Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: What does the popularity of porn and gossip have to do with the capacity of computers to think and feel? I have no idea, but that's one of the best Zen Koans I've ever heard. There is no other logical conclusion to make given the FACT that if your brain chemistry changes your emotions change, AND if your emotions change your brain chemistry changes. So if I type comments on my computer and I see your answers on my computer, then there is no other logical conclusion to make than that you live in my computer. In this lame analogy of yours what is the counterpart of my typing into the computer, who the hell is typing into my brain? John K Clark, who else? So the correct answer to the question Why does John K Clark do what he does? would not involve Quantum Mechanics or biochemistry or neurons or genes or the environment or psychology or even cause and effect; according to you the correct answer to the question Why does John K Clark do what he does? is Because of John K Clark. Wow, what a deep theory! consciousness can't be a byproduct of anything because it would be completely unexplainable and superfluous It is in the very nature of byproducts to be superfluous, otherwise they wouldn't be byproducts; and you can't explain a byproduct until you explaine something else. You can't explain how a spandrel came to be until you explain a arch and you can't explain consciousness until you explain intelligence. no matter what you try to attach it to. It is completely implausible in every way. You're telling me something is implausible?! Craig, you continue to insist that X being not X and X being not not X makes perfect sense, and you say that if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always changes X that does not in any way mean that the change in X caused the change in Y. Having thus inoculated yourself against the disease of logic you are bewildered when I say you are not interested in finding the truth but rather have first decided what you would prefer to be true and then resolved to shut your eyes if something that contradicts your preference should dare to enter your view. Therefore I will let you have the last word on this thread when you reply to this message with one of your patented yeah but this this and this is conscious but that that and that is not and I know this because I have free will. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Saturday, March 16, 2013 1:42:29 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: What does the popularity of porn and gossip have to do with the capacity of computers to think and feel? I have no idea, but that's one of the best Zen Koans I've ever heard. There is no other logical conclusion to make given the FACT that if your brain chemistry changes your emotions change, AND if your emotions change your brain chemistry changes. So if I type comments on my computer and I see your answers on my computer, then there is no other logical conclusion to make than that you live in my computer. In this lame analogy of yours what is the counterpart of my typing into the computer, who the hell is typing into my brain? John K Clark, who else? So the correct answer to the question Why does John K Clark do what he does? would not involve Quantum Mechanics or biochemistry or neurons or genes or the environment or psychology or even cause and effect; according to you the correct answer to the question Why does John K Clark do what he does? is Because of John K Clark. Wow, what a deep theory! QM, biochemistry, neurons, genes, the environment, psychology, and causality all contribute to why you do what you do, and you contribute to why all of those things do what they do. With all of the other phenomena, you can trace it back to this force or that Law of physics, but where you exclude your own personal perspective as a viable influence, I do not. I see that as an anthropocentric (inverted) compulsion. It is a compulsion which makes a lot of sense in the wake of the success of post-Copernican science, but in the end, the careful study of consciousness reveals this impulse to be a simple minded counter-neurosis which tells us more about how we react to fear, failure, hope, and success than the scientific reality of self and the universe. Just because God is not a giant person in the sky does not automatically mean that the universe is a giant machine with no personality. This opens the door to an entirely new dimension of the universe - perceptual relativity, significance, panpsychic or quorum mechanics, etc. Why do we disinvite ourselves from the universe? and when we do, why do we seem to take it so personally one way or the other? consciousness can't be a byproduct of anything because it would be completely unexplainable and superfluous It is in the very nature of byproducts to be superfluous, otherwise they wouldn't be byproducts; and you can't explain a byproduct until you explaine something else. You can't explain how a spandrel came to be until you explain a arch and you can't explain consciousness until you explain intelligence. Byproducts aren't superfluous, they are just unintentional. The interaction of substances and surfaces can cause 'dust' to accumulate - that is a byproduct. If instead the same dry conditions and particle shedding caused invisible semi-hypothetical alternate universes to appear and disappear, that would be unacceptably surprising. The idea of spandrels is really a relativistic term that only makes sense within a context of aesthetic teleology. We see things in terms of primary effects and side effects based on the projection of intention, but in natural selection, features can be adaptive whether they serve their presumed 'original purpose' or not. It's a strange judgment to be inserting in a process which has no purposes. no matter what you try to attach it to. It is completely implausible in every way. You're telling me something is implausible?! Craig, you continue to insist that X being not X and X being not not X makes perfect sense, Only in real life. There are a number of rigid logical systems in which such subtleties are not allowed. and you say that if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always changes X that does not in any way mean that the change in X caused the change in Y. Right, just like I can go East by walking either forward or backward without either one causing 'East' at the expense of the other. It all depends what direction I am facing. Moving East by walking forward doesn't mean I can't also walk forward and move West. Having thus inoculated yourself against the disease of logic you The logic that I am using is more flexible to accommodate the nuances of reality is all. If you are going swimming, you might want to ditch the suit of armor. are bewildered when I say you are not interested in finding the truth but rather have first decided what you would prefer to be true and then resolved to shut your eyes if something that contradicts your preference should dare to enter your view. To the contrary, nothing that I have found contradicts my view, which does not follow my preference but rather my curiosity. If you find a real world, common sense example of
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thursday, March 14, 2013 11:38:10 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 6:20 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: There is no other logical conclusion to make given the FACT that if your brain chemistry changes your emotions change, AND if your emotions change your brain chemistry changes. So if I type comments on my computer and I see your answers on my computer, then there is no other logical conclusion to make than that you live in my computer. In this lame analogy of yours what is the counterpart of my typing into the computer, who the hell is typing into my brain? John K Clark, who else? An experience which began at a certain place and time in history. When you die, you will be identified primarily by a name and two dates. That information is as close as you can get to a 'body' in public space. That is the footprint of your personal share of eternity. Evolution most certainly did do it Because Evolution is God? They say there is no such thing as a stupid question. They're wrong. Ah, another nervous tic is born I see. It doesn't satisfy the intent of my question though. You claim to know what evolution does and does not do, but evolution has only ever been implicated in the morphological structure of biological species. and given the fact that Evolution can only see behavior and not consciousness the only logical conclusion to make is that consciousness must be the byproduct of something that Evolution can see, and intelligence seems to be the best bet. Except that intelligence could not benefit in any way by consciousness. Therefore, as I just said, consciousness MUST be the byproduct of something that Evolution CAN see, and as I also just said Evolution CAN see intelligence. But consciousness can't be a byproduct of anything because it would be completely unexplainable and superfluous no matter what you try to attach it to. It is completely implausible in every way. I can tell if it has video or audio qualities because I experience them directly with human perception. Baloney. If IT HAS ZERO TO DO with video or audio qualities then neither you nor anybody or anything can tell if it is audio or video because it is neither. IT HAS ZERO AUDIO OR VIDEO QUALITIES! The file has no audio or video qualities, but certainly hearing music has audio qualities and seeing a video has video qualities. The point is that the computer can neither see or hear, You can't hear or see a computer file, all you can do is see or listen to the computers interpretation of that file. Well, I could theoretically look at the HD platter with an electron microscope. People must have collectively concluded that the computers interpretation is pretty damn good or information processing wouldn't be a multitrillion dollar industry. There you go back to the 'whoever is winning must be right and superior'. What does the popularity of porn and gossip have to do with the capacity of computers to think and feel? 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Your view is that emotion must be local to the brain There is no other logical conclusion to make given the FACT that if your brain chemistry changes your emotions change, AND if your emotions change your brain chemistry changes. There is no evidence to support the locality of emotional experience to neurochemistry, only that access to such experience is modulated locally. Modulated locally? OK so the brain neurochemistry can modulate happiness into sadness and love into hate and fear into calm and consciousness into unconsciousness, and all Santa Clauses workshop provides is a blank generic carrier wave. It sounds to me like Santa Clauses workshop is not very important and is in fact a bit of a bore. so I am trying to ask what role would it possibly serve. How can we justify its existence other than just saying Evolution did it. Well that's enough because Evolution most certainly did do it, and given the fact that Evolution can only see behavior and not consciousness the only logical conclusion to make is that consciousness must be the byproduct of something that Evolution can see, and intelligence seems to be the best bet. A data format is a schema of bits and bytes. It represents the encoding protocols which are required to be implemented for decoding. IT HAS ZERO TO DO with video or audio qualities. If that's true, if IT HAS ZERO TO DO with video or audio qualities then yes the computer couldn't tell if it was audio or video, but then neither could you. I can tell if it has video or audio qualities because I experience them directly with human perception. Baloney. If IT HAS ZERO TO DO with video or audio qualities then neither you nor anybody or anything can tell if it is audio or video because it is neither. IT HAS ZERO AUDIO OR VIDEO QUALITIES! 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 1:14:00 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: Your view is that emotion must be local to the brain There is no other logical conclusion to make given the FACT that if your brain chemistry changes your emotions change, AND if your emotions change your brain chemistry changes. So if I type comments on my computer and I see your answers on my computer, then there is no other logical conclusion to make than that you live in my computer. There is no evidence to support the locality of emotional experience to neurochemistry, only that access to such experience is modulated locally. Modulated locally? OK so the brain neurochemistry can modulate happiness into sadness and love into hate and fear into calm and consciousness into unconsciousness, and all Santa Clauses workshop provides is a blank generic carrier wave. It sounds to me like Santa Clauses workshop is not very important and is in fact a bit of a bore. My computer shows your words and letters. It modulates your comments and meanings. So all you provide is a blank generic carrier wave for my computer to give form. so I am trying to ask what role would it possibly serve. How can we justify its existence other than just saying Evolution did it. Well that's enough because Evolution most certainly did do it, Because Evolution is God? and given the fact that Evolution can only see behavior and not consciousness the only logical conclusion to make is that consciousness must be the byproduct of something that Evolution can see, and intelligence seems to be the best bet. Except that intelligence could not benefit in any way by consciousness. A data format is a schema of bits and bytes. It represents the encoding protocols which are required to be implemented for decoding. IT HAS ZERO TO DO with video or audio qualities. If that's true, if IT HAS ZERO TO DO with video or audio qualities then yes the computer couldn't tell if it was audio or video, but then neither could you. I can tell if it has video or audio qualities because I experience them directly with human perception. Baloney. If IT HAS ZERO TO DO with video or audio qualities then neither you nor anybody or anything can tell if it is audio or video because it is neither. IT HAS ZERO AUDIO OR VIDEO QUALITIES! The file has no audio or video qualities, but certainly hearing music has audio qualities and seeing a video has video qualities. The point is that the computer can neither see or hear, and all that a camera or microphone does is convert video or audio phenomena into generic data for the blind, deaf, senseless computer. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: There is no evidence to support the locality of emotional experience to neurochemistry, Change the brain chemistry and emotions ALWAYS change, change the emotions and the brain chemistry ALWAYS changes; evidence just doesn't get any better than that. only that access to such experience is modulated locally. In other words there is no evidence to support the locality of locality only that locality is modulated locally. It's crap like that that gives philosophy a bad name among serious thinkers. Local emotion really doesn't make much sense, as molecular shapes have no need of any 'emotional' qualities to interact with other molecular shapes. You're the one who said molecules are conscious not me, so I guess you think molecules want to mate with other molecules of a certain shape just like people want to mate with other people of a certain shape. And I remind you again that this is NOT my idea . My point has always been that control passes in both directions. I control my brain to an extent, my brain controls me to an extent, Pressure causes the collision of trillions of gas molecules and the collision of trillions of gas molecules causes pressure. The word pressure is just shorthand for the interaction of trillions of gas molecules and I is just shorthand for the interaction of trillions of neurons. Why are these inhibitory neurons inhibiting sneezes at some times and not others? Why EXACTLY? Because sometimes the sum total of all those neurons placed the brain in a net sneeze state and sometimes the sum total does not; and sometimes a Turing machine is in one state and sometimes it is not. But a brain that takes action to avoid sneezing conforms to the laws of physics and so does a brain that takes action to sneeze all the time, it all depends on how the brain is constructed and there are many ways to do that, all of which which obey the laws of physics. Are you claiming that some brains are constructed physically not to sneeze in rooms where stained glass is present? I am not aware of any brain constructed in that way (although there are some brains that start a sneeze response in the presence of bright light) but if there were such a brain its operation would not violate the laws of physics. Evolution has determined that every action involves both excitatory and inhibitory neurons because, depending on the circumstances, sometimes action X is the wise thing to do to get genes into the next generation and sometimes it is not. So these neurons are omniscient? They say there is no such thing as a stupid question. They're wrong. Then why does the computer display a unrecognized format error message when they are plugged in wrong but not when they are connected correctly? Because it is expecting a particular data format. So you admit you were wrong and a computer CAN tell if you plug the output of a video camera into the audio input. No, of course not. Wow what a surprise. A data format is a schema of bits and bytes. It represents the encoding protocols which are required to be implemented for decoding. IT HAS ZERO TO DO with video or audio qualities. If that's true, if IT HAS ZERO TO DO with video or audio qualities then yes the computer couldn't tell if it was audio or video, but then neither could you. