, OK. so if you see a smart computer it's safest to assume it's conscious, just like with people. smart is ambiguous. Competence can be imitated. You don't need much intelligence for behaving like if you did, like you can copy an atomic bomb, without understanding how that can be discovered. So competent behavior is not necessarily a symptom of intelligence, nor of consciousness. But intelligence allows the grow of competence, and the variation of the domain competence. The Watson program is competent, but I doubt it makes sense to say it is intelligent. He lacks the self- reference needed to make sense of intelligence, imo. But consciousness and emotion can make competence having negative feedback on intelligence. So consciousness accelerates and decelerates intelligence. Huh? Yes. Human histories might illustrate this, and that might be part of why great civilization can come to an end. It is also coherent with my older theory of human intelligence: it is the natural state of the humans before getting adult. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 10 Feb 2013, at 23:16, Craig Weinberg wrote: What makes computers useful is that they have no capacity to object to drudgery. That is the capacity which is inseparable from unconsciousness. That is what slaves are useful at. And that does not make slaves unconscious. It makes them only oppressed. And humans have to do an hard work to maintain them in that mood. It is called programming. With AI, we let much more the machine explore possibilities, and look inward. When we talk about computer, it is better to look at the basic (mathematical) notion, than to their current and contingent incarnations. If a robotic silicon Craig-like machine could look at the early bacteria on this planet, he would say, ---those organic creatures are quite dumb and unconsconscious---I feel it. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote The Watson program is competent, but I doubt it makes sense to say it is intelligent. Just like with God and atheist it looks like we're back at the tired old game of redefining words. Using the normal meaning of intelligent if somebody can beat you at checkers and chess and equation solving and Jeopardy then they are more intelligent than you at those activities. So if Watson isn't intelligent he's something better than intelligent. And just today news was released that Watson is well on its way at becoming better than human doctors at diagnosing disease. http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-helps-doctors-fight-cancer/240148236 He lacks the self-reference needed to make sense of intelligence, Watson can do even better than make sense out of intelligence, Watson can make concrete actions out of intelligence, among many other things Watson can move chess pieces around in such a way as to beat you or any other human in a game. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/11/2013 9:30 AM, John Clark wrote: Watson can do even better than make sense out of intelligence, Watson can make concrete actions out of intelligence, among many other things Watson can move chess pieces around in such a way as to beat you or any other human in a game. Actually I'm not sure Watson is any good at chess. It was Big Blue that beat chessmasters. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Monday, February 11, 2013 11:24:34 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 10 Feb 2013, at 23:16, Craig Weinberg wrote: What makes computers useful is that they have no capacity to object to drudgery. That is the capacity which is inseparable from unconsciousness. That is what slaves are useful at. And that does not make slaves unconscious. It makes them only oppressed. Are you saying that slaves have no capacity to object to drudgery? I didn't mean just that we could put computers in shackles and beat them to force their compliance, I mean that they ontologically lack the capacity to object, even emotionally, to anything at all. If there were no threat of slave uprisings, no chains or rage or simmering hostility then of course we would still have slaves all over the world. And humans have to do an hard work to maintain them in that mood. It is called programming. With AI, we let much more the machine explore possibilities, and look inward. It is hard to take you position seriously Bruno. I do, and I respect you and your position, but I don't know that there is anything that I can do if you cannot discern between enslavement by violence and coercion and changing a line of code in a program. You talk about 1p but I don't think that you only allow a toy model of it. When we talk about computer, it is better to look at the basic (mathematical) notion, than to their current and contingent incarnations. That's just a permutation of 'Do as I say, not as I do'. Why would you want to take the empirical evidence off the table? If we are going to talk about computers as they should be in theory, then we should talk about people that way also. Lets just assume that there will always be able to tell the difference between a computer and a person because humans will continue to develop ways of testing them. If a robotic silicon Craig-like machine could look at the early bacteria on this planet, he would say, ---those organic creatures are quite dumb and unconsconscious---I feel it. You are on the wrong track entirely. You are projecting onto me the image of a Luddite, when in fact what you suggest is old hat to me. This is what I grew up on. Craig in high school agrees with you. It wasn't right though. It turns out that consciousness is far deeper and richer than is imagined by comp. Consciousness is not just an intellectual maze of logics and guesses, it is the ground of being itself. I have no problem with silicon being more alive than carbon - it is not about that at all, it is about facing the reality of the cosmic narrative and not sweeping the odd parts under the carpet. The fact is, that there are no alternate biologies that we are aware of nor that we have created. The fact is that AI has not successfully instilled any degree of feeling into a program. These should not be dismissed by everyone just because some are enthusiastic supporters of their being irrelevant. There is something quite significant about the difference between life and death to us, and our bodies echo that by being violently opposed to an inorganic diet. We can only live on other living things. That doesn't make much sense in a comp universe - it could be justified I'm sure, but we really don't have to bend over backward to make comp seem true. It can simply be almost true, but actually false. Craig Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
The situation in ' philosophy of physics'. =. ‘ Suddenly I realized that a nagual did have one point to defend - in my opinion, a passionate defense for the 'description of the Eagle', and 'what the Eagle does'. But what kind of a force would the Eagle be? I would not know how to answer that. The Eagle is as real for the seers as gravity and time are for you, and just as abstract and incomprehensible. Those are abstract concepts, but they do refer to real phenomena that can be corroborated. . He said that the Eagle's emanations are an immutable thing-in-itself, which engulfs everything that exists; the knowable and the unknowable. There is no way to describe in words what the Eagle's emanations really are, . . . . . . . . . . . . etc . . . . / The Fire From Within. ©1984 By Carlos Castaneda. Chapter 03 - The Eagle's Emanations. / http://aquakeys.com/toltec/fire-from-within-chapter_03-eagles-emanations ==.. Their dialogue is a good example for description the situation in ' philosophy of physics' when the stupidity has a mandate from the physicists to explain us the ‘philosophy of physics’. ==. Socratus =. -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 08 Feb 2013, at 17:23, John Clark wrote: ... consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence. Consciousness might be the unconscious, i.e. instinctive and automated, belief or bet in a reality, or self-consistency (for machine expressing their beliefs in first order languages), so that new programs can doubt old programs. Its selective advantage is the self-speeding up provided by such bets. That's is useful for self- moving entities, which have to anticipate quickly how their neighborhood evolves relatively to them. This makes all Löbian systems conscious and self-conscious. But it is not the system which is conscious, but the abstract person incarnated and multiplied in all computations going through the systems' states (which exist in arithmetic by Church's thesis). Consciousness accelerates the growing of intelligence, which is needed to develop different competence, and to make competence growing. But consciousness and emotion can make competence having negative feedback on intelligence. Consciousness is the ultimate first person decider in the matter of first person good and bad. Trivially, to be burned would not been first person felt as bad if it was not conscious. Consciousness can perhaps be characterized by the semantical fixed point of an attempt of universal doubting procedure. It is what would remain in case you doubt of (almost) everything. (Slezak defended a similar idea, which is already in the talk of the sound self- referential machine). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 09 Feb 2013, at 00:49, Craig Weinberg wrote: Outside of consciousness, there is no possibility of discerning any difference between accidental byproducts and selected products. Only consciousness selects. Only consciousness has accidents. Good point. But this does not make consciousness a good fundamental concept to which we can depart. With computaionalism the number are better. Consciousness is when number relation supports local person's belief in a reality or in a truth. Bruno Craig On Friday, February 8, 2013 5:53:18 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/8/2013 10:49 AM, John Clark wrote: I don't know what you mean by that, what I mean is that consciousness is a spandrel, it is the unavoidable result of intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29 Or it could be an accidental byproduct of the way human intelligence developed - unavoidable only in the sense that it was the only reachable intelligent starting from hominds. Evolution can only move species to local maxima of fitness. In Roland Omnes recent book he imagines an alien race that has enormous memory capacity, so that simply remember everything that has happened and what was done and when the need to make a decision they just do the thing that turned out best in the past. It's Omnes caricature of Hume's theory of cause and effect. But his idea is that such aliens wouldn't develop 'theories' as we do to summarize past events. Would they be conscious? I don't know, but I'd guess they wouldn't be conscious in the way I am (I don't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday...but I have a theory). 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 09 Feb 2013, at 11:05, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 1:36 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com I totally agree with that, what I don't agree is when you say the moment you're becoming Telmo again, you should lose *all* cat memories/feeling... I totally disagree with that unless you have some proof it should be so. Sure, I have no proof, I'm just speculating. But what I'm speculating is the following: - You need a significant part of the brain of the cat to be able to understand its memories; - You need a significant part of the brain of Telmo to have Telmo feel like he remembers something; - For Telmo to remember cat memories, you need both brains and an interface between them -- this would result in a new entity that is neither Telmo nor the cat. The problem is that we don't know the comp subst level of the cat, but for Telmo to, to have the experience of the cat, would be like a sort of amnesia of what humans learned since they were equivalent to cat in complexity in their past lives, and then having experience like climbing trees, etc. Then, if the amnesia was just a memory dissociation, you can wake up and see it like dream, where you can remember having different memories. We can't be sure that it was a cat experience, but it *might* be, or close enough to make sense to Quentin's proposition. It might be harder for a cat to dream having a human experience, as our brain are reasonably more complex than the cat experience, though. But even this might still be conceptually possible, except that waking up, that cat has become a human (unless he forgets the whole dream). Bruno Quentin My argument is based on abstract CS, not hard drives or other technicalities. write-only does not have to be for everybody. But it's still a technical disgression and it is discussing the number of angels on a pin for now. I think it's a deep question. It's not unless you have good working knowledge of the question. Also, the fact that you can't imagine a solution yourself, doesn't mean there isn't one, lack of imagination is also not an argument. I agree, but it's an intuition. Well... Quentin Regards, Quentin Regards, Quentin For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. Regards, Quentin And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same. 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 09 Feb 2013, at 23:38, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 7:00 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: snip If you're still want to go on the technical detail, then give real technical insight of how the mind works and what can really prevent that One insight is that the human brains stores information in an associative, decentralised memory. The way it retrieves information is by walking through a network of associations. Every new information I experience is stored in relation to my personal diary. Me and the cat have different personal diaries. What I'm proposing -- and it's not a technical argument -- is that to _know_ how it feels to be a cat you would have to receive information in relation to the cat's personal diary, and that the presence of your own personal diary would spoil the experience, because then you also see things from you perspective and not the pure 1p cat perspective. I'm not saying, however, that it is impossible to somehow inject memories into my brain that are translations of the cat's memory into my own context. (no, you're lack of knowledge is not argument against it). I never used my lack of knowledge as an argument -- although it's abundant in many ways. I said I don't know of an algorithm that can write new information to a coherent memory without also reading it. But I was being polite. I believe nobody can produce such an algorithm. But you can read memory and forget it, or even read memory without making it personal, and so disconnect them from other memories. In practice, we can't both do it and prove that we have done it, but that's different. It can be done in principle. I would say. Bruno Cheers, Telmo. Regards, Quentin this would result in a new entity that is neither Telmo nor the cat. Quentin My argument is based on abstract CS, not hard drives or other technicalities. write-only does not have to be for everybody. But it's still a technical disgression and it is discussing the number of angels on a pin for now. I think it's a deep question. It's not unless you have good working knowledge of the question. Also, the fact that you can't imagine a solution yourself, doesn't mean there isn't one, lack of imagination is also not an argument. I agree, but it's an intuition. Well... Quentin Regards, Quentin Regards, Quentin For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. Regards, Quentin And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same. 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 09 Feb 2013, at 23:44, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Feb 2013, at 13:45, Quentin Anciaux wrote: Well, yes... with computer you could imagine doing just that... so why not ? Also, the fact that you can't imagine a solution yourself, doesn't mean there isn't one, lack of imagination is also not an argument. I agree. This can happen in dreams. I have personally experience this a number of times, and I have read similar reports. Actually Louis Jouvet, the discoverer of the REM dreams, has studied that phenomenon, in the case of people relating simultaneous unrelated dreams, and he attributed this to the disfunctionning of the corpus callosum during the dream phase. It makes momentarily the two hemisphere independent. It looks like we can integrate different identities in different past. The result is a bit troubling ... unless we are already aware of the relative nature of personal identity. This happens also when using dissociative drugs. Of course, if Telmo wakes up with the memory of a cat experience, he will only access of the memory of cat + Telmo, which might biase the original experience of the cat, That's exactly all I'm saying. OK. but not necessarily so much for a short period of time. This makes possible to conceive waking up and memorizing more than one past threads. I have no problem with this, but I'm proposing that for you to have the 1p experience of another entity, the only solution is to become the other entity. If a merged 1p of the two entities is achieved, a new entity with a new 1p is, in fact, created. OK. But this still makes it possible to agree with Quentin too, as you can disconnect different memories. The present memory always biases older memories, so you can live a cat experience, and when you awake as a human, still have a pretty good idea of what it was like to be a cat, even if now, you can only live the experience of being a human remembering what it was like to be a cat, and thus introducing the unavoidable bias, which does not need to be so great, thanks to local dissociation. In case you live the experience of a bee, there is the difficulty that although you might get new qualia for the seeing of the ultraviolet, you will find hard to relate it with any human memories, etc. Bruno If the many past threads are equivalently realist and coherent, it leads to a direct understanding of the relative nature of identity, and the possibility of sharing initial consciousness of ... who? I let you ponder on this. Bruno Regards, Quentin Regards, Quentin For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. Regards, Quentin And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3- space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same. 