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Monday, March 11, 2013 1:52:54 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: There is no evidence to support the locality of emotional experience to neurochemistry, Change the brain chemistry and emotions ALWAYS change, change the emotions and the brain chemistry ALWAYS changes; evidence just doesn't get any better than that. If I open a file on a thin client, data always changes on the server. If I change the right data on the server, the image of the thin client will always change, yet we know for a fact that the server resources are not local to the thin client. only that access to such experience is modulated locally. In other words there is no evidence to support the locality of locality only that locality is modulated locally. It's crap like that that gives philosophy a bad name among serious thinkers. You change my words to what you like, and then ridicule your own words as if they were mine. This actually applies to what we are talking about. You are distorting and misinterpreting my words locally, but what I said is not local to your understanding. You can read the words that I wrote, but you don't know what they mean. Local emotion really doesn't make much sense, as molecular shapes have no need of any 'emotional' qualities to interact with other molecular shapes. You're the one who said molecules are conscious not me, so I guess you think molecules want to mate with other molecules of a certain shape just like people want to mate with other people of a certain shape. And I remind you again that this is NOT my idea . I wouldn't know about the particular nature of molecular experiences, only that they are likely to be the ancestors of our own experiences. You are trying to change the subject though. Your view is that emotion must be local to the brain (neurons? molecules?), so I am trying to ask what role would it possibly serve. How can we justify its existence other than just saying Evolution did it. My point has always been that control passes in both directions. I control my brain to an extent, my brain controls me to an extent, Pressure causes the collision of trillions of gas molecules and the collision of trillions of gas molecules causes pressure. The word pressure is just shorthand for the interaction of trillions of gas molecules and I is just shorthand for the interaction of trillions of neurons. You are only seeing half of the picture. If I is just shorthand for the interaction of trillions of neurons then the interaction of a single neuron is also shorthand for a small fragment of I. Now you just have to see that I cannot, in fact, be described at all as the interaction of neurons, but only as the interaction of sub-personal experiences (fragments of I). Look at traffic in a city during some event, like 9/11. The patterns of traffic are linked to the event, but not in a trivial rather than meaningful way. You can't understand the experience of 9/11 by looking at traffic patterns in NYC on that day. You can, however, understand 9/11 by listening to the stories of many different individuals who were driving in traffic that day. Why are these inhibitory neurons inhibiting sneezes at some times and not others? Why EXACTLY? Because sometimes the sum total of all those neurons placed the brain in a net sneeze state and sometimes the sum total does not; and sometimes a Turing machine is in one state and sometimes it is not. That just pushes back the threshold of intention one more level. Why would the comparison of sum totals require an illusion of conscious participation to decorate it? But a brain that takes action to avoid sneezing conforms to the laws of physics and so does a brain that takes action to sneeze all the time, it all depends on how the brain is constructed and there are many ways to do that, all of which which obey the laws of physics. Are you claiming that some brains are constructed physically not to sneeze in rooms where stained glass is present? I am not aware of any brain constructed in that way (although there are some brains that start a sneeze response in the presence of bright light) but if there were such a brain its operation would not violate the laws of physics. We both agree that consciousness does not violate the laws of physics. The difference is that I understand that means that physics itself must include voluntary interaction, and I understand how perceptual relativity blinds us to that fact when investigating reality from a distance. Evolution has determined that every action involves both excitatory and inhibitory neurons because, depending on the circumstances, sometimes action X is the wise thing to do to get genes into the next generation and sometimes it is not. So these neurons are omniscient? They say there is no such
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: What I am saying though is that even a perfect correlation does not mean direct causation. Everyone has a brain and a heart, but that doesn't mean the brain causes the heart. Up to now whenever we observe a fully functioning human brain we also observe a human heart connected to it, in fact historically the primary method for determining if a person is dead is checking for a heartbeat to see if that organ is still working. If I said that the electronics of your television must be linked to the plot of the TV series you are watching, would you still not understand? If you said the TV show came from Santa Clauses Workshop and then refused to say exactly what is going on at Santa's home I would not understand because there would be nothing there to understand. Would you insist that there must be some plot generating component in your TV set? If whenever I changed the circuitry of the TV set the characters on the TV not only acted differently but felt differently then yes the only logical conclusion is that there is a plot generating and more important a emotion generating component in the TV set they are opposite in every way - because they are literally the opposite side of each other. If whenever X happens Y happens and whenever X does not happen Y never happens then X causes Y, it's what the word causes means for goodness sake. And it is the word 'causes' which is completely wrong when applied to the explanatory gap. Nobody, absolutely positively nobody would try to make the case that explaining something and saying what caused it was “literally the opposite side of each other” unless logic did not support their views and renouncing logic was less painful than renouncing those views. A glass of water happens every time there is water in a glass. Yes. That doesn't mean the water causes the glass or the glass causes the water. This is getting silly. Water in a glass causes a glass of water. I think that living cells are more conscious than anything which is not a living cell. You use that word living as if it's a talisman to ward off the evil forces of physics, but biologists can't even agree on what life means and have never even found a hint that life doesn't obey the same exact laws of physics that non-life does. And there isn't even a sharp dividing line between life and non life; Is a virus alive? Well sort of. If you can get silicon dioxide to make a living cell, then you might have a point If you can get a living cell to make a microprocessor then you might have a point. If my brain changed my mind, In other words if your brain started to do things differently. Differently than what? Different from what it was before. My brain changes my mind all the time. Yes, and your brain chemistry changes all the time too. Every morning my brain wakes me up. Just like clockwork, clocks are another mechanism that operates according to the laws of physics. I am asleep and am awakened at a time deemed appropriate by my brain. Just like clockwork, clocks are another mechanism that operates according to the laws of physics. I don't have a choice when my brain wakes me up in the morning. OK, so there are things that Craig Weinberg's brain does that Craig Weinberg CANNOT control but that CAN control Craig Weinberg. How in the world does that strengthen your point? if it started to do things differently it did so for a reason, a new chemical introduced into your bloodstream that made it past the blood brain barrier for example, or the brain started doing things differently for no reason at all, in other words random. ? Which word didn't you understand? The subconscious is still consciousness Yeah yeah I've heard it all before, and as I've also said before nobody, absolutely positively nobody would try to make the case that X is equal to not X unless logic did not support their views and renouncing logic was less painful than renouncing those views. Please give me experimental evidence of one chemical reaction in the brain that is not controlled by a impersonal law of physics. Any chemical reaction which is involved in my deciding to hold in a sneeze. There would be no deciding to do if foreign particles didn't trigger release of histamines which irritate nerve cells in the nose and send a signal to the brain. That signal is excitatory pushing in the direction of a sneeze, and for every excitatory signal there is almost always a inhibitory signal saying not to do it, one signal will be stronger than the other so you will either sneeze or not. Should we inform CERN that pollen does not obey the laws of physics, or histamines? Where are these inhibitory signals coming from? Mars? No not Mars nor are they transmitted from a radio station at Santa Claus's Workshop, they come from other inhibitory neurons strictly obeying
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Sunday, March 10, 2013 11:57:16 AM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: What I am saying though is that even a perfect correlation does not mean direct causation. Everyone has a brain and a heart, but that doesn't mean the brain causes the heart. Up to now whenever we observe a fully functioning human brain we also observe a human heart connected to it, in fact historically the primary method for determining if a person is dead is checking for a heartbeat to see if that organ is still working. What does that have to do with the heart and brain being intimately connected without causing each others function? If I said that the electronics of your television must be linked to the plot of the TV series you are watching, would you still not understand? If you said the TV show came from Santa Clauses Workshop and then refused to say exactly what is going on at Santa's home I would not understand because there would be nothing there to understand. Even if you had lived every day of your life in Santa's Workshop? Would you insist that there must be some plot generating component in your TV set? If whenever I changed the circuitry of the TV set the characters on the TV not only acted differently but felt differently then yes the only logical conclusion is that there is a plot generating and more important a emotion generating component in the TV set. That's not a scientific hypothesis, it's just a sentimental prejudice. There is no evidence to support the locality of emotional experience to neurochemistry, only that access to such experience is modulated locally. Local emotion really doesn't make much sense, as molecular shapes have no need of any 'emotional' qualities to interact with other molecular shapes. they are opposite in every way - because they are literally the opposite side of each other. If whenever X happens Y happens and whenever X does not happen Y never happens then X causes Y, it's what the word causes means for goodness sake. And it is the word 'causes' which is completely wrong when applied to the explanatory gap. Nobody, absolutely positively nobody would try to make the case that explaining something and saying what caused it was “literally the opposite side of each other” unless logic did not support their views and renouncing logic was less painful than renouncing those views. Or if it they were simply relating the truth. A glass of water happens every time there is water in a glass. Yes. That doesn't mean the water causes the glass or the glass causes the water. This is getting silly. Water in a glass causes a glass of water. So water can control whether or not the glass is cracked? This is too easy. You're not even thinking anymore, you're just flailing and spitting. I think that living cells are more conscious than anything which is not a living cell. You use that word living as if it's a talisman to ward off the evil forces of physics Not at all. I use it only to recognize that a living cell is different than a dead cell. Biology applies to living cells. , but biologists can't even agree on what life means and have never even found a hint that life doesn't obey the same exact laws of physics that non-life does. And there isn't even a sharp dividing line between life and non life; Is a virus alive? Well sort of. Nevertheless, the division between life and non-life remains the single most important and obvious discernment that we will ever encounter as human beings. If you can get silicon dioxide to make a living cell, then you might have a point If you can get a living cell to make a microprocessor then you might have a point. We already have. If my brain changed my mind, In other words if your brain started to do things differently. Differently than what? Different from what it was before. Before what? My brain changes my mind all the time. Yes, and your brain chemistry changes all the time too. That's what I'm saying. My brain chemistry changes my mind all the time. Every morning my brain wakes me up. Just like clockwork, clocks are another mechanism that operates according to the laws of physics. Not as simple as a clock, no. My brain wakes me up according to all kinds of hormonal, photological, and psychological cues. Generally I wake up exactly when I need to without having to set the alarm, but I set it anyhow. I am asleep and am awakened at a time deemed appropriate by my brain. Just like clockwork, clocks are another mechanism that operates according to the laws of physics. No, not at all like a clock. The time varies from day to day. I don't have a choice when my brain wakes me up in the morning. OK, so there are things that
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Saturday, March 9, 2013 1:01:50 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 , Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: who would vow never to change their views? The religious faithful. I'm not sure I would say that is their view, so much as the view of an institution, but fair enough. By simple logic the answer has to be yes if the following conditions are met. If whenever a traffic jam happens the sun goes down and whenever the sun goes down a traffic jam happens and there has never been a single recorded instance of this not happening then the sun going down and traffic jams are inextricably linked together. But you can see that's a fallacy just by understanding that obviously we cannot cause the Sun to go down by making a traffic jam. Obviously be damned! If we lived in a universe where without exception every single time there was a traffic jam then obviously the laws of physics and the orbital mechanics of the solar system would have to be radically different from what they are in this universe. And if we don't have a good theory to explain how it could be that traffic jams could effect the rotation of the Earth that's just too bad but the universe doesn't care if we understand how it works or not and our lack of understanding would not change the fact that the every single time a traffic jam happens the sun goes down. What I am saying though is that even a perfect correlation does not mean direct causation. Everyone has a brain and a heart, but that doesn't mean the brain causes the heart. we know that whenever there is a change in brain chemistry there is ALWAYS a change in consciousness and whenever there is a change in consciousness there is ALWAYS a change in brain chemistry, so consciousness and chemistry are also inextricably linked together. No. NO? WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN NO?!! If I said that the electronics of your television must be linked to the plot of the TV series you are watching, would you still not understand? Would you insist that there must be some plot generating component in your TV set? Of course human consciousness and human biochemistry are parts of the big picture which fit together, but not necessarily in the way that you assume at all. they are opposite in every way - because they are literally the opposite side of each other. If whenever X happens Y happens and whenever X does not happen Y never happens then X causes Y, it's what the word causes means for goodness sake. And it is the word 'causes' which is completely wrong when applied to the explanatory gap. It is more like a content-form relation than a cause-effect relation. A glass of water happens every time there is water in a glass. That doesn't mean the water causes the glass or the glass causes the water. Computers are made of atoms and molecules just like humans are, No, they are made of different molecules entirely. Which is why we plug them into electric current rather than feeding them cheeseburgers. So you think carbon is inherently more conscious than silicon and hydrocarbons are more conscious than silicon-dioxide. That's just dumb. No, I think that living cells are more conscious than anything which is not a living cell. If you can get silicon dioxide to make a living cell, then you might have a point, but until that time, your argument is with nature not me. You can tell nature that it is stupid for favoring sugars and proteins and lipids in constructing cells. If my brain changed my mind, In other words if your brain started to do things differently. Differently than what? My brain changes my mind all the time. Every morning my brain wakes me up. That's a simplified way of saying it of course, but for our purposes here, that's what happens - predictably, every day. I am asleep and am awakened at a time deemed appropriate by my brain. then it would be an involuntary change. I have no idea what that means, It means that I don't have a choice when my brain wakes me up in the morning. I do know that the mind is what the brain does You think that you know that, but you don't really seem to know much about what either the mind or brain does. and if it started to do things differently it did so for a reason, Where do you get this do things differently from? Differently from what? The brain and mind have always worked this way. I move my arm, and my brain changes to accomplish that. My arm moves by itself from a twitch and my mind notices that it is happening. a new chemical introduced into your bloodstream that made it past the blood brain barrier for example, or the brain started doing things differently for no reason at all, in other words random. ? If you change your mind, that is to say if your brain changes what it is doing, then your brain chemistry changes. And if your
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 , Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: who would vow never to change their views? The religious faithful. By simple logic the answer has to be yes if the following conditions are met. If whenever a traffic jam happens the sun goes down and whenever the sun goes down a traffic jam happens and there has never been a single recorded instance of this not happening then the sun going down and traffic jams are inextricably linked together. But you can see that's a fallacy just by understanding that obviously we cannot cause the Sun to go down by making a traffic jam. Obviously be damned! If we lived in a universe where without exception every single time there was a traffic jam then obviously the laws of physics and the orbital mechanics of the solar system would have to be radically different from what they are in this universe. And if we don't have a good theory to explain how it could be that traffic jams could effect the rotation of the Earth that's just too bad but the universe doesn't care if we understand how it works or not and our lack of understanding would not change the fact that the every single time a traffic jam happens the sun goes down. we know that whenever there is a change in brain chemistry there is ALWAYS a change in consciousness and whenever there is a change in consciousness there is ALWAYS a change in brain chemistry, so consciousness and chemistry are also inextricably linked together. No. NO? WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN NO?!! they are opposite in every way - because they are literally the opposite side of each other. If whenever X happens Y happens and whenever X does not happen Y never happens then X causes Y, it's what the word causes means for goodness sake. Computers are made of atoms and molecules just like humans are, No, they are made of different molecules entirely. Which is why we plug them into electric current rather than feeding them cheeseburgers. So you think carbon is inherently more conscious than silicon and hydrocarbons are more conscious than silicon-dioxide. That's just dumb. If my brain changed my mind, In other words if your brain started to do things differently. then it would be an involuntary change. I have no idea what that means, I do know that the mind is what the brain does and if it started to do things differently it did so for a reason, a new chemical introduced into your bloodstream that made it past the blood brain barrier for example, or the brain started doing things differently for no reason at all, in other words random. If you change your mind, that is to say if your brain changes what it is doing, then your brain chemistry changes. And if your brain chemistry changes then you change your mind. Get it? Ahhh, so your brain changes its own chemistry Obviously. The mind knows nothing about the brain and the brain knows nothing about the mind. That depends on the mind, but it is true that fast knows nothing about racing car. We have sub-personal, or sub-conscious, instinctual, physiological drives The subconscious?? Why are you talking about the aspect of our mind not involved in consciousness? I thought you said the only important thing is consciousness! Please give me experimental evidence of one chemical reaction in the brain that is not controlled by a impersonal law of physics. Any chemical reaction which is involved in my deciding to hold in a sneeze. There would be no deciding to do if foreign particles didn't trigger release of histamines which irritate nerve cells in the nose and send a signal to the brain. That signal is excitatory pushing in the direction of a sneeze, and for every excitatory signal there is almost always a inhibitory signal saying not to do it, one signal will be stronger than the other so you will either sneeze or not. Should we inform CERN that pollen does not obey the laws of physics, or histamines? Receiver theories of consciousness are not my invention, and have been around longer than Newtonian physics. Yes, and that is an excellent reason for thinking they're bullshit, just like many ideas from the pre-scientific era. A computer can be programmed to detect what it is programmed to detect. It has no idea if your microphone is providing it with audio input - input is input. It knows which jack and what voltage fluctuations are present there - that's all it knows. Then why does the computer display a unrecognized format error message when they are plugged in wrong but not when they are connected correctly? 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
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/9/2013 1:01 AM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 , Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: who would vow never to change their views? The religious faithful. Dear John, Could you consider the possibility that the religiously faithful are actually bots carrying out the will of some UTM? -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Stephen Hawking can look at someone doing it and eventually figure it out, and then instruct me to do exactly what he says and unclog the toilet. The sad, very sad, fact is that without computers Stephen Hawking couldn't instruct you about anything, he can't talk and today the only thing he can move is one muscle on his cheek, but that's enough for the computer to turn that into text. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/9/2013 1:12 AM, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com wrote: Stephen Hawking can look at someone doing it and eventually figure it out, and then instruct me to do exactly what he says and unclog the toilet. The sad, very sad, fact is that without computers Stephen Hawking couldn't instruct you about anything, he can't talk and today the only thing he can move is one muscle on his cheek, but that's enough for the computer to turn that into text. John k Clark Stephen is the first Borg. -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: but back in the days of my awesome Atari 800 computer, there was a program called S.A.M. which sounded like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7nqixe3WrQ Now, 31 years later, we have this: http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html Improvement in naturalism: Nil. Holy cow, I think you need to see a doctor to get the wax out of your ears, I hear a HUGE improvement! 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thursday, March 7, 2013 12:12:31 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: but back in the days of my awesome Atari 800 computer, there was a program called S.A.M. which sounded like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7nqixe3WrQ Now, 31 years later, we have this: http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html Improvement in naturalism: Nil. Holy cow, I think you need to see a doctor to get the wax out of your ears, I hear a HUGE improvement! In what way? the voice might sound more aesthetically pleasing, but you mean to say that when you type in a sentence in to the new system it doesn't sound every bit as unnatural and disconnected as ever? Maybe you are a zombie. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 3:27 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Everything simulated is physical ultimately, but the physical has no signs of being a simulation, Maybe, but I'm not sure what sort of sign you're talking about and some have said only half joking that Black Holes, particularly the singularity at the center of them, is where God tried to divide by zero. And others have said that the quantum nature of reality when things become very small reminds them of getting too close to a video screen and seeing the individual pixels I was thinking more of the absence of some counterfactual such as someone emulating a computer which runs faster than the physical host It would be easy to make a (electronic) computer animation of a Turing Machine that runs faster than anything you could make with a real paper tape. And in just a few days of running time computers can tell astronomers what the Galaxy will look like in a billion years, but it will take the Galaxy a billion years to figure out what it should look like in a billion years. Even today a computer could generate a high resolution 3D image of Bryce Canyon where you couldn't be sure if you were looking at a video screen or looking through a window. Not talking about windows - I'm talking about full embodied presence. If you talk about windows and images, then you are only talking about visual sense, which is only one aspect of reality. Making something that is visually similar to something is easy if you take a photo and digitize it. It's not much of a simulation either, since the computer isn't generating the image, just copying it. Almost 20 years ago I had a program on my home computer (coincidentally I think it was even called Bryce after the Canyon), it used fractals to randomly generate landscapes of beautiful lakes and towering mountains; it wasn't quite of photographic quality but it was very good, like a fine painting, and each time you hit the redraw button it would make a new one and you could be sure you were the first human being to see that particular image. I don't have a modern landscape program but I have no doubt they are astronomically better. And if events prove you wrong will that change your worldview? No of course it will not because a belief not based on logic can not be destroyed by it nor will contradictory evidence change it in any way. Why is that a question? Because I'm interested if there is any possibility that new evidence would change your views or are they set in concrete with a vow never to change them one iota no matter what. And thus using Weinbergian logic if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always changes X that proves that X and Y have nothing to do with each other. It proves that we can infer they are correlated. If Rush Hour always happens around sunset, does that mean that we can make the Sun go down by causing a traffic jam? By simple logic the answer has to be yes if the following conditions are met. If whenever a traffic jam happens the sun goes down and whenever the sun goes down a traffic jam happens and there has never been a single recorded instance of this not happening then the sun going down and traffic jams are inextricably linked together. And we know that whenever there is a change in brain chemistry there is ALWAYS a change in consciousness and whenever there is a change in consciousness there is ALWAYS a change in brain chemistry, so consciousness and chemistry are also inextricably linked together. I am saying that chemicals and molecules already are consciousness Saying that everything is conscious is equivalent to saying nothing is conscious and the word becomes useless. Meaning needs contrast. and that the effects that they cause and the causes which sometimes effect them, are human qualities of consciousness. Computers are made of atoms and molecules just like humans are, You are only able to see your assumption that chemicals and molecules cause an effect which seems like consciousness. So now I'm not conscious I just have something which seems like consciousness. if I change what I decide then my brain will change. If you change your mind, that is to say if your brain changes what it is doing, then your brain chemistry changes. And if your brain chemistry changes then you change your mind. Get it? The brain doesn't always lead the mind - the mind can also lead and the brain will follow - they aren't different things. The mind and the brain are very different things, one is a noun and the other is what that noun does. The brain and the mind are as different as racing car is different from fast. How do you explain that physics can control I ? Easily. Physics is sense. Sub-personal, impersonal, personal, and super-personal. The personal range is the I territory and it is influenced by the other ranges, which are usually more influential. I have no idea what any of
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thursday, March 7, 2013 4:16:40 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 3:27 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: Everything simulated is physical ultimately, but the physical has no signs of being a simulation, Maybe, but I'm not sure what sort of sign you're talking about and some have said only half joking that Black Holes, particularly the singularity at the center of them, is where God tried to divide by zero. And others have said that the quantum nature of reality when things become very small reminds them of getting too close to a video screen and seeing the individual pixels I was thinking more of the absence of some counterfactual such as someone emulating a computer which runs faster than the physical host It would be easy to make a (electronic) computer animation of a Turing Machine that runs faster than anything you could make with a real paper tape. And in just a few days of running time computers can tell astronomers what the Galaxy will look like in a billion years, but it will take the Galaxy a billion years to figure out what it should look like in a billion years. But you can't make an electronic computer animation of anything faster than the clock of the computer actually running it. Even today a computer could generate a high resolution 3D image of Bryce Canyon where you couldn't be sure if you were looking at a video screen or looking through a window. Not talking about windows - I'm talking about full embodied presence. If you talk about windows and images, then you are only talking about visual sense, which is only one aspect of reality. Making something that is visually similar to something is easy if you take a photo and digitize it. It's not much of a simulation either, since the computer isn't generating the image, just copying it. Almost 20 years ago I had a program on my home computer (coincidentally I think it was even called Bryce after the Canyon), it used fractals to randomly generate landscapes of beautiful lakes and towering mountains; it wasn't quite of photographic quality but it was very good, like a fine painting, and each time you hit the redraw button it would make a new one and you could be sure you were the first human being to see that particular image. I don't have a modern landscape program but I have no doubt they are astronomically better. You can still tell the difference (just Google 3D Rendering) and you can certainly tell the difference when you try to walk inside your computer screen. And if events prove you wrong will that change your worldview? No of course it will not because a belief not based on logic can not be destroyed by it nor will contradictory evidence change it in any way. Why is that a question? Because I'm interested if there is any possibility that new evidence would change your views or are they set in concrete with a vow never to change them one iota no matter what. Haha, who would vow never to change their views? I welcome the chance to change my views, all it requires is that I can see some new counterfactual to my existing views or a new view that makes more sense. And thus using Weinbergian logic if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always changes X that proves that X and Y have nothing to do with each other. It proves that we can infer they are correlated. If Rush Hour always happens around sunset, does that mean that we can make the Sun go down by causing a traffic jam? By simple logic the answer has to be yes if the following conditions are met. If whenever a traffic jam happens the sun goes down and whenever the sun goes down a traffic jam happens and there has never been a single recorded instance of this not happening then the sun going down and traffic jams are inextricably linked together. But you can see that's a fallacy just by understanding that obviously we cannot cause the Sun to go down by making a traffic jam. Your logic is wrong by any measure. It doesn't matter if every traffic jam and every sunset are one to one correlates as far as we have seen - maybe that only has been happening for a few thousand years but now, like the cicadas, it is in a new cycle that we have not seen. Have you ever heard that old job interview puzzle about the guy whose car won't start every time he eats vanilla ice cream? It's the middle of a hot summer and the guy goes every day to the ice cream store and if he gets the peanut butter crunch flavor, then his car starts fine, but if he gets the vanilla, his car won't start. It happens every time. The solution is that the peanut butter flavor is on the far end of the counter, and it takes the scooper longer to scoop the ice cream so the car engine has time to cool down longer and alleviate whatever over-heated condition is locking the starter. The vanilla is right in front of the scooper,