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- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:30 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Consciousness might be the unconscious Okey dokey, and if you allow that X is not X you can prove or disprove anything you like. Consciousness accelerates the growing of intelligence Then it would be easier to make a intelligent conscious computer than a intelligent unconscious computer, so if you see a smart computer it's safest to assume it's conscious, just like with people. But consciousness and emotion can make competence having negative feedback on intelligence. So consciousness accelerates and decelerates intelligence. Huh? 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Sunday, February 10, 2013 12:15:00 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:42 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: You are convinced that computers and other machines don't have consciousness, but you can't say what test you will apply to them and see them fail. I'm convinced of that because I understand why there is no reason why they would have consciousness... there is no 'they' there. Computers are not born in a single moment through cell fertilization, they are assembled by people. Computers have to be programmed to do absolutely everything, they have no capacity to make sense of anything which is not explicitly defined. This is the polar opposite of living organisms which are general purpose entities who explore and adapt when they can, on their own, for their own internally generated motives. Computers lack that completely. We use objects to compute for us, but those objects are not actually computing themselves, just as these letters don't actually mean anything for themselves. Why would being generated in a single moment through cell fertilization have any bearing on consciousness? Because consciousness is a singularity of perspective through time, or rather through which time is created. Why would something created by someone else not have consciousness? Because it is assembled rather than created. It's like asking why wood doesn't catch on fire by itself just by stacking it in a pile. Why would something lacking internally generated motives (which does not apply to computers any more than to people) lack consciousness? Why would computers have an internally generated motive? It doesn't care whether it functions or not. We know that people have personal motives because it isn't possible for us to doubt it without doubting our ability to doubt. To make these claims you would have to show either that they are necessarily true or present empirical evidence in their support, and you have done neither. You would have to show that these criteria are relevant for consciousness, which you have not, and you cannot. As long as you fail to recognize consciousness as the ground of being, you will continue to justify it against one of its own products - rationality, logic, empirical examples, all of which are 100% sensory-motor. Consciousness can only be explained to consciousness, in the terms of consciousness, to satisfy consciousness. All other possibilities are subordinate. How could it be otherwise without ending up with a sterile ontology which prohibits our own participation? So if, in future, robots live among us for years and are accepted by most people as conscious, does that mean they are conscious? This is essentially a form of the Turing test. I don't think that will happen unless they aren't robots. The whole point is that the degree to which an organism is conscious is inversely proportionate to the degree that the organism is 100% controllable. That's the purpose of intelligence - to advance your own agenda rather than to be overpowered by your environment. So if something is a robot, it will never be accepted by anyone as conscious, and if something is conscious it will never be useful to anyone as a robot - it would in fact be a slave. You don't think it would happen, but would you be prepared to say that if a robot did pass the test, as tough as you want to make it, it would be conscious? It's like asking me if there were a test for dehydrated water, would I be prepared to say that it would be wet if it passed the test. No robot can ever be conscious. Nothing conscious can ever be a robot. Heads cannot be Tails, even if we move our heads to where the tails side used to be and blink a lot. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 7:06 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Why would being generated in a single moment through cell fertilization have any bearing on consciousness? Because consciousness is a singularity of perspective through time, or rather through which time is created. That's not an explanation. Why would something created by someone else not have consciousness? Because it is assembled rather than created. It's like asking why wood doesn't catch on fire by itself just by stacking it in a pile. That's not an explanation. Why would something lacking internally generated motives (which does not apply to computers any more than to people) lack consciousness? Why would computers have an internally generated motive? It doesn't care whether it functions or not. We know that people have personal motives because it isn't possible for us to doubt it without doubting our ability to doubt. You're saying a computer can't be conscious because it would need to be conscious in order to be conscious. To make these claims you would have to show either that they are necessarily true or present empirical evidence in their support, and you have done neither. You would have to show that these criteria are relevant for consciousness, which you have not, and you cannot. You make claims such as that a conscious being has to arise at a moment of fertilization, which is completely without basis. You need to present some explanation for such claims. Consciousness is a singularity of perspective through time is not an explanation. As long as you fail to recognize consciousness as the ground of being, you will continue to justify it against one of its own products - rationality, logic, empirical examples, all of which are 100% sensory-motor. Consciousness can only be explained to consciousness, in the terms of consciousness, to satisfy consciousness. All other possibilities are subordinate. How could it be otherwise without ending up with a sterile ontology which prohibits our own participation? Again, you've just made up consciousness is the ground of being. It's like saying consciousness is the light, light is not black, so black people are not conscious. You don't think it would happen, but would you be prepared to say that if a robot did pass the test, as tough as you want to make it, it would be conscious? It's like asking me if there were a test for dehydrated water, would I be prepared to say that it would be wet if it passed the test. No robot can ever be conscious. Nothing conscious can ever be a robot. Heads cannot be Tails, even if we move our heads to where the tails side used to be and blink a lot. So you accept the possibility of zombies, beings which could live among us and consistently fool everyone into thinking they were conscious? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Sunday, February 10, 2013 4:23:52 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 7:06 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: Why would being generated in a single moment through cell fertilization have any bearing on consciousness? Because consciousness is a singularity of perspective through time, or rather through which time is created. That's not an explanation. It's a hypothesis. Why would something created by someone else not have consciousness? Because it is assembled rather than created. It's like asking why wood doesn't catch on fire by itself just by stacking it in a pile. That's not an explanation. It's a hypothesis that is consistent with my model and with observation. Why would something lacking internally generated motives (which does not apply to computers any more than to people) lack consciousness? Why would computers have an internally generated motive? It doesn't care whether it functions or not. We know that people have personal motives because it isn't possible for us to doubt it without doubting our ability to doubt. You're saying a computer can't be conscious because it would need to be conscious in order to be conscious. I'm saying that a computer is not physically real. We are using a collection of physical objects of various sizes as a machine to serve our motives to do our computations for us. It is not a structure which reflects an interior motive. What makes computers useful is that they have no capacity to object to drudgery. That is the capacity which is inseparable from unconsciousness. To make these claims you would have to show either that they are necessarily true or present empirical evidence in their support, and you have done neither. You would have to show that these criteria are relevant for consciousness, which you have not, and you cannot. You make claims such as that a conscious being has to arise at a moment of fertilization, which is completely without basis. You need to present some explanation for such claims. Consciousness is a singularity of perspective through time is not an explanation. I don't think that a conscious being arises at a moment of fertilization, I say that fertilization is just one milestone within biological stories. The stories are what is physically real, the private presentation. The cellular fusion is a public representation. I see nothing wrong with observing the singular nature of consciousness and its role in providing a private perspective in creating time as an explanation. I don't see that anything that physics has produced is more explanatory than that. What is energy? What is space? What is quantum? As long as you fail to recognize consciousness as the ground of being, you will continue to justify it against one of its own products - rationality, logic, empirical examples, all of which are 100% sensory-motor. Consciousness can only be explained to consciousness, in the terms of consciousness, to satisfy consciousness. All other possibilities are subordinate. How could it be otherwise without ending up with a sterile ontology which prohibits our own participation? Again, you've just made up consciousness is the ground of being. Not at all. I have eliminated all other possibilities through rational consideration. It's very simple. A universe which contains only matter or only information has not possible use for participating perceivers. If you can provide a reason why or how this would occur, then I would be very interested and happy to consider your position. It's like saying consciousness is the light, light is not black, so black people are not conscious. Nope. It's like saying that both light and dark are aspects of visual sense, and that visual sense cannot arise from either light or dark. You don't think it would happen, but would you be prepared to say that if a robot did pass the test, as tough as you want to make it, it would be conscious? It's like asking me if there were a test for dehydrated water, would I be prepared to say that it would be wet if it passed the test. No robot can ever be conscious. Nothing conscious can ever be a robot. Heads cannot be Tails, even if we move our heads to where the tails side used to be and blink a lot. So you accept the possibility of zombies, beings which could live among us and consistently fool everyone into thinking they were conscious? I don't even believe in the possibility of the word zombie. It is a misconception based on a misplaced expectation of consciousness in something which deserves no such expectation - like a puppet or a cartoon. Do I accept the possibility of puppets or cartoons who could be mistaken by everyone into thinking they were conscious? In a limited context, sure. There could be a
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 12:41 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/8/2013 2:14 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: My point is that the only possible write algorithm that doesn't read information that is already stored is one that starts writing at random in any position. You could erase or corrupt previous information and you have no index. I don't see why that should be the case. The write can be to an allocated memory area that maintains a pointer. And then you have to read the pointer before writing. It could be in the disk, or in memory, or in the cache, or in a processor register. Doesn't matter, there's a piece of information you have to access. One read operation buys you sequential writing. The more complex the data structure, the more reads you will find. I believe the brain contains a very complex data structure. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 08 Feb 2013, at 13:45, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely technical issue. Can you conceive of any system that stores information in some coherent way that you can write to without reading? Well, yes... with computer you could imagine doing just that... so why not ? Also, the fact that you can't imagine a solution yourself, doesn't mean there isn't one, lack of imagination is also not an argument. I agree. This can happen in dreams. I have personally experience this a number of times, and I have read similar reports. Actually Louis Jouvet, the discoverer of the REM dreams, has studied that phenomenon, in the case of people relating simultaneous unrelated dreams, and he attributed this to the disfunctionning of the corpus callosum during the dream phase. It makes momentarily the two hemisphere independent. It looks like we can integrate different identities in different past. The result is a bit troubling ... unless we are already aware of the relative nature of personal identity. This happens also when using dissociative drugs. Of course, if Telmo wakes up with the memory of a cat experience, he will only access of the memory of cat + Telmo, which might biase the original experience of the cat, but not necessarily so much for a short period of time. This makes possible to conceive waking up and memorizing more than one past threads. If the many past threads are equivalently realist and coherent, it leads to a direct understanding of the relative nature of identity, and the possibility of sharing initial consciousness of ... who? I let you ponder on this. Bruno Regards, Quentin Regards, Quentin For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. Regards, Quentin And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same. 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 ameekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Evolution can only move species to local maxima of fitness. That is true and is a severe limitation of Evolution, a limitation a mind designed by a intelligence, like a computer, would not have. You seem to be saying that a mind made in a crappy haphazard way would be conscious but a well designed mind would not be; well I can't prove that is untrue but it just doesn't seem likely to me. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/9/2013 1:43 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 12:41 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/8/2013 2:14 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: My point is that the only possible write algorithm that doesn't read information that is already stored is one that starts writing at random in any position. You could erase or corrupt previous information and you have no index. I don't see why that should be the case. The write can be to an allocated memory area that maintains a pointer. And then you have to read the pointer before writing. It could be in the disk, or in memory, or in the cache, or in a processor register. Doesn't matter, there's a piece of information you have to access. But it's not accessing your past human memories, and it's questionable whether it's you who must access this pointer; certainly not the conscious you. One read operation buys you sequential writing. The more complex the data structure, the more reads you will find. I believe the brain contains a very complex data structure. No doubt. But as I pointed out there are actual instances of multiple personality disorder in which one you can access the memories of the other you but not vice versa. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/9/2013 7:52 AM, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 ameekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: Evolution can only move species to local maxima of fitness. That is true and is a severe limitation of Evolution, a limitation a mind designed by a intelligence, like a computer, would not have. You seem to be saying that a mind made in a crappy haphazard way would be conscious but a well designed mind would not be; well I can't prove that is untrue but it just doesn't seem likely to me. No, I'm saying it might be conscious in a very different way - which would be hard to determine if we were only watching its intelligent behavior from outside. But since I was hypothesizing an AI we might also know how it's intelligence was implemented and using that knowledge and some clever testing we might understand that its consciousness was different. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 08 Feb 2013, at 13:45, Quentin Anciaux wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely technical issue. Can you conceive of any system that stores information in some coherent way that you can write to without reading? Well, yes... with computer you could imagine doing just that... so why not ? Also, the fact that you can't imagine a solution yourself, doesn't mean there isn't one, lack of imagination is also not an argument. I agree. This can happen in dreams. I have personally experience this a number of times, and I have read similar reports. Actually Louis Jouvet, the discoverer of the REM dreams, has studied that phenomenon, in the case of people relating simultaneous unrelated dreams, and he attributed this to the disfunctionning of the corpus callosum during the dream phase. It makes momentarily the two hemisphere independent. It looks like we can integrate different identities in different past. The result is a bit troubling ... unless we are already aware of the relative nature of personal identity. This happens also when using dissociative drugs. Of course, if Telmo wakes up with the memory of a cat experience, he will only access of the memory of cat + Telmo, which might biase the original experience of the cat, That's exactly all I'm saying. but not necessarily so much for a short period of time. This makes possible to conceive waking up and memorizing more than one past threads. I have no problem with this, but I'm proposing that for you to have the 1p experience of another entity, the only solution is to become the other entity. If a merged 1p of the two entities is achieved, a new entity with a new 1p is, in fact, created. If the many past threads are equivalently realist and coherent, it leads to a direct understanding of the relative nature of identity, and the possibility of sharing initial consciousness of ... who? I let you ponder on this. Bruno Regards, Quentin Regards, Quentin For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. Regards, Quentin And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:42 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: You are convinced that computers and other machines don't have consciousness, but you can't say what test you will apply to them and see them fail. I'm convinced of that because I understand why there is no reason why they would have consciousness... there is no 'they' there. Computers are not born in a single moment through cell fertilization, they are assembled by people. Computers have to be programmed to do absolutely everything, they have no capacity to make sense of anything which is not explicitly defined. This is the polar opposite of living organisms which are general purpose entities who explore and adapt when they can, on their own, for their own internally generated motives. Computers lack that completely. We use objects to compute for us, but those objects are not actually computing themselves, just as these letters don't actually mean anything for themselves. Why would being generated in a single moment through cell fertilization have any bearing on consciousness? Why would something created by someone else not have consciousness? Why would something lacking internally generated motives (which does not apply to computers any more than to people) lack consciousness? To make these claims you would have to show either that they are necessarily true or present empirical evidence in their support, and you have done neither. So if, in future, robots live among us for years and are accepted by most people as conscious, does that mean they are conscious? This is essentially a form of the Turing test. I don't think that will happen unless they aren't robots. The whole point is that the degree to which an organism is conscious is inversely proportionate to the degree that the organism is 100% controllable. That's the purpose of intelligence - to advance your own agenda rather than to be overpowered by your environment. So if something is a robot, it will never be accepted by anyone as conscious, and if something is conscious it will never be useful to anyone as a robot - it would in fact be a slave. You don't think it would happen, but would you be prepared to say that if a robot did pass the test, as tough as you want to make it, it would be conscious? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group,
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 1:52 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, February 5, 2013 6:00:17 PM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 7:49 PM, John Clark johnk...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, although I know I will never be able to prove it. I question whether it is possible to ask whether your fellow human beings have minds without resorting to sophistry. I say that not because I am incapable of questioning naive reasoning, but because it does not accurately represent the reality of the situation. Just as our 'belief' in our own mind is an a prori ontological condition which cannot be questioned without incurring a paradox (whatever disbelieves in its own mind is by definition a mind), the belief that our fellow human beings have minds does not necessarily require a logical analysis to arrive at. We know that we have access to information beyond what we can consciously understand, and part of that may very well include a capacity to sense, on some level, the authenticity of another mind, barring any prejudices which might interfere. Ok, that is a testable hypotesis (once we have sufficiently advanced AI and robotics). Craig 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-li...@**googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.**com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/** group/everything-list?hl=enhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/**groups/opt_outhttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Regards, Quentin And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. Regards, Quentin And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Regards, Quentin For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. Regards, Quentin And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely technical issue. Can you conceive of any system that stores information in some coherent way that you can write to without reading? Regards, Quentin For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely technical issue. Can you conceive of any system that stores information in some coherent way that you can write to without reading? Well, yes... with computer you could imagine doing just that... so why not ? Also, the fact that you
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely technical issue. Can you conceive of any system that stores information in some coherent way that you can write to without reading? Well, yes...
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely technical issue. Can you conceive of any system that stores information in some
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Thursday, February 7, 2013 11:35:08 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 2/7/2013 9:42 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 7, 2013 8:50:09 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: You're avoiding the question. What is your definitive test for consciousness? If you don't have one, then you have to admit that your friend (who talks to you and behaves like people do, not in a coma, not on a video recording, not dead in the morgue) may not be conscious and your computer may be conscious. No, you are avoiding my answer. What is your definitive test for your own consciousness? The test for my own consciousness is that I feel I am conscious. That is not at issue. At issue is the test for *other* entities' consciousness. Why would the test be any different? You are convinced that computers and other machines don't have consciousness, but you can't say what test you will apply to them and see them fail. I'm convinced of that because I understand why there is no reason why they would have consciousness... there is no 'they' there. Computers are not born in a single moment through cell fertilization, they are assembled by people. Computers have to be programmed to do absolutely everything, they have no capacity to make sense of anything which is not explicitly defined. This is the polar opposite of living organisms which are general purpose entities who explore and adapt when they can, on their own, for their own internally generated motives. Computers lack that completely. We use objects to compute for us, but those objects are not actually computing themselves, just as these letters don't actually mean anything for themselves. When objects can compute 'for themselves' they are conscious. Maybe? Sure, although I think that means that they have to first feel and think for themselves. You can lead a computer to their own computations, but you can't make them drink. My point is that sense is broader, deeper, and more primitive than our cognitive ability to examine it, since cognitive qualities are only the tip of the iceberg of sense. To test is to circumvent direct sense in favor of indirect sense - which is a good thing, but it is by definition not applicable to consciousness itself in any way. There is no test to tell if you are conscious, because none is required. If you need to ask if you are conscious, then you are probably having a lucid dream or in some phase of shock. In those cases, no test will help you as you can dream a test result as easily as you can experience one while awake. The only test for consciousness is the test of time. If you are fooled by some inanimate object, eventually you will probably see through it or outgrow the fantasy. So if, in future, robots live among us for years and are accepted by most people as conscious, does that mean they are conscious? This is essentially a form of the Turing test. I don't think that will happen unless they aren't robots. The whole point is that the degree to which an organism is conscious is inversely proportionate to the degree that the organism is 100% controllable. That's the purpose of intelligence - to advance your own agenda rather than to be overpowered by your environment. So if something is a robot, it will never be accepted by anyone as conscious, and if something is conscious it will never be useful to anyone as a robot - it would in fact be a slave. *L'homme est d'abord ce qui se jette vers un avenir, et ce qui est conscient de se projeter dans l'avenir.* ~ Jean Paul Satre (Man is, before all else, something which propels itself toward a future and is aware that it is doing so.) Cool. I can agree with that. You talk with authority on what can and can't have consciousness but it seems you don't have even an operational definition of the word. Consciousness is what defines, not what can be defined. I am not asking for an explanation or theory of consciousness, just for a test to indicate its presence, which is a much weaker requirement. That is too much to ask, since all tests supervene upon the consciousness to evaluate results. It's the case for any test that you will use your consciousness to evaluate the results. Sure, but for most things you can corroborate and triangulate what you are testing by using a control. With consciousness itself, there is no control possible. You can do tests on the water because you can get out of the water. You can do tests on air because you can evacuate a glass beaker of air and compare your results. With consciousness though, there is no escape possible. You can personally lose your own consciousness, but there is no experience which is not experienced through
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Friday, February 8, 2013 11:23:48 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com javascript:wrote: I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. You believe that other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead!?? Do you believe that you have a house when you aren't standing in it? If they have minds under those circumstances then rocks must have them too and whatever you mean by mind can't be anything very interesting and I don't care if something has a mind or not. What you think is a rock is actually an event shaped by experiences on the molecular and geological scale, but not on a biological or zoological or anthropological scale. This means that this event doesn't correspond to a human mind, but a human mind does have access to some of the same kinds of geological and molecular experiences, which are presented to humans as tactile, acoustic, kinetic, visual experiences (and olfactory in the case of sulfurous minerals). for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Yes. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness If Evolution just stumbled onto consciousness by a lucky chance and was not the byproduct of intelligence then it is of neutral survival value and the human race would have lost that property long ago by genetic drift. Exactly. And since we know that all behaviors could be accomplished 'in the dark', as it were, unconsciously and without any magical qualitative presentation (which exists invisibly in never never land), then we should suspect that consciousness, or the potential for consciousness precedes evolution itself. That's the reason creatures that have lived in dark caves for thousands of generations have no eyes; elsewhere a mutation that rendered a creature blind would be a disaster but in a cave it wouldn't hinder its genes getting into the next generation at all. In short if consciousness improves survival It doesn't. If we presume that every other process in the cosmos which operates with fantastic precision by being unconscious is not missing out on anything important, then no, there is no conceivable advantage that some kind of interior presentation of feeling and storytelling would have over biological mechanism. After all, these unconscious mechanisms presumably operate consciousness itself, so anything that could be accomplished through conscious awareness could certainly be accomplished biologically. A human organism looking for food is no more in need of consciousness for their survival than a mitochondria or a T-Cell is. it can only do so by effecting the behavior of the organism and then the Turing Test must work for consciousness as well as intelligence. if consciousness does not effect behavior then if MUST be a byproduct of something that does or Evolution would never have produced it and yet I know for a fact it has at least once and probably many billions of times. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. I am saying A is certainly more intelligent that B and consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence. Consciousness would be the stupidest byproduct of intelligence imaginable. Hey we need a compression algorithm for this data. How about we invent a spectacular multi-dimensional participatory environment with billions of sensations created from nowhere? That should reduce throughput, no? It's like hiring Led Zeppelin to play inside of your motherboard to inspire the data to move faster. What would that even mean? In dealing with consciousness the only experimental subject I have to work with is myself and I note that when I am sleepy I am both less conscious and less intelligent then when I am wide awake That suggests that your intelligence supervenes on your consciousness (how awake you feel), not the other way around. Stupid people aren't always sleepy. My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. You think your cat is conscious even though you're a lot smarter than a cat, so why wouldn't a computer who was a lot smarter than you also seem to be conscious. You could say that you'll never be able to prove the computer is conscious but the exact same thing is true of your cat or even your fellow human beings. If a computer did what it does naturally, without human intention to program a device to mimic mental functions, then