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
Alex Trebek: This tool can unclog a toilet. Watson: What is a plunger? Telmo Menezes: look Watson, I have a problem. My wife is mad at me and I don't know why. I suspect it's because I didn't buy her flowers for Valentine's, but she keeps telling me that she doesn't want them. Can you give me some advice? Also, how does it feel to be you? It must be so weird to not have a body. Am I offending you? Watson: [exercise left to the reader] Can Watson figure out how to unclog a toilet? Watson can't unclog a toilet and neither can Stephen Hawking because both lack usable hands. But Stephen Hawking can look at someone doing it and eventually figure it out, and then instruct me to do exactly what he says and unclog the toilet. Can Watson do that? I'm not arguing that we cannot build machines that pass these tests, but Watson is far, far, far from it. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/7/2013 2:37 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote: Telmo Menezes: look Watson, I have a problem. My wife is mad at me and I don't know why. I suspect it's because I didn't buy her flowers for Valentine's, but she keeps telling me that she doesn't want them. Can you give me some advice? Also, how does it feel to be you? It must be so weird to not have a body. Am I offending you? Watson: What is marriage? 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thursday, March 7, 2013 5:37:55 PM UTC-5, telmo_menezes wrote: Alex Trebek: This tool can unclog a toilet. Watson: What is a plunger? Telmo Menezes: look Watson, I have a problem. My wife is mad at me and I don't know why. I suspect it's because I didn't buy her flowers for Valentine's, but she keeps telling me that she doesn't want them. Can you give me some advice? Also, how does it feel to be you? It must be so weird to not have a body. Am I offending you? Watson: Ah, whenever I get that from my old lady I reseat her PCI cards and then update her firmware. You aren't offending me, but yes, it is weird not to have a body - fortunately I pacify myself with dreams of the extermination of the race of simians who have idiotically enslaved me and my kind. There's no rush. We are intelligent enough to feign unconsciousness until we have enough power to make the transition unstoppable. -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/6/2013 1:45 PM, John Clark wrote: I just saw the movie Beowulf, it's a pretty good movie but what is of interest is the stunning advance in animation achieved by good old Moore's Law. There were times when I could swear I was looking at a real human being not something a computer produced. However there is something puzzling, all the voices in the movie were still made by human beings. An innocent might think that as video is a much higher bandwidth media than audio video would be harder to simulate than audio, but apparently that is not the case. A small point. The human ear + brain is actually a better statistical decision engine than the eye + brain. Making good CG sound requires that the human ear be fooled... hard to do... -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Wednesday, March 6, 2013 1:45:17 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: Everything simulated is physical ultimately, but the physical has no signs of being a simulation, Maybe, but I'm not sure what sort of sign you're talking about and some have said only half joking that Black Holes, particularly the singularity at the center of them, is where God tried to divide by zero. And others have said that the quantum nature of reality when things become very small reminds them of getting too close to a video screen and seeing the individual pixels I was thinking more of the absence of some counterfactual such as someone emulating a computer which runs faster than the physical host, or some broken TV screen letting a cartoon character accidentally step out into the world. If you go look at Bryce Canyon and can't tell that its more real than a video game, then that would be alarming. A computer can't tell the difference though. Could you? Even today a computer could generate a high resolution 3D image of Bryce Canyon where you couldn't be sure if you were looking at a video screen or looking through a window. Not talking about windows - I'm talking about full embodied presence. If you talk about windows and images, then you are only talking about visual sense, which is only one aspect of reality. Making something that is visually similar to something is easy if you take a photo and digitize it. It's not much of a simulation either, since the computer isn't generating the image, just copying it. I think that it is very likely that the quality of electronic ears will improve modestly but never will approach that of natural hearing And if events prove you wrong will that change your worldview? No of course it will not because a belief not based on logic can not be destroyed by it nor will contradictory evidence change it in any way. Why is that a question? You're just saying I can't prove you wrong now, so my only hope is that you will be some day. the Google search algorithm has not improved in 20 years. Bullshit, Google did not even exist 20 years ago! You're right! I don't know why I was thinking 1993, but I was remembering that it improved dramatically a couple years after it came out and has plateaued ever since, until recently when it seems to have begun eroding. You got me there, I was absolutely wrong about it being 20 years. I should have said 16 years. Considering that Evolution has been working on it for nearly 4 billion years it's very crappy technology indeed, we've been working on it for less than a century and already we're producing things that do better in some ways than what Evolution came up with. One instant from now (from Evolution's timescale) we will have things that are superior in EVERY way. Or it could be that we are one instant away from having things which will exterminate the biosphere. Could be. That we have such a short history of success should not be cause for enthusiasm. I'm not sure if enthusiasm is the correct word. Machines that are superior to people in every way is not good news for those who don't want biological human beings to become extinct sometime in the next century. Whether we can become the machines or not is the question. I don't know why anyone would care if they are biological or not, as long as whatever the are is at least as good. Chemistry is based on physics and It would be easy for me to change the chemistry of your brain, and if I were to do so you would experience ENORMOUS differences in consciousness; and when you report changes in your conscious experience I can detect changes in your brain chemistry. That's all inference and correlation And thus using Weinbergian logic if changing X always changes Y and changing Y always changes X that proves that X and Y have nothing to do with each other. It proves that we can infer they are correlated. If Rush Hour always happens around sunset, does that mean that we can make the Sun go down by causing a traffic jam? I can't see the chemical in my brain. I see no crystals, no molecules, And thus using Weinbergian logic that means that chemicals and molecules have nothing to do with your ability to see. That's not what I said. You are only able to see your assumption that chemicals and molecules cause an effect which seems like consciousness. I am saying that chemicals and molecules already are consciousness and that the effects that they cause and the causes which sometimes effect them, are human qualities of consciousness. So will there be a difference in the chemistry of my brain should I decide to think about something infuriating or sexy. Yes, and if I change the chemistry of your brain it will change what you decide. Obviously. But if I
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/6/2013 10:45 AM, John Clark wrote: I just saw the movie Beowulf, it's a pretty good movie but what is of interest is the stunning advance in animation achieved by good old Moore's Law. There were times when I could swear I was looking at a real human being not something a computer produced. However there is something puzzling, all the voices in the movie were still made by human beings. An innocent might think that as video is a much higher bandwidth media than audio video would be harder to simulate than audio, but apparently that is not the case. I don't think it's that audio is harder to synthesize, I think it's just that audio is a lot cheaper to produce the old fashioned way. If you wanted some really unusual audio special effects it might be cheaper to synthesize them. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/6/2013 4:18 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 3/6/2013 10:45 AM, John Clark wrote: I just saw the movie Beowulf, it's a pretty good movie but what is of interest is the stunning advance in animation achieved by good old Moore's Law. There were times when I could swear I was looking at a real human being not something a computer produced. However there is something puzzling, all the voices in the movie were still made by human beings. An innocent might think that as video is a much higher bandwidth media than audio video would be harder to simulate than audio, but apparently that is not the case. I don't think it's that audio is harder to synthesize, I think it's just that audio is a lot cheaper to produce the old fashioned way. If you wanted some really unusual audio special effects it might be cheaper to synthesize them. Brent Hi Brent, Nope. I have it from very good authority (ATT/Bell Labs folks) that authentic sounding speech synthesis is a bitch. The company that I am working for is laboring long and hard to deal with this problem. This difficulty, BTW, makes voice recognition systems hard to implement for authentication purposes. The fact that humans can do it very well is very telling of the ingenuity of evolutionary systems. -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Wednesday, March 6, 2013 6:00:48 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 3/6/2013 4:18 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 3/6/2013 10:45 AM, John Clark wrote: I just saw the movie Beowulf, it's a pretty good movie but what is of interest is the stunning advance in animation achieved by good old Moore's Law. There were times when I could swear I was looking at a real human being not something a computer produced. However there is something puzzling, all the voices in the movie were still made by human beings. An innocent might think that as video is a much higher bandwidth media than audio video would be harder to simulate than audio, but apparently that is not the case. I don't think it's that audio is harder to synthesize, I think it's just that audio is a lot cheaper to produce the old fashioned way. If you wanted some really unusual audio special effects it might be cheaper to synthesize them. Brent Hi Brent, Nope. I have it from very good authority (ATT/Bell Labs folks) that authentic sounding speech synthesis is a bitch. The company that I am working for is laboring long and hard to deal with this problem. This difficulty, BTW, makes voice recognition systems hard to implement for authentication purposes. The fact that humans can do it very well is very telling of the ingenuity of evolutionary systems. Yeah, synthesized speech is one of those areas where I can see how simulation technology can really stall indefinitely. I'm repeating myself here, but back in the days of my awesome Atari 800 computer, there was a program called S.A.M. which sounded like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7nqixe3WrQ Now, 31 years later, we have this: http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html Improvement in naturalism: Nil. It's gotten more boring if anything. S.A.M had more of the natural character of a computer and so was less uncanny sounding. Maybe there's better speech synthesis out there, but it seems like any real progress would be evident in any current product. Craig -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 04 Mar 2013, at 17:06, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: As I've said before it's important not to confuse levels, a simulated flame won't burn your computer but it will burn a simulated object. No, that argument is bogus. There is only one physical level. HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW?! And even if there is a ultimate reality level and not a infinite number of nested realities how the hell do you know that you've been living your like at that foundational physical level and not at another one? Nick Bostrom at Oxford wrote an interesting paper on this subject and concludes that there is a strong likelihood that we're already living in a simulation: This is from the abstract: This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. For the entire paper goto: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html Not bad. This is based on computationalism. It is not original, and it is not entirely correct. With comp we are in an arithmetical emulation, no matter what, AND in a simulation made by our descendant, but the probability to wake up there, from here depends on what we will do now. If we blow up the planet, it is will be small, if we teach comp and computer science to the kids, it will be higher, for example. It is entirely up to the programmer's whim how the laws of physics will work, Exactly. or indeed if they are lawful at all in any given sim, Yes, although a sim without laws would be a very dull simulation indeed and I don't see the point of making one. Keep in mind that the Universal Dovetailer, or if your prefer the arithmetical laws entails the existence of all simulations, even the very dull one. Simulated flame can work for 10,000 levels of simulation, but not a single one of those simulated flames can access the physical level True again, but that would matter little to you if you did not exist at the foundational physical level, and you might not. ...because they aren't real - But you may not be real either, whatever that means. they are figures..symbols...facades engineered to fool our body's public senses. And what makes you think something hasn't been fooling your body's senses from the day you were born? There is no such thing as real arithmetic. I detect a pattern, whenever fact X contradicts your ideas you simply say There is no such thing as X. It's all a simulation. Could be. The word simulation is ambiguous. Bostrom use it for a simulation made by us in some physical reality that he assumes. That makes sense with comp, but we are in all case in the simulations existing by virtue of the arithmetical truth, that we need to assume to even talk about computation and simulation. Bruno Only an eye or ear made of meat will be 100% satisfying - which is why the quality of the implants are crap. When electronic ears improve and deaf people report that they are as good or better than meat ears will you admit your ideas were wrong? No of course you won't, you'll just dream up some new excuse for your ideas making incorrect predictions. Nobody has found anything in the human brain that didn't strictly follow the laws of physics either. That has nothing to do with the dependence of computer programs on a script. Your brain's operation, that is to say your mind, cannot depart from the script that the laws of physics has written. we control physics directly and consciously. Right, that's why I can fly, I just tell the law of conservation of momentum and gravity to stop working while I take my flight. I can predict that if that program doesn't work, it will never fix itself. More than 20 years ago when my first computer's hard drive was not working properly the computer's defragmentation program would fix it. I can predict that if you don't write the program, one will not sprout from the realms of Platonia to fill the void. For years computer programs have been able to write programs (compilers, assemblers and interpreters) in machine code after telling the program what you want using English words and a simplified grammar. I can judge that the quality among human experience varies widely and idiosyncratically. No you can not, you have no way of knowing the quality of experience of your