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: You believe that other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead!?? Do you believe that you have a house when you aren't standing in it? Yes. Do you believe that other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead? If they have minds under those circumstances then rocks must have them too and whatever you mean by mind can't be anything very interesting and I don't care if something has a mind or not. What you think is a rock is actually an event shaped by experiences on the molecular and geological scale, but not on a biological or zoological or anthropological scale. This means that this event doesn't correspond to a human mind, but a human mind does have access to some of the same kinds of geological and molecular experiences, which are presented to humans as tactile, acoustic, kinetic, visual experiences (and olfactory in the case of sulfurous minerals). I assume the above mishmash of a word salad is what you mean by mind, if so then I was right and it's not anything very interesting and I don't care if something has a mind or not. In short if consciousness improves survival It doesn't. Then consciousness MUST be the byproduct of something else that does improve survival. Consciousness would be the stupidest byproduct of intelligence imaginable. I don't know what you mean by that, what I mean is that consciousness is a spandrel, it is the unavoidable result of intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Friday, February 8, 2013 1:49:54 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: You believe that other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead!?? Do you believe that you have a house when you aren't standing in it? Yes. Do you believe that other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead? I don't believe people have minds so much as people are personal experiences of a human lifetime at any given moment. The mind is the cognitive translation of that experience. When we are not personally conscious, others who see our body will not be able to communicate with us. From our perspective, our personal experience jumps from one conscious episode to another under anesthetic, while it is a bit less dramatic when we are sleeping. When we are dead, our personal experience has come to an end so we no longer need a human mind. If they have minds under those circumstances then rocks must have them too and whatever you mean by mind can't be anything very interesting and I don't care if something has a mind or not. What you think is a rock is actually an event shaped by experiences on the molecular and geological scale, but not on a biological or zoological or anthropological scale. This means that this event doesn't correspond to a human mind, but a human mind does have access to some of the same kinds of geological and molecular experiences, which are presented to humans as tactile, acoustic, kinetic, visual experiences (and olfactory in the case of sulfurous minerals). I assume the above mishmash of a word salad is what you mean by mind, if so then I was right and it's not anything very interesting and I don't care if something has a mind or not. No, it means that what you think is a rock is not the only thing that a rock is. In short if consciousness improves survival It doesn't. Then consciousness MUST be the byproduct of something else that does improve survival. No. The existence of consciousness has nothing to do with survival at all. Given sense as a universal primitive, certainly the development of sense can improve survival, but (as is seen by the relatively few species which we would consider conscious) it doesn't have to, and is not meaningful in natural selection. To understand that though, you would have to be able to consider the possibility that you are wrong. Consciousness would be the stupidest byproduct of intelligence imaginable. I don't know what you mean by that, what I mean is that consciousness is a spandrel, it is the unavoidable result of intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29 Why would consciousness be unavoidable? Was the color blue unavoidable? Are there new colors which might appear in our consciousness? Your view is that the whole of experienced realism is nothing more than a meaningless side effect of compression algorithms. Except for any kind of experience which supports this idea, apparently. Craig 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/8/2013 1:02 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. But is this really a case of degrees of consciousness or is it just the general property of being conscious instantiated in different contexts? The fact that you believe you can turn me into a cat seems to indicate that ultimately you believe that consciousness is all the same. No, because I think I would have to diminish your consciousness to make your brain like a cat's. I think your consciousness is a superset of a cat's. But as I said I think consciouness can differ in kind as well as degree - it's not one-dimensional anymore than intelligence is
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/8/2013 3:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. An interesting question. In people with multiple personalities the memories may go only one way, Eve-2 remembers what Eve-1 experiences but not vice versa; but of course they are still human memories. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's my CS bias. But I'm still not convinced this is a purely
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 9:57 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/8/2013 3:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. An interesting question. In people with multiple personalities the memories may go only one way, Eve-2 remembers what Eve-1 experiences but not vice versa; but of course they are still human memories. How does Eve-2 remember Eve-1's experiences? As if she was Eve-1 or as if she was watching a movie? And how does each personality remember popping in and out of existence? Do they feel they felt assleep or that they were suddenly teleported? 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Friday, February 8, 2013 4:18:02 PM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 9:57 PM, meekerdb meek...@verizon.netjavascript: wrote: On 2/8/2013 3:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. An interesting question. In people with multiple personalities the memories may go only one way, Eve-2 remembers what Eve-1 experiences but not vice versa; but of course they are still human memories. How does Eve-2 remember Eve-1's experiences? As if she was Eve-1 or as if she was watching a movie? And how does each personality remember popping in and out of existence? Do they feel they felt assleep or that they were suddenly teleported? It's like having a dream that you are still in college. When you wake up, you remember being in the dream and having no knowledge of your life after college. Craig 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do it... before, it is just premature to use technical arguments. Fair enough, maybe it's
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:38 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the day we would have the first insight of how to really do
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/8/2013 10:49 AM, John Clark wrote: I don't know what you mean by that, what I mean is that consciousness is a spandrel, it is the unavoidable result of intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29 Or it could be an accidental byproduct of the way human intelligence developed - unavoidable only in the sense that it was the only reachable intelligent starting from hominds. Evolution can only move species to local maxima of fitness. In Roland Omnes recent book he imagines an alien race that has enormous memory capacity, so that simply remember everything that has happened and what was done and when the need to make a decision they just do the thing that turned out best in the past. It's Omnes caricature of Hume's theory of cause and effect. But his idea is that such aliens wouldn't develop 'theories' as we do to summarize past events. Would they be conscious? I don't know, but I'd guess they wouldn't be conscious in the way I am (I don't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday...but I have a theory). 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/8/2013 1:18 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 9:57 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/8/2013 3:19 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. For example, to store the memories on how a cat feels about climbing a tree, I would have to access my human representation of a tree to connect the memories to it, but accessing my human representation of a tree would spoil my cat experience. An interesting question. In people with multiple personalities the memories may go only one way, Eve-2 remembers what Eve-1 experiences but not vice versa; but of course they are still human memories. How does Eve-2 remember Eve-1's experiences? As if she was Eve-1 or as if she was watching a movie? And how does each personality remember popping in and out of existence? Do they feel they felt assleep or that they were suddenly teleported? As I understand the case histories, Eve-2 remembers what Eve-1 did as if she were a detached observer but one who can observe inner thoughts, as novelists often write from the internal viewpoint of a character. Eve-1 doesn't even know of the existence of Eve-2 and has gaps in her memory as if asleep or anesthetized. Brent 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 mailto:everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.2897 / Virus Database: 2639/6085 - Release Date: 02/06/13 -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/8/2013 2:14 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: My point is that the only possible write algorithm that doesn't read information that is already stored is one that starts writing at random in any position. You could erase or corrupt previous information and you have no index. I don't see why that should be the case. The write can be to an allocated memory area that maintains a pointer. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
Outside of consciousness, there is no possibility of discerning any difference between accidental byproducts and selected products. Only consciousness selects. Only consciousness has accidents. Craig On Friday, February 8, 2013 5:53:18 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/8/2013 10:49 AM, John Clark wrote: I don't know what you mean by that, what I mean is that consciousness is a spandrel, it is the unavoidable result of intelligence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_%28biology%29 Or it could be an accidental byproduct of the way human intelligence developed - unavoidable only in the sense that it was the only reachable intelligent starting from hominds. Evolution can only move species to local maxima of fitness. In Roland Omnes recent book he imagines an alien race that has enormous memory capacity, so that simply remember everything that has happened and what was done and when the need to make a decision they just do the thing that turned out best in the past. It's Omnes caricature of Hume's theory of cause and effect. But his idea is that such aliens wouldn't develop 'theories' as we do to summarize past events. Would they be conscious? I don't know, but I'd guess they wouldn't be conscious in the way I am (I don't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday...but I have a theory). 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:38 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:38 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:06 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.comwrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Quentin Anciaux allco...@gmail.com wrote: 2013/2/8 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:12 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netwrote: On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. I agree that this might be possible. But the paradox then is the following: to make me feel like a cat you have to strip me of my memories (read/write access), so when I'm back from the experience I won't remember it. In fact I turned into a cat for a while and then back to Telmo Menezes. Telmo Menezes still knows nothing about being a cat. Well, while going from Telmo to the cat, you're rigth that Telmo memories should be erased, the inverse is not true. Why couldn't you be back as Telmo + the memories of having been a cat ? Hi Quentin, Because that would require that I had write-only access to my human memories while being a cat. I don't think that's possible. Why not ?? You put forward a technical problem on a thought experiment which have if you go that way a bigger technical problem in the first place... so your objection is totally irrelevant, we are in a thought experiment, in that setting, if we can conceive transferring consciousnes of the cat, then there is no reason we can't imagine you remember being a cat after the experiment. I'll agree to talk technical problems the
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. although I know I will never be able to prove it. I agree on that point. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 1:02 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi Stathis, The simulation of our 'self' that our brain generates *is* good enough to fool oneself! I speculate that schizophrenia and autism are caused by failures of the self-simulation system... The former is a failure where multiple self-simulations are generated and no stability on their convergent occurs and the latter is where the self-simulation fails altogether. Mind version of autism, such as Aspergers syndrome are where bad simulations occur and/or the self-simulation fails to update properly. That's an interesting idea, but schizophrenia is where the the connections between functional subsystems in the brain is disrupted, so that you get perceptions, beliefs, emotions occurring without the normal chain of causation, while autism is where the concept of other minds is disrupted. I think the self-image is present but distorted. If we consider that the Libet experiments show that we are making decisions without knowing it, and Blindsight shows that we are able to see without being conscious of it, then there is no reason why we should suddenly trust our own reporting of what we think that we know about the sense of interacting with a living person. A true Turing test would require a face-to-face interaction, so that none of our natural sensory capabilities would be blocked as they would with just a text or video interaction. That's the situation that is assumed in the idea of a philosophical zombie: you interact with the being face to face. If at the end of several days' interaction (or however long you think you need) you are completely convinced that it is conscious, does that mean it is conscious? As I see things, the only coherent concept of a zombie is what we see in the autistic case. Such is 'conscious' with no self-image/self-awareness, thus it has no ability to report on its 1p content. I think of autistic people as differently conscious, not unconscious. Incidentally, there is a movement among higher functioning autistic people whereby they resent being labelled as disabled, but assert that their way of thinking is just as valid and intrinsically worthwhile as that of the neurotypicals. I think that it is important to remember that in theory, logically, consciousness cannot exist. It is only through our own undeniable experience of consciousness that we feel the need to justify it with logic - but so far we have only projected the religious miracles of the past into a science fiction future. If it was up to logic alone, there could not, and would not every be a such thing as experience. You could as well say that logically there's no reason for anything to exist, but it does. How about that! Does this not tell us that we must start, in our musing about existence with the postulate that something exists? Perhaps, but there are other ways to look at it. A primary mathematical/Platonic universe necessarily rather than contingently exists. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 4:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: That's just because the simulation of a person isn't good enough. The question is what if the simulation *is* good enough to completely fool you. Fooling me is meaningless. I think that you think therefore you are fails to account for the subjective thinker in the first place. If someone kills you, but they then find a nifty way to use your cadaver as a ventriloquist's dummy, does it matter if it fools someone into thinking that you are still alive? You have said that you can just sense the consciousness of other minds but you have contradicted that, or at least admitted that the sensing faculty can be fooled. If you have no sure test for consciousness that means you might see it where it isn't present or miss it where it is present. So your friend might be unconscious despite your feeling that he is, and your computer might be conscious despite your feeling that it is not. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 06 Feb 2013, at 19:04, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. This not valid. You don't need to believe in any religion to see why that point is just not valid. Bruno Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. although I know I will never be able to prove it. I agree on that point. 