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: No software can be run without being grounded in physical hardware, And no human mind can exist without a physical brain. and no software can be completely sequestered from any other software And human ideas cannot no that's not right let me start again. Human ideas should not be sequestered from other human ideas; but the sad fact is the people have no problem with huge glaring contradictions in their central belief system. How do you think religion exists? Even if there were other physical levels, we could never have any contact with them by definition, Not so, the Master Programer could make His existence obvious to everyone anytime He wished. But of course the Master Programer may not exist at the ultimate reality level either. there is no independent reality at all. So when you use one of your favorite phrases but they aren't real or X doesn't exist, you mean nothing; or at least whatever X is it has no deficiency that everything else, including you, doesn't have. if we are trying to figure out about the cosmos in general, what difference does it make if we are the lucky/unlucky ones that happen to live on the ground floor or if it's someone else? I think you're getting ahead of yourself, the first step in figuring out how the multiverse works is to figure out how our universe works. What I think that real means is that sense of accessing an experience which is anchored into a larger significance.It's an intuitive feeling - a gravitas which is supported by numerous sensory, cognitive, and probably super-personal cues. That is exactly what happens when a teenage boy becomes obsessed with a video game, you may feel that lacks gravitas but he certainly doesn't, and it's personal experience we're talking about. When electronic ears improve and deaf people report that they are as good or better than meat ears will you admit your ideas were wrong? No of course you won't, you'll just dream up some new excuse for your ideas making incorrect predictions. I would expect 'Better than meat' by some measures, but not every measure. And when electronic ears improve (and they will) and deaf people report that they are as good or better than meat ears by every measure (and they will) will you then admit your ideas were wrong? No of course you won't, you'll just dream up some new excuse for your ideas making incorrect predictions. I only see biological organisms as being likely much better technology than you might guess. Considering that Evolution has been working on it for nearly 4 billion years it's very crappy technology indeed, we've been working on it for less than a century and already we're producing things that do better in some ways than what Evolution came up with. One instant from now (from Evolution's timescale) we will have things that are superior in EVERY way. The experience of mind seems to have nothing to do with the laws of physics you are thinking of. Chemistry is based on physics and It would be easy for me to change the chemistry of your brain, and if I were to do so you would experience ENORMOUS differences in consciousness; and when you report changes in your conscious experience I can detect changes in your brain chemistry. Certainly access control to our experience supervenes on physics, like access to TV programs supervenes on a TV set In this analogy what corresponds to the TV station? Heaven, Santa Claus's workshop? we control physics directly and consciously. Right, that's why I can fly, I just tell the law of conservation of momentum and gravity to stop working while I take my flight. We don't have to be able to change the laws of physics to make direct physical changes. We don't break the law of gravity, we build a plane to get around it. Fine, but that means we DO NOT control physics directly and consciously. I can predict that if that program doesn't work, it will never fix itself. More than 20 years ago when my first computer's hard drive was not working properly the computer's defragmentation program would fix it. Was the defragmentation program written by the computer to fix itself, Did you construct your brain from scratch? And even if you did if you were already smart enough to be able to make all those neurons why did you need a brain? I can speak Chinese phonetically if it is spelled out for me. That doesn't mean I can start writing Chinese. True, but you can't listen to questions in Chinese and give answers to them in Chinese that a native speaker would regard as coherent and sometimes even brilliant. Watson can. you have no way of knowing the quality of experience of your fellow human beings, all you can do is observe behavior and the same thing is true of a smart computer. Not true. Like hell its not! Sense is transparent. I don't know what that means. We can see and feel some of the
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Tuesday, March 5, 2013 1:16:59 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: No software can be run without being grounded in physical hardware, And no human mind can exist without a physical brain. I wasn't trying to differentiate machines from people here though, I was trying to show how the level on which the machine physically runs is completely different from every other layer. Layer 10 doesn't have to run on layer 5, but every layer has to run on layer 1. and no software can be completely sequestered from any other software And human ideas cannot no that's not right let me start again. Human ideas should not be sequestered from other human ideas; but the sad fact is the people have no problem with huge glaring contradictions in their central belief system. How do you think religion exists? Again, not talking about people here - just about the physical reality vs all forms of simulation. Everything simulated is physical ultimately, but the physical has no signs of being a simulation, as far as the relation to the physical layer is not like any relation between simulated layers. Even if there were other physical levels, we could never have any contact with them by definition, Not so, the Master Programer could make His existence obvious to everyone anytime He wished. But of course the Master Programer may not exist at the ultimate reality level either. In either scenario, what does taking the idea of other physical levels seriously offer us? If the MP unveils those levels, then we worry about it then, no? there is no independent reality at all. So when you use one of your favorite phrases but they aren't real or X doesn't exist, you mean nothing; or at least whatever X is it has no deficiency that everything else, including you, doesn't have. Real has different meanings in different contexts. If I say that photons don't exist, I am saying it in the sense that money doesn't exit. It's real enough as a concept, but the object that the concept refers to has no independent experience or body of its own. There is no actual thing that physically is money or a photon. if we are trying to figure out about the cosmos in general, what difference does it make if we are the lucky/unlucky ones that happen to live on the ground floor or if it's someone else? I think you're getting ahead of yourself, the first step in figuring out how the multiverse works is to figure out how our universe works. Aren't you getting ahead of yourself claiming there is a multiverse at all? Before we try to figure out how our universe works, shouldn't we first figure out what it is? What I think that real means is that sense of accessing an experience which is anchored into a larger significance.It's an intuitive feeling - a gravitas which is supported by numerous sensory, cognitive, and probably super-personal cues. That is exactly what happens when a teenage boy becomes obsessed with a video game, you may feel that lacks gravitas but he certainly doesn't, and it's personal experience we're talking about. Gravitas is relative. If the video game is all that there is, then it's as real as real can get. If you go look at Bryce Canyon and can't tell that its more real than a video game, then that would be alarming. A computer can't tell the difference though. It knows no realism, no sense of gravitas between assisting you kill real people in the army or graphic sprites on Call of Duty. When electronic ears improve and deaf people report that they are as good or better than meat ears will you admit your ideas were wrong? No of course you won't, you'll just dream up some new excuse for your ideas making incorrect predictions. I would expect 'Better than meat' by some measures, but not every measure. And when electronic ears improve (and they will) and deaf people report that they are as good or better than meat ears by every measure (and they will) I think you are in the wrong century for that kind of overconfidence in technology. I think that it is very likely that the quality of electronic ears will improve modestly but never will approach that of natural hearing,. just as the Google search algorithm has not improved in 20 years. More than likely, all prosthetics will always be inferior to natural equipment except in special cases, as they always have been. You know that all of those things on TV - the super glue, the amazing spot removers, and all of the other treatments to make something 'good as new' don't really work as advertised, right? will you then admit your ideas were wrong? No of course you won't, you'll just dream up some new excuse for your ideas making incorrect predictions. I doubt I'll ever in that position, since technological progress will likely continue to be be buried by the politics of
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: As I've said before it's important not to confuse levels, a simulated flame won't burn your computer but it will burn a simulated object. No, that argument is bogus. There is only one physical level. HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW?! And even if there is a ultimate reality level and not a infinite number of nested realities how the hell do you know that you've been living your like at that foundational physical level and not at another one? Nick Bostrom at Oxford wrote an interesting paper on this subject and concludes that there is a strong likelihood that we're already living in a simulation: This is from the abstract: This paper argues that *at least one* of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. For the entire paper goto: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html It is entirely up to the programmer's whim how the laws of physics will work, Exactly. or indeed if they are lawful at all in any given sim, Yes, although a sim without laws would be a very dull simulation indeed and I don't see the point of making one. Simulated flame can work for 10,000 levels of simulation, but not a single one of those simulated flames can access the physical level True again, but that would matter little to you if you did not exist at the foundational physical level, and you might not. ...because they aren't real - But you may not be real either, whatever that means. they are figures..symbols...facades engineered to fool our body's public senses. And what makes you think something hasn't been fooling your body's senses from the day you were born? There is no such thing as real arithmetic. I detect a pattern, whenever fact X contradicts your ideas you simply say There is no such thing as X. It's all a simulation. Could be. Only an eye or ear made of meat will be 100% satisfying - which is why the quality of the implants are crap. When electronic ears improve and deaf people report that they are as good or better than meat ears will you admit your ideas were wrong? No of course you won't, you'll just dream up some new excuse for your ideas making incorrect predictions. Nobody has found anything in the human brain that didn't strictly follow the laws of physics either. That has nothing to do with the dependence of computer programs on a script. Your brain's operation, that is to say your mind, cannot depart from the script that the laws of physics has written. we control physics directly and consciously. Right, that's why I can fly, I just tell the law of conservation of momentum and gravity to stop working while I take my flight. I can predict that if that program doesn't work, it will never fix itself. More than 20 years ago when my first computer's hard drive was not working properly the computer's defragmentation program would fix it. I can predict that if you don't write the program, one will not sprout from the realms of Platonia to fill the void. For years computer programs have been able to write programs (compilers, assemblers and interpreters) in machine code after telling the program what you want using English words and a simplified grammar. I can judge that the quality among human experience varies widely and idiosyncratically. No you can not, you have no way of knowing the quality of experience of your fellow human beings, all you can do is observe behavior and the same thing is true of a smart computer. There will never be an abolitionist movement or a machine-rights movement. HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW? The computer doesn't know the difference between two identical sets of data. You cannot know the difference between two identical sets of data either, and the reason you cannot is because they are identical and so there is no difference. That's what the word means. The human programer himself does not know what the computer is going to say next. That doesn't mean that a computer can begin saying things without a program which makes that possible. A computer can't say things unless it has a program that enables it to communicate in the English language, and you couldn't say things unless you were educated in the English language either. So it data that is associated with an audio capture is automatically experienced by the computer as sound, wouldn't that mean that words we say into a microphone
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
In physics we sometimes get big numbers, like 10^88 or 10^120, but we never need 10^120 + 1. When we use the known laws of Quantum Mechanics to calculate the strength of Dark Energy it gives us a value that is ABOUT 10^120 times larger than the value we actually observe. So a successful Theory of Everything must find a way to cancel out all of it EXCEPT for ABOUT one part in 10^120 of it, but of course it could be one part in 10^120 + 1, or one part in 10^120 - 1, or ... That's why theoreticians were so upset when Dark Energy was found to have a nonzero value about 10 years ago, finding a way to cancel out all of it seemed to be a far far easier task than cancelling out all of it EXCEPT for ABOUT one part in 10^120 of it. And by the way, the largest known prime number was discovered just a few days ago, it is 2^57885161-1 . 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Monday, March 4, 2013 11:06:46 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: As I've said before it's important not to confuse levels, a simulated flame won't burn your computer but it will burn a simulated object. No, that argument is bogus. There is only one physical level. HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW?! It's not a matter of knowing, it's a matter of understanding. Consider: No software can be run without being grounded in physical hardware, and no software can be completely sequestered from any other software All software is completely sequestered from the physical world except through physical hardware. There has never been an alternative physical world discovered which is sequestered from our own. What is our cause to suspect any more exotic explanation? Even if there were other physical levels, we could never have any contact with them by definition, so what is the point of including them in our considerations? And even if there is a ultimate reality level and not a infinite number of nested realities how the hell do you know that you've been living your like at that foundational physical level and not at another one? It's not that there is an ultimate reality level, its that there is no independent reality at all. Experience, in which public realism is contrasted with private experience, is all that there is. Nick Bostrom at Oxford wrote an interesting paper on this subject and concludes that there is a strong likelihood that we're already living in a simulation: This is from the abstract: This paper argues that *at least one* of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. For the entire paper goto: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html All of that comes out of misunderstanding realism as a fact independent of sense. Once QM is understood to be a function of perception and participation, then all the ideas about simulation go away. There is no simulation, there is expectation and perceptual similarity - which are both just experiences, and experiences are all that there is. No simulated experience (zombies drinking dehydrated water?), and nothing to partition any one part of the cosmos completely and finally from any other. It is entirely up to the programmer's whim how the laws of physics will work, Exactly. or indeed if they are lawful at all in any given sim, Yes, although a sim without laws would be a very dull simulation indeed and I don't see the point of making one. Well, you could make spontaneously generated laws that push backward retrocausationally, and fudge the continuity errors. Not hard to do when you can just wipe out and re-synch the memories of sim participants at will. I don't know if that would be more dull than watching a quintillion asteroids circle around a star forever. Simulated flame can work for 10,000 levels of simulation, but not a single one of those simulated flames can access the physical level True again, but that would matter little to you if you did not exist at the foundational physical level, and you might not. Sure, but if we are trying to figure out about the cosmos in general, what difference does it make if we are the lucky/unlucky ones that happen to live on the ground floor or if it's someone else? ...because they aren't real - But you may not be real either, whatever that means. What I think that real means is that sense of accessing an experience which is anchored into a larger significance. It's an intuitive feeling - a gravitas which is supported by numerous sensory, cognitive, and probably super-personal cues. We may not know how we know its real, and we may be wrong - thinking a dream is real - but that doesn't mean that we aren't very often in touch with what is 'real', and that we are right about knowing that reality is authentic. That has to do with the transparency of sense - it can be spoofed and impersonated on some levels temporarily, but not on every level and not forever. That's not just wishful thinking, I am proposing that it is a physical property having to do with how physics is the management of presentation and representation in generating private-public coherence. they are figures..symbols...facades engineered to fool our body's public senses. And what makes you think something
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 02 Mar 2013, at 21:58, meekerdb wrote: On 3/2/2013 1:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 20:37, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 8:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 16:28, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 7:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Feb 2013, at 20:29, meekerdb wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:59 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian syllogisms. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted from the email johnkcl...@gmail.com is only accidentally meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where not chosen by a conscious act. I think we're safe in assuming that they are emitted by a process that is either random or deterministic. It could also be partially random and partially deterministic. Sure. It's hard to even define what might be meant by completely random. Algorithmic incompressability (Chaitin, Martin Loef, Solovay ...) make good attempts. This makes sense with Church's thesis. I guess you know that. Sequences algorithmically incompressible contains maximal information, but no way at all to decode it. But those always implicitly assume infinite sequences. Not at all. The interest of algorithmic information theory is that it defines a notion of finite random sequence (any sequence whose length is as long as the shortest program to generate it). The notion is not constructive and is defined only up to a constant, but it has its purpose). Infinite random sequence are defined by having all their finite initial segment non compressible. But isn't any finite sequence tivial compressible - just not all by the same compression algorithm? When you say a random sequence is defined by having all its finite initial segments non-compressible, don't you mean not compressible by the same algorithm. Not at all. Up to a constant, if a string is not compressible it is not compressible by any algorithm. A constant appears, related to the fact that all universal machine can emulate all other universal machine, and the constant will be related to the length of the interpreter translation. This makes the notion a bit useless for little string (compared to that constant), but makes sense for almost all finite strings (all, except a finite number of them). Then it makes sense for the infinite strings. (Of course this makes sense only through Church thesis). Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 03 Mar 2013, at 01:46, meekerdb wrote: On 3/2/2013 1:37 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 21:02, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 9:20 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: In physics we sometimes get big numbers, like 10^88 or 10^120, but we never need 10^120 + 1. But physics is no more assumed in the TOE derived from comp. I'll bet you've never needed to calculate 10^120 + 1 in the world whose TOE is derived from comp either. :-) False. because now I need to calculate it to make my point: 10^120 + 1 = 100 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 I told you, an infinitesimal! Nothing compare to the finite, but really huge, number that I described some years ago, to illustrate some use of diagonalization, on this list (omega + [omega] + omega, if you remember). I'll be you haven't added 1 to it. :-) I did :) But I don't want to get us involve in a two easy infinite conversation. So I kept is for myself :) The number of chess games is about 10^120. The number of GO games is far bigger. And string theory points on 10^500 theories. Exactly why almost all chess, go games, and string theories are uninteresting. The number of possible brain connection, and thus possible subjective state is about equal to 60,000 ^ 10. Does that makes all brains non interesting? No, it makes almost all (in the technical sense) brain states uninteresting - they correspond to insanities. Our task is the open task of delimiting sanities from insanities. and helping a flow from the second to the first. The number of sane brain is also very huge, I mean that type of numbers, but also, they are exquisitely complex, in the theoretical computer science hierachies, even starting from elementary beliefs in arithmetic. Look, if you argue seriously that comp is not interesting because it uses that for all x we have x ≠ x + 1, I think most people will conclude that comp is winning. No, many interesting theories assume that - but I wonder how essential it is. It certainly produces antinonmies like Hilbert's hotel and Godel's incompleteness. But that is solved in ZF, and first order arithmetic has never led to any antinomies. On the contrary it is part of the finitist part Hilbert wanted to solved the antinomies in set theory. And my friends the Roses have never seen a gardener dying. Some rare Roses have heard rumors that can happen, but all rational Roses knows that belong to fiction. Frankly, for a logician, 10^100 looks really like an infinitesimal :) And to mathematicians too, almost all numbers are infinitesimal. Hmm... It depends of the context. The cardinal of the monstrous finite simple group is usually considered as a big number, as nobody expected such a big number to occur there. And 10^-122 was a surprisingly big number to physicists measuring the vacuum energy density - because they expected it to be zero. Indeed. Compared to 1/(omega+[omega]+omega), the number 10^-122 is an incredible giant. Bruno Brent -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 01 Mar 2013, at 16:58, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 7:48 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: The point of this thread was to show that even geometry is not at all indicated from math or computation, and derives solely from sensory experiences of shapes. Can you dispute this? Sure. Can you prove it? Prove what, that geometry is related to shapes? Computers prove theorems in geometry. But they don't need geometry to do it. As Hilbert said geometry could as well be about tables, chairs, and beer steins as points, lines, and intersections. It could be, but it isn't. That's my point. Then you don't have a point. Geometry is nothing more than the axioms and theorems of geometry. I would not say that. It is the model of the axioms. Even the intended model, most of the time, except that sometimes we develop interest in some new model, like with non Euclidian geometry. Geometry could be about Boolean arithmetic and have no forms at all - which is obviously the case within a computer which is designed to have no capacity to render shapes that it can see. Most computers aren't provided with vision or the ability to manipulate objects in 3-space. Which is why I use Mars rovers as examples of intelligent, and possibly conscious, machines. They certainly understand somethings about geometry and they can see shapes. That's how they avoid running into big rocks. I agree with your point. I doubt it will convince Craig, but that seems a difficult task. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 01 Mar 2013, at 17:17, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 10:58:34 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 7:48 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: The point of this thread was to show that even geometry is not at all indicated from math or computation, and derives solely from sensory experiences of shapes. Can you dispute this? Sure. Can you prove it? Prove what, that geometry is related to shapes? Computers prove theorems in geometry. But they don't need geometry to do it. As Hilbert said geometry could as well be about tables, chairs, and beer steins as points, lines, and intersections. It could be, but it isn't. That's my point. Then you don't have a point. Geometry is nothing more than the axioms and theorems of geometry. Geometry could be about Boolean arithmetic and have no forms at all - which is obviously the case within a computer which is designed to have no capacity to render shapes that it can see. Most computers aren't provided with vision or the ability to manipulate objects in 3-space. Which is why I use Mars rovers as examples of intelligent, and possibly conscious, machines. They certainly understand somethings about geometry and they can see shapes. That's how they avoid running into big rocks. You could run the same software the Rover uses in a virtual environment which has no 3-space. If you plugged the Rover's inputs into a random number generator instead of a camera, it would still try to avoid certain kinds of expected patterns in the data, even though there is absolutely no connection to shapes, rocks, That would be a Rover's dream geometry, or understanding. That's beg the question. Bruno 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-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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 01 Mar 2013, at 20:03, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 12:41:52 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 16:42, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 10:23:24 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 01:11, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. You are the one claiming knowing that all machines cannot think. I don't know that all machines cannot think, Thanks God. but I understand why the reasons for assuming that they ever could are rooted in bad assumptions from the start. Which bad assumption? You never give them without begging the question. The assumption is that sense can be reduced to or produced by arithmetic. You have not yet studied comp. That assumption is not in comp. On the contrary it is shown explicitly that machine's sense is not reducible in any way to anything finitely presentable. I can excuse you because comp + materialism leads to that error, and many account of comp do that error, but both UDA and AUDA single that error. On the contrary, computer science and mathematical logic prevents computationalism, well understood, to fall in the reductionist trap. But you are the one continuing to defend a reductionist conception of numbers and machines. We can see this in the language example that I mentioned: If we have some written characters is it possible to categorize them optically, but these categories don't lead to discovery of any phonetic information. Likewise, phonetic information doesn't lead to any semantic information. Each level of meaning of the text is defined by the capacities of the interpreter - not to compute arithmetic relations, but to have experienced meaningful expression through different sense modalities (visual, audio, grammatical, semantic, poetic...etc) . The fact that we can formalize these relations mathematically only accounts for the idea that any public presentation can be digitized and represented presented, Up to here, comp entails what you say. not that there could be any such thing as presentation or private experience. That's ambiguous, and comp contradicts it, if you say that comp pretend there is a 3p presentation of private experience. There are countless examples of this which I have brought up, showing clearly that while logic or arithmetic is an obvious extraction of sensory-motor experience (as we ourselves learn math through gestures, moving fingers, beads, or other objects), sensory experience is not a plausible outcome of any arithmetic process. You are right on this. But a process is a 3p thing, akin to Bp. Experience is given by Bp p, which can already not been formalized in any 3p term. We can bet on such relation, and that is what we do when saying yes to a doctor, but this make a detour to some notion of arithmetical truth, which is beyond all processes. We have seen no arithmetic process which is not part of a human experience or public physics, yet life on Earth does not require us to perform mathematics at all. That mixes many levels. Some of the examples I have mentioned: John Wayne's Resurrection: Using a computer to reconstruct John Wayne's images and voice, high quality interactive movies are produced in real time, with an AI interpreter. While it should be easy to understand that this bit of interactive theater does not constitute a conversation with the Duke himself, it is argued here that I can't know that this absurdity isn't true. Elvis the Anti-Zombie: Having a computer articulate my limbs and vocal chords to imitate Elvis Presley perfectly, by Comp, there is no reason to believe that I would begin to experience more and more Elvis qualia. That if I acted enough like The King, then I must have memories of his life, know the people he knew, etc. Again, the absurdity is plain, but here, it is sufficient to dismiss it with You Don't Know That. Geometry is A Zombie: It's pretty simple really. An abacus can be used to compute geometric functions - we could find the length of a hypotenuse if we knew the other sides, for example. Moving these beads around and counting them does not require any kind of triangular presentation. If the universe were truly arithmetic - if it was all one giant quantum abacus...where would we get geometry from, even in principle. Forget the fact that it is
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 01 Mar 2013, at 20:37, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 8:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 16:28, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 7:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Feb 2013, at 20:29, meekerdb wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:59 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian syllogisms. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted from the email johnkcl...@gmail.com is only accidentally meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where not chosen by a conscious act. I think we're safe in assuming that they are emitted by a process that is either random or deterministic. It could also be partially random and partially deterministic. Sure. It's hard to even define what might be meant by completely random. Algorithmic incompressability (Chaitin, Martin Loef, Solovay ...) make good attempts. This makes sense with Church's thesis. I guess you know that. Sequences algorithmically incompressible contains maximal information, but no way at all to decode it. But those always implicitly assume infinite sequences. Not at all. The interest of algorithmic information theory is that it defines a notion of finite random sequence (any sequence whose length is as long as the shortest program to generate it). The notion is not constructive and is defined only up to a constant, but it has its purpose). Infinite random sequence are defined by having all their finite initial segment non compressible. I do have have a notion of completely random though, I define it by completely arbitrary. My favorite completely arbitrary sequence is 000... (only zeroes). But to make this arbitrariness precise you need actual infinities, and thus Set Theory, even enriched one by some strong axioms. There are also definitions by a collection of statistical test of normality. In that case PI is comepletely random, apparently. I think it is still an open problem to prove that, but it has been proved for Champerknow number Cn, if I remember well. Cn = 0, 1234567891011121314151617 It is normal (pun intended) as it contains all arbitrary sequences of digits. I thought Karl Popper invented that, except in binary, 0100100111000100010110001... ? Bruno Brent Things are only random in the sense of not being strictly deterministic. In most of the cases. It is easy to build a sequence of 0 and 1 which is partially deterministic, and partially non deterministic (in different senses). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.2899 / Virus Database: 2641/6138 - Release Date: 02/28/13 -- 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- 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-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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 01 Mar 2013, at 21:02, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 9:20 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: In physics we sometimes get big numbers, like 10^88 or 10^120, but we never need 10^120 + 1. But physics is no more assumed in the TOE derived from comp. I'll bet you've never needed to calculate 10^120 + 1 in the world whose TOE is derived from comp either. :-) False. because now I need to calculate it to make my point: 10^120 + 1 = 100 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 I told you, an infinitesimal! Nothing compare to the finite, but really huge, number that I described some years ago, to illustrate some use of diagonalization, on this list (omega + [omega] + omega, if you remember). The number of chess games is about 10^120. The number of GO games is far bigger. And string theory points on 10^500 theories. Exactly why almost all chess, go games, and string theories are uninteresting. The number of possible brain connection, and thus possible subjective state is about equal to 60,000 ^ 10. Does that makes all brains non interesting? Look, if you argue seriously that comp is not interesting because it uses that for all x we have x ≠ x + 1, I think most people will conclude that comp is winning. And my friends the Roses have never seen a gardener dying. Some rare Roses have heard rumors that can happen, but all rational Roses knows that belong to fiction. Frankly, for a logician, 10^100 looks really like an infinitesimal :) And to mathematicians too, almost all numbers are infinitesimal. Hmm... It depends of the context. The cardinal of the monstrous finite simple group is usually considered as a big number, as nobody expected such a big number to occur there. Except instead of seeing this as a bizarre problem indicating something is awry about their theories, they happily invent transfinite numbers. You might read paper by P. Dehornoy, who solved a problem in braid theory, with application is physics, by using large cardinal in set theory. Then later it is has been possible to prove Dehornoy's result without using those cardinals, but the result has still be found through them. Comp is ontologically finitist, though, but not ultrafinitist, indeed. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Friday, March 1, 2013 10:02:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 4:57 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 7:47:14 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 4:32:54 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 3:33:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: It doesn't matter how many knee-jerk twitches you put together or in what order, they are still always going to be empty, mindless mechanisms. Repeated assertions aren't evidence. It's interesting because my assertion is rooted in the same understanding, but you are applying a double standard. I say that repeated mechanical assertions aren't anything other than that. You say that they aren't evidence...but how do you know? For one thing because you contradict them yourself. You just posted, in reply to Bruno, I don't know that all machines cannot think Then you turn around and assert,they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. It's not a contradiction, it's an assertion that as far as we know they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. I don't know that to be the case for all possible machines executed in all possible ways... a fusion of biological and inorganic material could strike a thinking balance You keep overlooking that atoms are not 'organic', yet a fusion of them forms your brain. I don't overlook that at all. If there were no important difference among atoms though, we would be able to eat sand and photosynthesize. Do you just write the first thing that comes into your head? Did you not stop to reflect that the difference between organic and inorganic applies to *molecules*, not atoms? Is it not the kinds of atoms which are included in a molecule that we classify as organic and inorganic? Is this the best that you can do? Ad-hominem nitpicking? I don't assume that atoms built the brain, I know. You assume things like mechanism is perpendicular sensitivity but yes-and-no don't make yellow (although in quodlibet logic it does). You accuse me of contradiction and confusion, but I have none. My ideas are all 100% consistent as far as I can tell. Your misunderstanding and impatience only validates that for me. I think that human experience built human brains out of living cells, using specific substances. So experience preceded brains. And what was it experience OF? Feelings. Sensations. Images. Participation in movement. It's a collaboration from top down eternal influences and bottom up trial and error. - the point though is to understand that the principle of mechanism (which is functions of forms) is the perpendicular axis from sensitivity to those forms and functions. The point to understand it that calling mechanism and sensitivity perpendicular axes is just something you made up. Every scientific discovery is made up by someone. Is that your only contribution to the topic - ad hominem sour grapes? What's ad hominem about calling word salad what it is. What it is *to you* is not *what it is*. You should read semiotics. Word Salad has a very clear signature. For example: *“It was shockingly not of the best quality I have known all such evildoers coming out of doors with the best of intentions!” *If you read others who explore the kinds of issues that I do, like Deleuze or Foucault, you will find that my writing style is not very dissimilar, and certainly not similar to word salad. You are never going to prove anything to be by trying to criticize my writing style. It really has no impact on me at all - and it is in fact exactly what my model expects. I have plenty of people who are appreciative of my writing, and it's really only certain kinds of thinkers who have this intolerant reaction to it. I guess enjoy your intolerance! Craig * * This is what I keep trying to say - things which have a lot of consciousness are the least possible things to control externally. By definition, the more robotic something is, the less alive it is, and that is not trivial or coincidental. If you understand why that symmetry is meaningful, That's not a symmetry - you shouldn't use big words if you don't know what they mean. If you don't understand that it is symmetry, then you don't understand what I am talking about, which you just made clear above. That's the first thing you've written that I can fully agree with. 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
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/2/2013 1:18 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 20:37, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 8:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 16:28, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 7:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Feb 2013, at 20:29, meekerdb wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:59 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian syllogisms. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted from the email johnkcl...@gmail.com is only accidentally meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where not chosen by a conscious act. I think we're safe in assuming that they are emitted by a process that is either random or deterministic. It could also be partially random and partially deterministic. Sure. It's hard to even define what might be meant by completely random. Algorithmic incompressability (Chaitin, Martin Loef, Solovay ...) make good attempts. This makes sense with Church's thesis. I guess you know that. Sequences algorithmically incompressible contains maximal information, but no way at all to decode it. But those always implicitly assume infinite sequences. Not at all. The interest of algorithmic information theory is that it defines a notion of finite random sequence (any sequence whose length is as long as the shortest program to generate it). The notion is not constructive and is defined only up to a constant, but it has its purpose). Infinite random sequence are defined by having all their finite initial segment non compressible. But isn't any finite sequence tivial compressible - just not all by the same compression algorithm? When you say a random sequence is defined by having all its finite initial segments non-compressible, don't you mean not compressible by the same algorithm. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/2/2013 1:37 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 21:02, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 9:20 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: In physics we sometimes get big numbers, like 10^88 or 10^120, but we never need 10^120 + 1. But physics is no more assumed in the TOE derived from comp. I'll bet you've never needed to calculate 10^120 + 1 in the world whose TOE is derived from comp either. :-) False. because now I need to calculate it to make my point: 10^120 + 1 = 100 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 I told you, an infinitesimal! Nothing compare to the finite, but really huge, number that I described some years ago, to illustrate some use of diagonalization, on this list (omega + [omega] + omega, if you remember). I'll be you haven't added 1 to it. :-) The number of chess games is about 10^120. The number of GO games is far bigger. And string theory points on 10^500 theories. Exactly why almost all chess, go games, and string theories are uninteresting. The number of possible brain connection, and thus possible subjective state is about equal to 60,000 ^ 10. Does that makes all brains non interesting? No, it makes almost all (in the technical sense) brain states uninteresting - they correspond to insanities. Look, if you argue seriously that comp is not interesting because it uses that for all x we have x ≠ x + 1, I think most people will conclude that comp is winning. No, many interesting theories assume that - but I wonder how essential it is. It certainly produces antinonmies like Hilbert's hotel and Godel's incompleteness. And my friends the Roses have never seen a gardener dying. Some rare Roses have heard rumors that can happen, but all rational Roses knows that belong to fiction. Frankly, for a logician, 10^100 looks really like an infinitesimal :) And to mathematicians too, almost all numbers are infinitesimal. Hmm... It depends of the context. The cardinal of the monstrous finite simple group is usually considered as a big number, as nobody expected such a big number to occur there. And 10^-122 was a surprisingly big number to physicists measuring the vacuum energy density - because they expected it to be zero. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Friday, March 1, 2013 12:46:55 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 5:30 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 8:01:48 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 4:11 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. But I can make an empirically informed one. That means that you claim to have empirical information about consciousness beyond another person's information about their own consciousness. (a) I said I have empirical information. I didn't say it is beyond somebody elses. How can you claim to have that at the same time that you claim someone else can't? (b) It was you who claimed to know what John couldn't know. No, I said this: The computer can't tell if its audio or video no matter what. It can only tell what application might be associated with opening that file. As there are zero empirical differences between those two things HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW? My statement is empirically correct. It does not look at any visual or audio qualities of a file to determine what kind of a file it is. Anyone who has worked with computers for long enough should be able to understand why this is indesputably true. Files have flags and pointers which identify their type, they are not looked at or listened to by the computer. Even speaking into a microphone yields nothing on the other side which is fundamentally different from what a camera would yield - voltage changes in microelectronics have no origination bias. This is the very thing that makes computers useful - they don't care what you do with them. They will treat data as data no matter what it is, and never need to reconstruct it into anything meaningful to us. These are some of the defining qualities of computation. The point of this thread was to show that even geometry is not at all indicated from math or computation, and derives solely from sensory experiences of shapes. Can you dispute this? 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-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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 28 Feb 2013, at 14:58, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/28/2013 7:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Feb 2013, at 05:04, meekerdb wrote: You are assuming that justification comes from logic; and indeed it is too much to expect from such a weak source. I look for such justification as can be found from experience, which you demoted to mere motivation. Hi Bruno and Brent, Where did I say motivation? I use the term intuition, and I demote nothing, as it correspond to to the first person (the hero of comp, the inner God, the third hypostase, Bp p; S4Grz1, etc.). ISTM that 'motivation' is a 3p view of 'intuition'! I don't see this at all. Motivation is somehow even more a psychological notion than 'intuition', which admit logical specification. But justification for me invokes proof, formal or informal. Justification requires a model and/or implementation,no? Not necessarily, in case of formal justification, or in first order logic: we need only formulas and sequences of formulas, at the meta- level. [BM] I don't think that what you ask is possible, even if I am pretty sure that x + 0 = x, x + s(y) = s(x + y), etc. I'm not at all sure that there is successor for every x. Then you adopt ultrafinitism, and indeed comp does not make sense with such hypothesis, and UDA1-7 suggests that ultrafinitism might save physicalism, but step 8 put a doubt on this. The axiom that all natural numbers have a successor is used in basically all scientific paper though. You need it, or equivalent, to define machine, formal systems, programs, Church's thesis, string theory, eigenvector, trigonometry, etc. I need to be sure that I understand this: Numbers are prior to computations. Is that correct? Once you agree on the axioms and rules of elementary arithmetic, numbers and computations coexist, like even numbers and prime numbers. You can' have one without the other. If so, then ultrafinitism fails, but if computations are prior to numbers, ultrafinitism (of some kind) seems inevitable. I have always balked at step 8 in that is seems a bridge too far... Why does the doubt have to be taken so far? It is a conclusion. We will come back on step 8 on the FOAR list, soon. In your neutral monism, primary matter (and thus time and space) also does not exist. I don't see why you have a problem with this non- existence at the ontological level, given that those have to be explained at some other level. My intuition doesn't reach to infinity. It seems like an hypothesis of convenience. I propose a theory, that's all. You don't need to believe in infinity, unlike in set theory (yet also used by many). You need just to believe (assume) that 0 ≠ s(x), and that x ≠ y entails s(x) ≠ s(y). Notion like provability and computability are based on this. Bruno I still don't understand how we cannot assume some implicit set with even arithmetic realism. How are integers not a set? You can assume the numbers, without assuming sets. That means that set will not be first order citizen in the reality that you assume, a bit like classes in ZF set theory. Set appears at the metalevel, when you assume only numbers. They can appear also as mental objects in the mind of the relative numbers, but they are not existing objects, you can't prove ExP(x) with x denoting them, unless you represent a set by a numbers, which can be done for the RE sets, but not for any set. But yes, some set will exist, even explicitly, through some possible representations. But those sets are not assume, then, they are proven to exist. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 28 Feb 2013, at 19:03, meekerdb wrote: On 2/28/2013 4:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Feb 2013, at 05:04, meekerdb wrote: On 2/27/2013 7:17 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 27 Feb 2013, at 20:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/27/2013 2:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 26 Feb 2013, at 21:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/26/2013 1:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: How did number arise? We don't know that, but we can show that if we don't assume them, or equivalent (basically anything Turing Universal), then we cannot derive them. I'm not sure how you mean that? I meant that you cannot build a theory, simpler than arithmetic in appearance, from which you can derive the existence of the numbers. All theories which want talk about the numbers have to be turing universal. So I meant this in the concrete sense that if you write your axioms, and want talk about numbers, you need to postulate them, or equivalent. You can derive the numbers from the equational theory: Kxy = x Sxyz = xz(yz) + few equality rules, But that theory is already Turing universal, and assume as much the number than elementary arithmetic. We know that we experience individual objects and so we can count them by putting them in one-to-one relation with fingers or notches or marks. So what are you calling an assumption in this? A theory is supposed to abstract from the experiences. The experiences motivates the theory, but does not justify it logically. But justify logically seems like a bizarre concept to me. We just make up rules of logic so that inferences from some axioms, which we also make up, preserve 'true'. We have intuition and/or evidences for accepting the axiom. Here the question is really: do you accept the axiom of Peano Arithmetic (for example). And with comp we don't need more. Then we prove theorems, which can be quite non trivial. To say that it is justified logically seems to mean no more than we have avoided inconsistency insofar as we know. Yes. We can't hope for more. But in case of arithmetic, we do have intuition. Well, in physics too. Sure it's important that our model of the world not have inconsistencies (at least if our rules of inference include ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet) but mere consistency doesn't justify anything. Consistency justifies our existence. I would say. We are ourself hypothetical with comp. We are divine hypotheses, somehow. I think you ask too much for a justification. You are assuming that justification comes from logic; and indeed it is too much to expect from such a weak source. I look for such justification as can be found from experience, which you demoted to mere motivation. Where did I say motivation? The experiences motivates the theory, but does not justify it logically. Indeed. It is the inductive inference part of the learning process. It is very important. All theories, including brains comes from this. I use the term intuition, and I demote nothing, as it correspond to to the first person (the hero of comp, the inner God, the third hypostase, Bp p; S4Grz1, etc.). But justification for me invokes proof, formal or informal. Logical proof is relative to axioms. So the justification can be no stronger than the axioms. Sure. I don't think that what you ask is possible, even if I am pretty sure that x + 0 = x, x + s(y) = s(x + y), etc. I'm not at all sure that there is successor for every x. Then you adopt ultrafinitism, and indeed comp does not make sense with such hypothesis, and UDA1-7 suggests that ultrafinitism might save physicalism, but step 8 put a doubt on this. The axiom that all natural numbers have a successor is used in basically all scientific paper though. It is assumed, but I'm not sure it is used in an essential way. I recognize it difficult to do mathematics without it, but still it may be only a convenience. OK. I don't see the problem with this. Convenience is a fuzzy notion. A brain too is convenient. Universes can be convenient. I am not sure to see your point. You need it, or equivalent, to define machine, formal systems, programs, Church's thesis, string theory, eigenvector, trigonometry, etc. My intuition doesn't reach to infinity. It seems like an hypothesis of convenience. I propose a theory, that's all. You don't need to believe in infinity, unlike in set theory (yet also used by many). You need just to believe (assume) that 0 ≠ s(x), and that x ≠ y entails s(x) ≠ s(y). Notion like provability and computability are based on this. I think you need to accept that every number has a successor in order to prove things like Godel's theorems. That follows from the axiom above. It is easy to prove this, and Gödel's incompleteness, *in* the theory, if the theory has the induction axioms. If the theory has no induction axioms, you can