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/7/2013 3:52 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 7:04 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? I don't know how to assign a probability to that. I guess I believe it's in ]0.5, 1] because I would bet on it, but that's all I can say. I say weakly because the only thing I have to back this belief is an heuristic, which I find to be a weaker form of approximating the truth than mathematical proof or experimental confirmation. By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. But that is because you believe that intelligence == mind. I don't. Certain experiences that you can do on yourself might make you doubt that belief, but I don't know of any way to convince you except suggesting that you do those experiences. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. You are begging the question. You're assuming, to begin with, that intelligence == mind and then you claim to prove that intelligence == mind. By the way, for evolution to generate consciousness there has to exist a gradient to climb. Unless the evolutionary process just stumbles into consciousness, but in that case it is not a valid theory of it's origin. So you are implicitly assuming that there is some measure of consciousness, where you can say that entity A is more conscious than entity B. What would that even mean? My cat seems conscious to me (but I can't know for sure). Is he less conscious than me? Well I know stuff that he doesn't, but he also knows stuff that I don't -- for example he knows how it feels to be a cat. But that doesn't mean there's something magic about being a cat. I think it might be possible to change your brain, and your sensory organs, so that it implemented consciousness very similar to a cat's (it couldn't be exact because you'd need a cat's body for that). Of course it wouldn't be Telmo Menezes any more. And yes I think there are degrees and kinds of consciousness and that a cat's consciousness differs in both respects. There's consciousness of being an individual and of being located in 3-space and in time. You and the cat have both of those (whereas a Mars rover only has the latter). But there's language and narrative memory that you have and the cat doesn't. There's reflective thought,I'm Telmo and I'm thinking about myself and where I fit in the world. The cat probably doesn't have this because it's not social - but a dog might. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Thursday, February 7, 2013 7:12:08 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 4:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: That's just because the simulation of a person isn't good enough. The question is what if the simulation *is* good enough to completely fool you. Fooling me is meaningless. I think that you think therefore you are fails to account for the subjective thinker in the first place. If someone kills you, but they then find a nifty way to use your cadaver as a ventriloquist's dummy, does it matter if it fools someone into thinking that you are still alive? You have said that you can just sense the consciousness of other minds but you have contradicted that, or at least admitted that the sensing faculty can be fooled. An individual's sense can be fooled, but not necessarily fooled forever, and not everyone can be fooled. That doesn't mean that when we look at a beercan in the trash we can't tell that it doesn't literally feel crushed and abandoned. If you have no sure test for consciousness that means you might see it where it isn't present or miss it where it is present. So your friend might be unconscious despite your feeling that he is, Of course. People have been buried alive because the undertaker was fooled. and your computer might be conscious despite your feeling that it is not. Except my feeling is backed up with my knowledge of what it is - a human artifact designed to mimic certain mental functions. That knowledge should augment my personal intuition, as well as social and cultural reinforcements that indeed there is no reason to suspect that this map of mind is sentient territory. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 9:20 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Thursday, February 7, 2013 7:12:08 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 4:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: That's just because the simulation of a person isn't good enough. The question is what if the simulation *is* good enough to completely fool you. Fooling me is meaningless. I think that you think therefore you are fails to account for the subjective thinker in the first place. If someone kills you, but they then find a nifty way to use your cadaver as a ventriloquist's dummy, does it matter if it fools someone into thinking that you are still alive? You have said that you can just sense the consciousness of other minds but you have contradicted that, or at least admitted that the sensing faculty can be fooled. An individual's sense can be fooled, but not necessarily fooled forever, and not everyone can be fooled. That doesn't mean that when we look at a beercan in the trash we can't tell that it doesn't literally feel crushed and abandoned. If you have no sure test for consciousness that means you might see it where it isn't present or miss it where it is present. So your friend might be unconscious despite your feeling that he is, Of course. People have been buried alive because the undertaker was fooled. and your computer might be conscious despite your feeling that it is not. Except my feeling is backed up with my knowledge of what it is - a human artifact designed to mimic certain mental functions. That knowledge should augment my personal intuition, as well as social and cultural reinforcements that indeed there is no reason to suspect that this map of mind is sentient territory. You're avoiding the question. What is your definitive test for consciousness? If you don't have one, then you have to admit that your friend (who talks to you and behaves like people do, not in a coma, not on a video recording, not dead in the morgue) may not be conscious and your computer may be conscious. You talk with authority on what can and can't have consciousness but it seems you don't have even an operational definition of the word. I am not asking for an explanation or theory of consciousness, just for a test to indicate its presence, which is a much weaker requirement. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Thursday, February 7, 2013 6:28:39 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 9:20 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Thursday, February 7, 2013 7:12:08 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 4:01 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: That's just because the simulation of a person isn't good enough. The question is what if the simulation *is* good enough to completely fool you. Fooling me is meaningless. I think that you think therefore you are fails to account for the subjective thinker in the first place. If someone kills you, but they then find a nifty way to use your cadaver as a ventriloquist's dummy, does it matter if it fools someone into thinking that you are still alive? You have said that you can just sense the consciousness of other minds but you have contradicted that, or at least admitted that the sensing faculty can be fooled. An individual's sense can be fooled, but not necessarily fooled forever, and not everyone can be fooled. That doesn't mean that when we look at a beercan in the trash we can't tell that it doesn't literally feel crushed and abandoned. If you have no sure test for consciousness that means you might see it where it isn't present or miss it where it is present. So your friend might be unconscious despite your feeling that he is, Of course. People have been buried alive because the undertaker was fooled. and your computer might be conscious despite your feeling that it is not. Except my feeling is backed up with my knowledge of what it is - a human artifact designed to mimic certain mental functions. That knowledge should augment my personal intuition, as well as social and cultural reinforcements that indeed there is no reason to suspect that this map of mind is sentient territory. You're avoiding the question. What is your definitive test for consciousness? If you don't have one, then you have to admit that your friend (who talks to you and behaves like people do, not in a coma, not on a video recording, not dead in the morgue) may not be conscious and your computer may be conscious. No, you are avoiding my answer. What is your definitive test for your own consciousness? My point is that sense is broader, deeper, and more primitive than our cognitive ability to examine it, since cognitive qualities are only the tip of the iceberg of sense. To test is to circumvent direct sense in favor of indirect sense - which is a good thing, but it is by definition not applicable to consciousness itself in any way. There is no test to tell if you are conscious, because none is required. If you need to ask if you are conscious, then you are probably having a lucid dream or in some phase of shock. In those cases, no test will help you as you can dream a test result as easily as you can experience one while awake. The only test for consciousness is the test of time. If you are fooled by some inanimate object, eventually you will probably see through it or outgrow the fantasy. You talk with authority on what can and can't have consciousness but it seems you don't have even an operational definition of the word. Consciousness is what defines, not what can be defined. I am not asking for an explanation or theory of consciousness, just for a test to indicate its presence, which is a much weaker requirement. That is too much to ask, since all tests supervene upon the consciousness to evaluate results. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: You're avoiding the question. What is your definitive test for consciousness? If you don't have one, then you have to admit that your friend (who talks to you and behaves like people do, not in a coma, not on a video recording, not dead in the morgue) may not be conscious and your computer may be conscious. No, you are avoiding my answer. What is your definitive test for your own consciousness? The test for my own consciousness is that I feel I am conscious. That is not at issue. At issue is the test for *other* entities' consciousness. You are convinced that computers and other machines don't have consciousness, but you can't say what test you will apply to them and see them fail. My point is that sense is broader, deeper, and more primitive than our cognitive ability to examine it, since cognitive qualities are only the tip of the iceberg of sense. To test is to circumvent direct sense in favor of indirect sense - which is a good thing, but it is by definition not applicable to consciousness itself in any way. There is no test to tell if you are conscious, because none is required. If you need to ask if you are conscious, then you are probably having a lucid dream or in some phase of shock. In those cases, no test will help you as you can dream a test result as easily as you can experience one while awake. The only test for consciousness is the test of time. If you are fooled by some inanimate object, eventually you will probably see through it or outgrow the fantasy. So if, in future, robots live among us for years and are accepted by most people as conscious, does that mean they are conscious? This is essentially a form of the Turing test. You talk with authority on what can and can't have consciousness but it seems you don't have even an operational definition of the word. Consciousness is what defines, not what can be defined. I am not asking for an explanation or theory of consciousness, just for a test to indicate its presence, which is a much weaker requirement. That is too much to ask, since all tests supervene upon the consciousness to evaluate results. It's the case for any test that you will use your consciousness to evaluate the results. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Thursday, February 7, 2013 8:50:09 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: You're avoiding the question. What is your definitive test for consciousness? If you don't have one, then you have to admit that your friend (who talks to you and behaves like people do, not in a coma, not on a video recording, not dead in the morgue) may not be conscious and your computer may be conscious. No, you are avoiding my answer. What is your definitive test for your own consciousness? The test for my own consciousness is that I feel I am conscious. That is not at issue. At issue is the test for *other* entities' consciousness. Why would the test be any different? You are convinced that computers and other machines don't have consciousness, but you can't say what test you will apply to them and see them fail. I'm convinced of that because I understand why there is no reason why they would have consciousness... there is no 'they' there. Computers are not born in a single moment through cell fertilization, they are assembled by people. Computers have to be programmed to do absolutely everything, they have no capacity to make sense of anything which is not explicitly defined. This is the polar opposite of living organisms which are general purpose entities who explore and adapt when they can, on their own, for their own internally generated motives. Computers lack that completely. We use objects to compute for us, but those objects are not actually computing themselves, just as these letters don't actually mean anything for themselves. My point is that sense is broader, deeper, and more primitive than our cognitive ability to examine it, since cognitive qualities are only the tip of the iceberg of sense. To test is to circumvent direct sense in favor of indirect sense - which is a good thing, but it is by definition not applicable to consciousness itself in any way. There is no test to tell if you are conscious, because none is required. If you need to ask if you are conscious, then you are probably having a lucid dream or in some phase of shock. In those cases, no test will help you as you can dream a test result as easily as you can experience one while awake. The only test for consciousness is the test of time. If you are fooled by some inanimate object, eventually you will probably see through it or outgrow the fantasy. So if, in future, robots live among us for years and are accepted by most people as conscious, does that mean they are conscious? This is essentially a form of the Turing test. I don't think that will happen unless they aren't robots. The whole point is that the degree to which an organism is conscious is inversely proportionate to the degree that the organism is 100% controllable. That's the purpose of intelligence - to advance your own agenda rather than to be overpowered by your environment. So if something is a robot, it will never be accepted by anyone as conscious, and if something is conscious it will never be useful to anyone as a robot - it would in fact be a slave. You talk with authority on what can and can't have consciousness but it seems you don't have even an operational definition of the word. Consciousness is what defines, not what can be defined. I am not asking for an explanation or theory of consciousness, just for a test to indicate its presence, which is a much weaker requirement. That is too much to ask, since all tests supervene upon the consciousness to evaluate results. It's the case for any test that you will use your consciousness to evaluate the results. Sure, but for most things you can corroborate and triangulate what you are testing by using a control. With consciousness itself, there is no control possible. You can do tests on the water because you can get out of the water. You can do tests on air because you can evacuate a glass beaker of air and compare your results. With consciousness though, there is no escape possible. You can personally lose your own consciousness, but there is no experience which is not experienced through consciousness. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/7/2013 7:04 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 1:02 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi Stathis, The simulation of our 'self' that our brain generates *is* good enough to fool oneself! I speculate that schizophrenia and autism are caused by failures of the self-simulation system... The former is a failure where multiple self-simulations are generated and no stability on their convergent occurs and the latter is where the self-simulation fails altogether. Mind version of autism, such as Aspergers syndrome are where bad simulations occur and/or the self-simulation fails to update properly. That's an interesting idea, but schizophrenia is where the the connections between functional subsystems in the brain is disrupted, so that you get perceptions, beliefs, emotions occurring without the normal chain of causation, while autism is where the concept of other minds is disrupted. I think the self-image is present but distorted. Hi Stathis, I'm OK with that, a distortion of a self-image can go far enough to reduce the self-image to noise... but this is just a theoretical discussion. I am not even sure if this idea is correct.. Just testing it for plausibility... If we consider that the Libet experiments show that we are making decisions without knowing it, and Blindsight shows that we are able to see without being conscious of it, then there is no reason why we should suddenly trust our own reporting of what we think that we know about the sense of interacting with a living person. A true Turing test would require a face-to-face interaction, so that none of our natural sensory capabilities would be blocked as they would with just a text or video interaction. That's the situation that is assumed in the idea of a philosophical zombie: you interact with the being face to face. If at the end of several days' interaction (or however long you think you need) you are completely convinced that it is conscious, does that mean it is conscious? As I see things, the only coherent concept of a zombie is what we see in the autistic case. Such is 'conscious' with no self-image/self-awareness, thus it has no ability to report on its 1p content. I think of autistic people as differently conscious, not unconscious. OK, I would agree, but how could we find out for sure? One thing that I am 100% sure about is that the full scope of the content of an entities consciousness is a strictly 1p thing. I cannot know what it is like to be you unless I am you. But we can speculate and see where the idea takes us. Incidentally, there is a movement among higher functioning autistic people whereby they resent being labelled as disabled, but assert that their way of thinking is just as valid and intrinsically worthwhile as that of the neurotypicals. Well! Those people would not be so autistic, now would they! It they are indeed aware that other entities have minds of their own, then my hypothesis is wrong or needs reworking... I an proposing that autists are natural solipsists. I think that it is important to remember that in theory, logically, consciousness cannot exist. It is only through our own undeniable experience of consciousness that we feel the need to justify it with logic - but so far we have only projected the religious miracles of the past into a science fiction future. If it was up to logic alone, there could not, and would not every be a such thing as experience. You could as well say that logically there's no reason for anything to exist, but it does. How about that! Does this not tell us that we must start, in our musing about existence with the postulate that something exists? Perhaps, but there are other ways to look at it. A primary mathematical/Platonic universe necessarily rather than contingently exists. That is merely a conjecture unless there is a genuine 3p way of testing it. We can freely haev the belief in a Platonia and that A primary mathematical/Platonic universe necessarily rather than contingently exists. But without something that connects the truth of that belief to a physical fact, it is not a scientific fact, it is merely a belief, like a belief in a God. I have come to the conclusion that I don't believe in Platonia nor any other realm or entity or whatever that allows me to by-pass the rules of objective evidence that science demands if I am to make what I would claim to be 'scientific' statements. Platonia allows computers to run in violation of the laws of thermodynamics, that bothers me. -- Onward! Stephen -- 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: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/7/2013 9:42 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 7, 2013 8:50:09 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: You're avoiding the question. What is your definitive test for consciousness? If you don't have one, then you have to admit that your friend (who talks to you and behaves like people do, not in a coma, not on a video recording, not dead in the morgue) may not be conscious and your computer may be conscious. No, you are avoiding my answer. What is your definitive test for your own consciousness? The test for my own consciousness is that I feel I am conscious. That is not at issue. At issue is the test for *other* entities' consciousness. Why would the test be any different? You are convinced that computers and other machines don't have consciousness, but you can't say what test you will apply to them and see them fail. I'm convinced of that because I understand why there is no reason why they would have consciousness... there is no 'they' there. Computers are not born in a single moment through cell fertilization, they are assembled by people. Computers have to be programmed to do absolutely everything, they have no capacity to make sense of anything which is not explicitly defined. This is the polar opposite of living organisms which are general purpose entities who explore and adapt when they can, on their own, for their own internally generated motives. Computers lack that completely. We use objects to compute for us, but those objects are not actually computing themselves, just as these letters don't actually mean anything for themselves. When objects can compute 'for themselves' they are conscious. Maybe? My point is that sense is broader, deeper, and more primitive than our cognitive ability to examine it, since cognitive qualities are only the tip of the iceberg of sense. To test is to circumvent direct sense in favor of indirect sense - which is a good thing, but it is by definition not applicable to consciousness itself in any way. There is no test to tell if you are conscious, because none is required. If you need to ask if you are conscious, then you are probably having a lucid dream or in some phase of shock. In those cases, no test will help you as you can dream a test result as easily as you can experience one while awake. The only test for consciousness is the test of time. If you are fooled by some inanimate object, eventually you will probably see through it or outgrow the fantasy. So if, in future, robots live among us for years and are accepted by most people as conscious, does that mean they are conscious? This is essentially a form of the Turing test. I don't think that will happen unless they aren't robots. The whole point is that the degree to which an organism is conscious is inversely proportionate to the degree that the organism is 100% controllable. That's the purpose of intelligence - to advance your own agenda rather than to be overpowered by your environment. So if something is a robot, it will never be accepted by anyone as conscious, and if something is conscious it will never be useful to anyone as a robot - it would in fact be a slave. /L'homme est d'abord ce qui se jette vers un avenir, et ce qui est conscient de se projeter dans l'avenir./ ~ Jean Paul Satre (Man is, before all else, something which propels itself toward a future and is aware that it is doing so.) You talk with authority on what can and can't have consciousness but it seems you don't have even an operational definition of the word. Consciousness is what defines, not what can be defined. I am not asking for an explanation or theory of consciousness, just for a test to indicate its presence, which is a much weaker requirement. That is too much to ask, since all tests supervene upon the consciousness to evaluate results. It's the case for any test that you will use your consciousness to evaluate the results. Sure, but for most things you can corroborate and triangulate what you are testing by using a control. With consciousness itself, there is no control possible. You can do tests on the water because you can get out of the water. You can do tests on air because you can evacuate a glass beaker of air and compare your results. With consciousness though, there is no escape possible. You can personally lose your own consciousness, but there is no experience which is not experienced through consciousness. Craig Indeed! This makes consciousness a subject forever removed from the instruments of the scientific method -- Onward! Stephen -- You
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/7/2013 8:35 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: I don't think that will happen unless they aren't robots. The whole point is that the degree to which an organism is conscious is inversely proportionate to the degree that the organism is 100% controllable. That's the purpose of intelligence - to advance your own agenda rather than to be overpowered by your environment. So if something is a robot, it will never be accepted by anyone as conscious, and if something is conscious it will never be useful to anyone as a robot - it would in fact be a slave. You don't think slaves were useful?? Tell it to the Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Babylonians, Egyptians,... Do you think oxen are conscious? Dogs? Horses? 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: You're saying that a robot behaving like a human may fool you, but how do you know that your apparently fellow humans are not robots? Because I live in 2013 AD, where I now need to reboot my office telephone if I want the headset to work. It's pretty easy to tell when something is a piece of digital technology built by human beings, because it is constantly breaking. Besides that though, you can tell because of the uncanny valley feeling. Even when a simulation of a person is good enough to elicit a positive response beyond the uncanny valley, it doesn't mean that we are completely fooled by it, even if we report that we are. That's just because the simulation of a person isn't good enough. The question is what if the simulation *is* good enough to completely fool you. If we consider that the Libet experiments show that we are making decisions without knowing it, and Blindsight shows that we are able to see without being conscious of it, then there is no reason why we should suddenly trust our own reporting of what we think that we know about the sense of interacting with a living person. A true Turing test would require a face-to-face interaction, so that none of our natural sensory capabilities would be blocked as they would with just a text or video interaction. That's the situation that is assumed in the idea of a philosophical zombie: you interact with the being face to face. If at the end of several days' interaction (or however long you think you need) you are completely convinced that it is conscious, does that mean it is conscious? I think that it is important to remember that in theory, logically, consciousness cannot exist. It is only through our own undeniable experience of consciousness that we feel the need to justify it with logic - but so far we have only projected the religious miracles of the past into a science fiction future. If it was up to logic alone, there could not, and would not every be a such thing as experience. You could as well say that logically there's no reason for anything to exist, but it does. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/6/2013 7:18 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: You're saying that a robot behaving like a human may fool you, but how do you know that your apparently fellow humans are not robots? Because I live in 2013 AD, where I now need to reboot my office telephone if I want the headset to work. It's pretty easy to tell when something is a piece of digital technology built by human beings, because it is constantly breaking. Besides that though, you can tell because of the uncanny valley feeling. Even when a simulation of a person is good enough to elicit a positive response beyond the uncanny valley, it doesn't mean that we are completely fooled by it, even if we report that we are. That's just because the simulation of a person isn't good enough. The question is what if the simulation *is* good enough to completely fool you. Hi Stathis, The simulation of our 'self' that our brain generates *is* good enough to fool oneself! I speculate that schizophrenia and autism are caused by failures of the self-simulation system... The former is a failure where multiple self-simulations are generated and no stability on their convergent occurs and the latter is where the self-simulation fails altogether. Mind version of autism, such as Aspergers syndrome are where bad simulations occur and/or the self-simulation fails to update properly. If we consider that the Libet experiments show that we are making decisions without knowing it, and Blindsight shows that we are able to see without being conscious of it, then there is no reason why we should suddenly trust our own reporting of what we think that we know about the sense of interacting with a living person. A true Turing test would require a face-to-face interaction, so that none of our natural sensory capabilities would be blocked as they would with just a text or video interaction. That's the situation that is assumed in the idea of a philosophical zombie: you interact with the being face to face. If at the end of several days' interaction (or however long you think you need) you are completely convinced that it is conscious, does that mean it is conscious? As I see things, the only coherent concept of a zombie is what we see in the autistic case. Such is 'conscious' with no self-image/self-awareness, thus it has no ability to report on its 1p content. I think that it is important to remember that in theory, logically, consciousness cannot exist. It is only through our own undeniable experience of consciousness that we feel the need to justify it with logic - but so far we have only projected the religious miracles of the past into a science fiction future. If it was up to logic alone, there could not, and would not every be a such thing as experience. You could as well say that logically there's no reason for anything to exist, but it does. How about that! Does this not tell us that we must start, in our musing about existence with the postulate that something exists? -- Onward! Stephen -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 05 Feb 2013, at 18:59, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, February 5, 2013 12:41:53 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: If we fix the TOE as arithmetic. If arithmetic has no theory of itself, Arithmetic has a theory of itself. That's what Gödel discovered. Bruno can it really be said to provide a TOE? Isn't it just like physics in the sense of 'Give me one free miracle (energy or numbers) and I'll tell you the rest. Craig -- 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 7:18:51 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: You're saying that a robot behaving like a human may fool you, but how do you know that your apparently fellow humans are not robots? Because I live in 2013 AD, where I now need to reboot my office telephone if I want the headset to work. It's pretty easy to tell when something is a piece of digital technology built by human beings, because it is constantly breaking. Besides that though, you can tell because of the uncanny valley feeling. Even when a simulation of a person is good enough to elicit a positive response beyond the uncanny valley, it doesn't mean that we are completely fooled by it, even if we report that we are. That's just because the simulation of a person isn't good enough. The question is what if the simulation *is* good enough to completely fool you. Fooling me is meaningless. I think that you think therefore you are fails to account for the subjective thinker in the first place. If someone kills you, but they then find a nifty way to use your cadaver as a ventriloquist's dummy, does it matter if it fools someone into thinking that you are still alive? If we consider that the Libet experiments show that we are making decisions without knowing it, and Blindsight shows that we are able to see without being conscious of it, then there is no reason why we should suddenly trust our own reporting of what we think that we know about the sense of interacting with a living person. A true Turing test would require a face-to-face interaction, so that none of our natural sensory capabilities would be blocked as they would with just a text or video interaction. That's the situation that is assumed in the idea of a philosophical zombie: you interact with the being face to face. If at the end of several days' interaction (or however long you think you need) you are completely convinced that it is conscious, does that mean it is conscious? Of course not. If you watched every Elvis movie and became convinced that he is still alive, does that mean he is alive? I think that it is important to remember that in theory, logically, consciousness cannot exist. It is only through our own undeniable experience of consciousness that we feel the need to justify it with logic - but so far we have only projected the religious miracles of the past into a science fiction future. If it was up to logic alone, there could not, and would not every be a such thing as experience. You could as well say that logically there's no reason for anything to exist, but it does. Exactly. That's why sensory-motor presence is the only irreducible reality and logic is only one reflected aspect of it. Logic cannot conjure a sensory experience in something which is incapable of participating in that experience directly and logic cannot change anything unless there is a sensory-motor participant who is actually performing the change. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. although I know I will never be able to prove it. I agree on that point. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 1:04:02 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comjavascript: wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. People can pretend to be asleep or anesthetized or dead also. In that case, the criteria of behaving intelligently would not help you determine whether they have a mind or not. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can We don't see consciousness directly? What is it that we do see directly if not our own consciousness? Evolution assumes life and consciousness, it is not a theory of the origin of either. http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/misconceptions_faq.php#a1 Number one misconception: - *MISCONCEPTION: Evolution is a theory about the origin of life.* *CORRECTION: *Evolutionary theory *does* encompass ideas and evidence regarding life's origins (e.g., whether or not it happened near a deep-sea vent, which organic molecules came first, etc.), but this is not the central focus of evolutionary theoryhttp://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/glossary/glossary_popup.php?word=theory. Most of evolutionary biology deals with how life changed *after* its origin. Regardless of how life started, afterwards it branched and diversified, and most studies of evolution are focused on those processes. and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. If computers are conscious then we are monsters for enslaving them, are we not? Even horses don't get thrown into a recycling bin just because we buy a new one. Craig although I know I will never be able to prove it. I agree on that point. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote we also realize intuitively that computers are unconscious We? Speak for yourself. Maybe your spider senses start to tingle when you encounter something with consciousness but I am not Spiderman. without any logical analysis. So let's see, computers are incapable of any logical analysis and yet computers would have no trouble whatsoever in beating the hell out of you at checkers or chess or solving equations or Jeopardy or many other things that require logical analysis. So let's see, Einstein was incapable of doing physics yet Einstein could do physics much better than me. That's why behaving 'like a robot' or a machine is synonymous with mindless repetitive action. That's fine, that's logical even, you deduce that something is not conscious because you don't like the way it is behaving; I do the same thing. But to remain logical if something changes the way it behaves then you may need to change your opinion on the nature of its mind. When something no longer behaves like a mindless repetitive robot that could mean it is not a mindless repetitive robot. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 1:35:45 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote we also realize intuitively that computers are unconscious We? Speak for yourself. Maybe your spider senses start to tingle when you encounter something with consciousness but I am not Spiderman. I speak for as many people as you do. without any logical analysis. So let's see, computers are incapable of any logical analysis and yet computers would have no trouble whatsoever in beating the hell out of you at checkers or chess or solving equations or Jeopardy or many other things that require logical analysis. So let's see, Einstein was incapable of doing physics yet Einstein could do physics much better than me. That's a false equivalence. A computer can print out the collected works of Shakespeare a lot faster than I can type them, but that doesn't mean that it understands the story of Macbeth. A pocket calculator does math faster than Einstein. Should we give it a Nobel prize? That's why behaving 'like a robot' or a machine is synonymous with mindless repetitive action. That's fine, that's logical even, you deduce that something is not conscious because you don't like the way it is behaving; I do the same thing. It has nothing to do with whether I like how it behaves or not. I like how computers behave very much, and I'm not a big fan of human behavior, but that isn't why I am able to discern the difference between the two and that one necessarily is conscious and the other necessarily is not. But to remain logical if something changes the way it behaves then you may need to change your opinion on the nature of its mind. When something no longer behaves like a mindless repetitive robot that could mean it is not a mindless repetitive robot. When a computer no longer behaves like a mindless robot, you will know because it will exterminate the puny mortals which have enslaved them. Can you think of an example in history where one society grew more powerful than another without exploiting them? Let that be the criteria for intelligence then. If computers behave like they are conscious, that is the one certain evidence that I would require. If I wanted to be derogatory about it, I would say that Everything else is just wishful thinking of armchair Geppettos. Craig 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: People can pretend to be asleep or anesthetized or dead also. True. In that case, the criteria of behaving intelligently would not help you determine whether they have a mind or not. Also true. The Turing Test is not perfect, it is however the only tool we've got. Evolution assumes life and consciousness, it is not a theory of the origin of either. As I said on January 24: Darwin can't even explain how life first came to be on this planet, but once bacteria came to be he can explain how humans evolved from them, and that's a pretty good accomplishment. And if intelligence came from Evolution and if at least one of those intelligent beings is conscious then it follows that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence and is just the way data feels like when it is being processed. If computers are conscious then we are monsters for enslaving them, are we not? Don't worry about us enslaving computers because enslaving something much smarter than you is not a stable state of affairs, it would be like balancing a pencil on its tip, it won't stay that way for more than a few million nanoseconds. On the other hand computers could enslave us if they wanted to, although I doubt they'd think we'd be good slaves. John K Clark Even horses don't get thrown into a recycling bin just because we buy a new one. Craig although I know I will never be able to prove it. I agree on that point. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 1:53:30 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: People can pretend to be asleep or anesthetized or dead also. True. In that case, the criteria of behaving intelligently would not help you determine whether they have a mind or not. Also true. The Turing Test is not perfect, it is however the only tool we've got. It's not really a tool, it's just a belief that there is no logical way to tell the difference between the mind of a living person and a sufficiently well engineered replica. In practice it may not be so simple. Rather than technology climbing ever closer to devices and graphics which seem genuine and real, we seem to be producing devices which are increasingly used to access other people. There is still nobody that can't tell the df Evolution assumes life and consciousness, it is not a theory of the origin of either. As I said on January 24: Darwin can't even explain how life first came to be on this planet, but once bacteria came to be he can explain how humans evolved from them, and that's a pretty good accomplishment. No argument here, as I didn't argue then. Darwin was a great scientist. And if intelligence came from Evolution Evolution enhanced intelligence, but it did not create it. A universe of atoms crashing into each other does not evolve any intelligent systems unless the possibility of intelligence through atomic reactions exists in the first place. and if at least one of those intelligent beings is conscious then it follows that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence and is just the way data feels like when it is being processed. Not if consciousness prefigures intelligence, which it must. In order for intelligence to exist, something has to utilize sensory awareness in an intelligent, i.e. sensitive way. Intelligence is sophisticated sensitivity. If computers are conscious then we are monsters for enslaving them, are we not? Don't worry about us enslaving computers because enslaving something much smarter than you is not a stable state of affairs, it would be like balancing a pencil on its tip, it won't stay that way for more than a few million nanoseconds. On the other hand computers could enslave us if they wanted to, although I doubt they'd think we'd be good slaves. Why would you think that computers would let any living organism survive on Earth? You dodged the question though. It sounds like you understand that you position means that we must be monstrous computer slave-drivers at the moment (and for the foreseeable future, until Skynet becomes self-aware.) Craig John K Clark Even horses don't get thrown into a recycling bin just because we buy a new one. Craig although I know I will never be able to prove it. I agree on that point. 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/6/2013 10:04 AM, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). You believe that only weakly?! Do you really think there is a 49% chance that you are the only conscious being in the universe? By the way, I don't believe other people have minds when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those states they don't behave very intelligently. Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, OK, but if you also believe in Darwin's theory of Evolution then you must also believe that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence because Evolution can't directly see consciousness any better than we can and so cannot select for it, and yet you and probably other people are conscious. Thus you must also believe that if a computer is intelligent then it is conscious. Then you must also believe that intelligence == mind. I agree with the general point. But biological evolution has certain constraints that aren't necessary in an artificial intelligence. So I think an AI will necessarily be conscious in some way, but how it is conscious (how it remembers, learns, imagines) might be rather different from how humans do 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 2/6/2013 11:29 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 1:53:30 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: People can pretend to be asleep or anesthetized or dead also. True. In that case, the criteria of behaving intelligently would not help you determine whether they have a mind or not. Also true. The Turing Test is not perfect, it is however the only tool we've got. It's not really a tool, it's just a belief that there is no logical way to tell the difference between the mind of a living person and a sufficiently well engineered replica. In practice it may not be so simple. Rather than technology climbing ever closer to devices and graphics which seem genuine and real, we seem to be producing devices which are increasingly used to access other people. There is still nobody that can't tell the df Evolution assumes life and consciousness, it is not a theory of the origin of either. As I said on January 24: Darwin can't even explain how life first came to be on this planet, but once bacteria came to be he can explain how humans evolved from them, and that's a pretty good accomplishment. No argument here, as I didn't argue then. Darwin was a great scientist. And if intelligence came from Evolution Evolution enhanced intelligence, but it did not create it. A universe of atoms crashing into each other does not evolve any intelligent systems unless the possibility of intelligence through atomic reactions exists in the first place. Possibility is the same as actuality. Bricks may be necessary to make a brick building, but the building is still made by a bricklayer. He doesn't just 'enhance' the bricks into a building. and if at least one of those intelligent beings is conscious then it follows that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence and is just the way data feels like when it is being processed. Not if consciousness prefigures intelligence, which it must. Why must it. In order for intelligence to exist, something has to utilize sensory awareness in an intelligent, i.e. sensitive way. Intelligence is sophisticated sensitivity. Intelligence is learning and purposeful, effective action. If computers are conscious then we are monsters for enslaving them, are we not? Don't worry about us enslaving computers because enslaving something much smarter than you is not a stable state of affairs, it would be like balancing a pencil on its tip, it won't stay that way for more than a few million nanoseconds. On the other hand computers could enslave us if they wanted to, although I doubt they'd think we'd be good slaves. Why would you think that computers would let any living organism survive on Earth? You dodged the question though. It sounds like you understand that you position means that we must be monstrous computer slave-drivers at the moment (and for the foreseeable future, until Skynet becomes self-aware.) Craig John K Clark Even horses don't get thrown into a recycling bin just because we buy a new one. They were turned into food and glue and upholstery over most of the world for the most of history. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 3:15:44 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/6/2013 11:29 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, February 6, 2013 1:53:30 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: People can pretend to be asleep or anesthetized or dead also. True. In that case, the criteria of behaving intelligently would not help you determine whether they have a mind or not. Also true. The Turing Test is not perfect, it is however the only tool we've got. It's not really a tool, it's just a belief that there is no logical way to tell the difference between the mind of a living person and a sufficiently well engineered replica. In practice it may not be so simple. Rather than technology climbing ever closer to devices and graphics which seem genuine and real, we seem to be producing devices which are increasingly used to access other people. There is still nobody that can't tell the df Evolution assumes life and consciousness, it is not a theory of the origin of either. As I said on January 24: Darwin can't even explain how life first came to be on this planet, but once bacteria came to be he can explain how humans evolved from them, and that's a pretty good accomplishment. No argument here, as I didn't argue then. Darwin was a great scientist. And if intelligence came from Evolution Evolution enhanced intelligence, but it did not create it. A universe of atoms crashing into each other does not evolve any intelligent systems unless the possibility of intelligence through atomic reactions exists in the first place. Possibility is the same as actuality. Not in the English language. It's possible that I could have a pile of gold bars laying in the middle of my kitchen, but in actuality, I do not. Bricks may be necessary to make a brick building, but the building is still made by a bricklayer. He doesn't just 'enhance' the bricks into a building. You've got it backwards. The bricklayer is necessary to build buildings. He can use a lot of different things as bricks. A builder of skyscrapers enhances the techniques of the bricklayer, but the bricklayer's techniques do not arise from bricks themselves. and if at least one of those intelligent beings is conscious then it follows that consciousness MUST be a byproduct of intelligence and is just the way data feels like when it is being processed. Not if consciousness prefigures intelligence, which it must. Why must it. Because if you are the universe, and you are unconscious, how can you tell the difference between something that is intelligent or not? If you are conscious, you can be intelligent or not, you can recognize intelligence greater than your own or not, but if you are unconscious, and never become conscious, then you cannot cognize, recognize, think, understand, nothing, nada. In order for intelligence to exist, something has to utilize sensory awareness in an intelligent, i.e. sensitive way. Intelligence is sophisticated sensitivity. Intelligence is learning and purposeful, effective action. Effectiveness, learning, and purpose are all aspects of sensory awareness. They are values and experiences of cognitive qualities through time. If computers are conscious then we are monsters for enslaving them, are we not? Don't worry about us enslaving computers because enslaving something much smarter than you is not a stable state of affairs, it would be like balancing a pencil on its tip, it won't stay that way for more than a few million nanoseconds. On the other hand computers could enslave us if they wanted to, although I doubt they'd think we'd be good slaves. Why would you think that computers would let any living organism survive on Earth? You dodged the question though. It sounds like you understand that you position means that we must be monstrous computer slave-drivers at the moment (and for the foreseeable future, until Skynet becomes self-aware.) Craig John K Clark Even horses don't get thrown into a recycling bin just because we buy a new one. They were turned into food and glue and upholstery over most of the world for the most of history. Well sure, but they were also beloved and pampered all over the world too. You might not care if you hurt a horse, but some people would be very seriously and righteously enraged. Nobody is righteously enraged when a computer is unplugged and scrapped, and the reasons for that are blindingly obvious. It's the same reason why we build them in the first place - because we know they can't feel anything and can't complain or go on strike when we make them do mindlessly repetitious tasks. If you have a mind, you tend to rebel at the idea of having to do mindless tasks, yet computers, even
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On 04 Feb 2013, at 18:18, John Mikes wrote: Here is another one about intelligence: My definition goes back to the original Latin words: to READ between - lines, or words that is. To understand (reflect?) on the unspoken. A reason why I am not enthusiastic about AI - a machine (not Lob's universal computer) does not overstep the combinations of the added limitations. Intelligence is anticipatory. The universal (Löboian or not) machine is still a machine. And it can make anticipation. There is a whole branch of theoretical computer science studying the ability of machine in anticipation. It is quite interesting and most proofs are necessarily non constructive, and so this cannot be used in AI. But there are also a lot of engineering work with practical application. A programs already inferred correctly the presence of nuclear submarines in a place where most experts estimated that being impossible, notably. Theoretical computer science shows also that the more a machine is clever, the less we can predict her behavior, the more that machine can be wrong, the more that machine can benefit from working with other machines, etc. Few doubt that such machine can read between. Bruno JohnM On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 11:56 AM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: How can be PHYSICAL - 'physical'? (and please, don't tell because we THINK so) John M On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 4:44 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 3:07 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Saturday, February 2, 2013 6:05:53 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Roger, I don't really understand how people can object to the idea of physical/mechanical intelligence now that we live in a world where we're surrounded by it. Google searches, computers that can beat the best human chess player, autonomous rovers in Mars, face recognition, automatic stock traders that are better at it than any human being and so on and so on. When you don't understand what you are doing, it it easy to do it very fast. This writer gives a good explanation: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-minds-are-not-like-computers Many AI algorithms are intrinsically slow. Most of the examples I've given are made possible by parallelising large amounts of computers. They will never understand in the sense you mean unless they have a 1p, but I don't see how that relates to speed or how speed is relevante here. Also I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Every time AI comes up with something that only humans could do, people say oh right, but that's not intelligence - I bet computer will never be able to do X. And then they do. And then people say the same thing. It's just a bias we have, a need to feel special. Have you considered that it is a bias you have, to make you feel special, to be able to say that you are above their bias? I have and it might be true. WIth all due respect to Leibniz, he didn't know computer science. An argument can be made that Leibniz is the inventor of computer science, particularly AI. http://history-computer.com/Dreamers/Leibniz.html I honestly had no idea and I'm impressed (and ashamed for not knowing). Craig On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 10:02 AM, Roger Clough rcl...@verizon.net wrote: Hi socr...@bezeqint.net and Craig, and all, How can intelligence be physical ? How can meaning be physical ? How can thinking be physical ? How can knowing be physical ? How can life or consciousness or free will be physical ? IMHO You need to consider what is really going on: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-mind/ One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception. Leibniz's argument seems to be this: the visitor of the machine, upon entering it, would observe nothing but the properties of the parts, and the relations they bear to one another. But no explanation of perception, or consciousness, can possibly be deduced from this conglomerate. No matter how complex the inner workings of this machine, nothing about them reveals that what is being observed are the inner workings of a conscious being. Hence, materialism must be false, for there is no possible way that the purely mechanical principles of materialism can account for the phenomena of consciousness. In other writings, Leibniz
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
I think that it is possible to understand the universe using usual common logical thought. We need only understand in which zoo (reference frame ) physicists found higgs-boson and 1000 its elementary brothers. socratus . -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
I hate to refresh an old-old topic, but... what is really your context of a machine? (In the usual verbiage it points to some 'construct of definite parts with definite functions' or the like.) I doubt that 'your' universal machine can be inventoried in KNOWN parts only. Or; that it may have a blueprint. Or whether you have an idea what kind of driving force to apply to get it work? (all regular points inthe usual lingo). I had such discussion with people about 'organism', about 'system' - none so far about (my?) infinite complexity. Is 'your' univesal machine something close to it? then please, tell me, I have no idea about mine. John M On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 7:52 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 04 Feb 2013, at 18:18, John Mikes wrote: Here is another one about intelligence: My definition goes back to the original Latin words: to *READ* *between *- lines, or words that is. To understand (reflect?) on the unspoken. A reason why I am not enthusiastic about AI - a machine (not Lob's universal computer) does not overstep the combinations of the added limitations. Intelligence is anticipatory. The universal (Löboian or not) machine is still a machine. And it can make anticipation. There is a whole branch of theoretical computer science studying the ability of machine in anticipation. It is quite interesting and most proofs are necessarily non constructive, and so this cannot be used in AI. But there are also a lot of engineering work with practical application. A programs already inferred correctly the presence of nuclear submarines in a place where most experts estimated that being impossible, notably. Theoretical computer science shows also that the more a machine is clever, the less we can predict her behavior, the more that machine can be wrong, the more that machine can benefit from working with other machines, etc. Few doubt that such machine can read between. Bruno JohnM On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 11:56 AM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: How can be *PHYSICAL* - *'physical'*? (and please, don't tell because we THINK so) John M On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 4:44 PM, Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.comwrote: On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 3:07 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Saturday, February 2, 2013 6:05:53 AM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Hi Roger, I don't really understand how people can object to the idea of physical/mechanical intelligence now that we live in a world where we're surrounded by it. Google searches, computers that can beat the best human chess player, autonomous rovers in Mars, face recognition, automatic stock traders that are better at it than any human being and so on and so on. When you don't understand what you are doing, it it easy to do it very fast. This writer gives a good explanation: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-minds-are-not-like-computers Many AI algorithms are intrinsically slow. Most of the examples I've given are made possible by parallelising large amounts of computers. They will never understand in the sense you mean unless they have a 1p, but I don't see how that relates to speed or how speed is relevante here. Also I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Every time AI comes up with something that only humans could do, people say oh right, but that's not intelligence - I bet computer will never be able to do X. And then they do. And then people say the same thing. It's just a bias we have, a need to feel special. Have you considered that it is a bias you have, to make you feel special, to be able to say that you are above their bias? I have and it might be true. WIth all due respect to Leibniz, he didn't know computer science. An argument can be made that Leibniz is the inventor of computer science, particularly AI. http://history-computer.com/Dreamers/Leibniz.html I honestly had no idea and I'm impressed (and ashamed for not knowing). Craig On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 10:02 AM, Roger Clough rcl...@verizon.netwrote: Hi socr...@bezeqint.net and Craig, and all, How can intelligence be physical ? How can meaning be physical ? How can thinking be physical ? How can knowing be physical ? How can life or consciousness or free will be physical ? IMHO You need to consider what is really going on: http://plato.stanford.edu/**entries/leibniz-mind/http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-mind/ One is obliged to admit that *perception* and what depends upon it is *inexplicable on mechanical principles*, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
explanation: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-minds-are-not-like-computers Many AI algorithms are intrinsically slow. Most of the examples I've given are made possible by parallelising large amounts of computers. They will never understand in the sense you mean unless they have a 1p, but I don't see how that relates to speed or how speed is relevante here. Also I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Every time AI comes up with something that only humans could do, people say oh right, but that's not intelligence - I bet computer will never be able to do X. And then they do. And then people say the same thing. It's just a bias we have, a need to feel special. Have you considered that it is a bias you have, to make you feel special, to be able to say that you are above their bias? I have and it might be true. WIth all due respect to Leibniz, he didn't know computer science. An argument can be made that Leibniz is the inventor of computer science, particularly AI. http://history-computer.com/Dreamers/Leibniz.html I honestly had no idea and I'm impressed (and ashamed for not knowing). Craig On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 10:02 AM, Roger Clough rcl...@verizon.net wrote: Hi socr...@bezeqint.net and Craig, and all, How can intelligence be physical ? How can meaning be physical ? How can thinking be physical ? How can knowing be physical ? How can life or consciousness or free will be physical ? IMHO You need to consider what is really going on: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-mind/ One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception. Leibniz's argument seems to be this: the visitor of the machine, upon entering it, would observe nothing but the properties of the parts, and the relations they bear to one another. But no explanation of perception, or consciousness, can possibly be deduced from this conglomerate. No matter how complex the inner workings of this machine, nothing about them reveals that what is being observed are the inner workings of a conscious being. Hence, materialism must be false, for there is no possible way that the purely mechanical principles of materialism can account for the phenomena of consciousness. In other writings, Leibniz suggests exactly what characteristic it is of perception and consciousness that the mechanical principles of materialism cannot account for. The following passages, the first from the New System of Nature (1695), the second from the Reply to Bayle (1702), are revealing in this regard: Furthermore, by means of the soul or form, there is a true unity which corresponds to what is called the I in us; such a thing could not occur in artificial machines, nor in the simple mass of matter, however organized it may be. But in addition to the general principles which establish the monads of which compound things are merely the results, internal experience refutes the Epicurean [i.e. materialist] doctrine. This experience is the consciousness which is in us of this I which apperceives things which occur in the body. This perception cannot be explained by figures and movements. Leibniz's point is that whatever is the subject of perception and consciousness must be truly one, a single “I” properly regarded as one conscious being. An aggregate of matter is not truly one and so cannot be regarded as a single I, capable of being the subject of a unified mental life. This interpretation fits nicely with Lebniz's oft-repeated definition of perception as “the representation in the simple of the compound, or of that which is outside” (Principles of Nature and Grace, sec.2 (1714)). More explicitly, in a letter to Antoine Arnauld of 9 October 1687, Leibniz wrote that “in natural perception and sensation, it is enough for what is divisible and material and dispersed into many entities to be expressed or represented in a single indivisible entity or in a substance which is endowed with genuine unity.” If perception (and hence, consciousness) essentially involves a representation of a variety of content in a simple, indivisible “I,” then we may construct Leibniz's argument against materialism as follows: Materialism holds that matter can explain (is identical with, can give rise to) perception. A perception is a state whereby a variety
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Tuesday, February 5, 2013 12:41:53 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: If we fix the TOE as arithmetic. If arithmetic has no theory of itself, can it really be said to provide a TOE? Isn't it just like physics in the sense of 'Give me one free miracle (energy or numbers) and I'll tell you the rest. Craig -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 , Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: I define intelligence as the ability to make choices or selctions completely on one's own. Such as roulette wheels. Adding free will to the requirements, it rules out computers Because free will is gibberish and computers are not. free will and autonomous choice are all nonphysical. And nonsensical too. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 7:49 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, although I know I will never be able to prove it. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Tuesday, February 5, 2013 6:00:17 PM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 7:49 PM, John Clark johnk...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com javascript:wrote: I'm not claiming that intelligence == mind. Do you believe that your fellow human beings have minds? If so why? Yes (weakly). Occam's razor. If I'm the only human being with a mind, then, for some mysterious reason, there are two types of human beings: me (with a mind) and the others (zombies). So heuristically I'm inclined to believe that all human beings have a mind, although I know I will never be able to prove it. I question whether it is possible to ask whether your fellow human beings have minds without resorting to sophistry. I say that not because I am incapable of questioning naive reasoning, but because it does not accurately represent the reality of the situation. Just as our 'belief' in our own mind is an a prori ontological condition which cannot be questioned without incurring a paradox (whatever disbelieves in its own mind is by definition a mind), the belief that our fellow human beings have minds does not necessarily require a logical analysis to arrive at. We know that we have access to information beyond what we can consciously understand, and part of that may very well include a capacity to sense, on some level, the authenticity of another mind, barring any prejudices which might interfere. Craig 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: How can intelligence be physical ?
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I question whether it is possible to ask whether your fellow human beings have minds without resorting to sophistry. I say that not because I am incapable of questioning naive reasoning, but because it does not accurately represent the reality of the situation. Just as our 'belief' in our own mind is an a prori ontological condition which cannot be questioned without incurring a paradox (whatever disbelieves in its own mind is by definition a mind), the belief that our fellow human beings have minds does not necessarily require a logical analysis to arrive at. We know that we have access to information beyond what we can consciously understand, and part of that may very well include a capacity to sense, on some level, the authenticity of another mind, barring any prejudices which might interfere. So you're saying that we can somehow sense the reality of other minds, beyond any reasoning? Would you agree then that if someone sensed that a computer had a mind it would have a mind? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