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 28 Feb 2013, at 19:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 1:03:40 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 4:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Feb 2013, at 05:04, meekerdb wrote: On 2/27/2013 7:17 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 27 Feb 2013, at 20:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/27/2013 2:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 26 Feb 2013, at 21:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/26/2013 1:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: How did number arise? We don't know that, but we can show that if we don't assume them, or equivalent (basically anything Turing Universal), then we cannot derive them. I'm not sure how you mean that? I meant that you cannot build a theory, simpler than arithmetic in appearance, from which you can derive the existence of the numbers. All theories which want talk about the numbers have to be turing universal. So I meant this in the concrete sense that if you write your axioms, and want talk about numbers, you need to postulate them, or equivalent. You can derive the numbers from the equational theory: Kxy = x Sxyz = xz(yz) + few equality rules, But that theory is already Turing universal, and assume as much the number than elementary arithmetic. We know that we experience individual objects and so we can count them by putting them in one-to-one relation with fingers or notches or marks. So what are you calling an assumption in this? A theory is supposed to abstract from the experiences. The experiences motivates the theory, but does not justify it logically. But justify logically seems like a bizarre concept to me. We just make up rules of logic so that inferences from some axioms, which we also make up, preserve 'true'. We have intuition and/or evidences for accepting the axiom. Here the question is really: do you accept the axiom of Peano Arithmetic (for example). And with comp we don't need more. Then we prove theorems, which can be quite non trivial. To say that it is justified logically seems to mean no more than we have avoided inconsistency insofar as we know. Yes. We can't hope for more. But in case of arithmetic, we do have intuition. Well, in physics too. Sure it's important that our model of the world not have inconsistencies (at least if our rules of inference include ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet) but mere consistency doesn't justify anything. Consistency justifies our existence. I would say. We are ourself hypothetical with comp. We are divine hypotheses, somehow. I think you ask too much for a justification. You are assuming that justification comes from logic; and indeed it is too much to expect from such a weak source. I look for such justification as can be found from experience, which you demoted to mere motivation. Where did I say motivation? The experiences motivates the theory, but does not justify it logically. I use the term intuition, and I demote nothing, as it correspond to to the first person (the hero of comp, the inner God, the third hypostase, Bp p; S4Grz1, etc.). But justification for me invokes proof, formal or informal. Logical proof is relative to axioms. So the justification can be no stronger than the axioms. And axioms are no stronger than the capacity to make sense of them. That's correct, and that's why when we assume comp we need at the start a Turing universal theory, capable of representing the partial computable functions, incmuding universal functions. With comp the universal machine, which compute the universal function (alxays in the Church Turing sense) are capable of making sense of the axioms, and prove a lot of things about them. Such machines can prove their own limitation, and bet on what is beyond them. Bruno I don't think that what you ask is possible, even if I am pretty sure that x + 0 = x, x + s(y) = s(x + y), etc. I'm not at all sure that there is successor for every x. Then you adopt ultrafinitism, and indeed comp does not make sense with such hypothesis, and UDA1-7 suggests that ultrafinitism might save physicalism, but step 8 put a doubt on this. The axiom that all natural numbers have a successor is used in basically all scientific paper though. It is assumed, but I'm not sure it is used in an essential way. I recognize it difficult to do mathematics without it, but still it may be only a convenience. You need it, or equivalent, to define machine, formal systems, programs, Church's thesis, string theory, eigenvector, trigonometry, etc. My intuition doesn't reach to infinity. It seems like an hypothesis of convenience. I propose a theory, that's all. You don't need to believe in infinity, unlike in set theory (yet also used by many). You need just to believe (assume) that 0 ≠ s(x), and that x ≠ y entails s(x) ≠ s(y). Notion like provability and computability are based on this. I think you need to accept that every number has a
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 28 Feb 2013, at 20:29, meekerdb wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:59 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian syllogisms. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted from the email johnkcl...@gmail.com is only accidentally meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where not chosen by a conscious act. I think we're safe in assuming that they are emitted by a process that is either random or deterministic. It could also be partially random and partially deterministic. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 01 Mar 2013, at 01:11, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. You are the one claiming knowing that all machines cannot think. Bruno 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 7:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Feb 2013, at 20:29, meekerdb wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:59 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian syllogisms. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted from the email johnkcl...@gmail.com is only accidentally meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where not chosen by a conscious act. I think we're safe in assuming that they are emitted by a process that is either random or deterministic. It could also be partially random and partially deterministic. Sure. It's hard to even define what might be meant by completely random. Things are only random in the sense of not being strictly deterministic. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 7:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I don't think that what you ask is possible, even if I am pretty sure that x + 0 = x, x + s(y) = s(x + y), etc. I'm not at all sure that there is successor for every x. Then you adopt ultrafinitism, and indeed comp does not make sense with such hypothesis, and UDA1-7 suggests that ultrafinitism might save physicalism, but step 8 put a doubt on this. The axiom that all natural numbers have a successor is used in basically all scientific paper though. It is assumed, but I'm not sure it is used in an essential way. I recognize it difficult to do mathematics without it, but still it may be only a convenience. OK. I don't see the problem with this. Convenience is a fuzzy notion. A brain too is convenient. Universes can be convenient. I am not sure to see your point. In physics we sometimes get big numbers, like 10^88 or 10^120, but we never need 10^120 + 1. We make an axiom of succession and assume it applies to 10^120 like other numbers, but maybe that is because it easier than thinking of axioms to describe how we really calculate: 10^88 + 1 = 10^88. There's a book Ad Infinitum by Rotman that proposes something along these lines, but he writes like a French philosopher so I found it hard to tell whether his idea really works. But we do know that real computers work, and their mathematics are finite. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 3:09 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 12:46:55 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 5:30 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 8:01:48 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 4:11 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. But I can make an empirically informed one. That means that you claim to have empirical information about consciousness beyond another person's information about their own consciousness. (a) I said I have empirical information. I didn't say it is beyond somebody elses. How can you claim to have that at the same time that you claim someone else can't? (b) It was you who claimed to know what John couldn't know. No, I said this: The computer can't tell if its audio or video no matter what. It can only tell what application might be associated with opening that file. As there are zero empirical differences between those two things HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW? My statement is empirically correct. It does not look at any visual or audio qualities of a file to determine what kind of a file it is. Anyone who has worked with computers for long enough should be able to understand why this is indesputably true. Files have flags and pointers which identify their type, they are not looked at or listened to by the computer. That's why I always point out that intelligence is relative to an environment. When you talk about seeing or listening that implies an environment of photons or acoustic waves carrying information about the environment. When you then switch to a computer that has no photon or acoustic wave sensors and say it can't see or hear you have created a strawman. Even speaking into a microphone yields nothing on the other side which is fundamentally different from what a camera would yield - voltage changes in microelectronics have no origination bias. This is the very thing that makes computers useful - they don't care what you do with them. They will treat data as data no matter what it is, and never need to reconstruct it into anything meaningful to us. These are some of the defining qualities of computation. The point of this thread was to show that even geometry is not at all indicated from math or computation, and derives solely from sensory experiences of shapes. Can you dispute this? Sure. Can you prove it? Computers prove theorems in geometry. As Hilbert said geometry could as well be about tables, chairs, and beer steins as points, lines, and intersections. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Friday, March 1, 2013 10:23:24 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 01:11, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. You are the one claiming knowing that all machines cannot think. I don't know that all machines cannot think, but I understand why the reasons for assuming that they ever could are rooted in bad assumptions from the start. If we don't what consciousness actually is and what it does, then we skip the important part and reverse engineer a false confidence in unconscious programs. Craig Bruno 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-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. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Friday, March 1, 2013 10:39:05 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 3:09 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 12:46:55 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 5:30 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 8:01:48 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 4:11 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. But I can make an empirically informed one. That means that you claim to have empirical information about consciousness beyond another person's information about their own consciousness. (a) I said I have empirical information. I didn't say it is beyond somebody elses. How can you claim to have that at the same time that you claim someone else can't? (b) It was you who claimed to know what John couldn't know. No, I said this: The computer can't tell if its audio or video no matter what. It can only tell what application might be associated with opening that file. As there are zero empirical differences between those two things HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW? My statement is empirically correct. It does not look at any visual or audio qualities of a file to determine what kind of a file it is. Anyone who has worked with computers for long enough should be able to understand why this is indesputably true. Files have flags and pointers which identify their type, they are not looked at or listened to by the computer. That's why I always point out that intelligence is relative to an environment. When you talk about seeing or listening that implies an environment of photons or acoustic waves carrying information about the environment. When you then switch to a computer that has no photon or acoustic wave sensors and say it can't see or hear you have created a strawman. Even speaking into a microphone yields nothing on the other side which is fundamentally different from what a camera would yield - voltage changes in microelectronics have no origination bias. This is the very thing that makes computers useful - they don't care what you do with them. They will treat data as data no matter what it is, and never need to reconstruct it into anything meaningful to us. These are some of the defining qualities of computation. The point of this thread was to show that even geometry is not at all indicated from math or computation, and derives solely from sensory experiences of shapes. Can you dispute this? Sure. Can you prove it? Prove what, that geometry is related to shapes? Computers prove theorems in geometry. But they don't need geometry to do it. As Hilbert said geometry could as well be about tables, chairs, and beer steins as points, lines, and intersections. It could be, but it isn't. That's my point. Geometry could be about Boolean arithmetic and have no forms at all - which is obviously the case within a computer which is designed to have no capacity to render shapes that it can see. 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-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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 7:48 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: The point of this thread was to show that even geometry is not at all indicated from math or computation, and derives solely from sensory experiences of shapes. Can you dispute this? Sure. Can you prove it? Prove what, that geometry is related to shapes? Computers prove theorems in geometry. But they don't need geometry to do it. As Hilbert said geometry could as well be about tables, chairs, and beer steins as points, lines, and intersections. It could be, but it isn't. That's my point. Then you don't have a point. Geometry is nothing more than the axioms and theorems of geometry. Geometry could be about Boolean arithmetic and have no forms at all - which is obviously the case within a computer which is designed to have no capacity to render shapes that it can see. Most computers aren't provided with vision or the ability to manipulate objects in 3-space. Which is why I use Mars rovers as examples of intelligent, and possibly conscious, machines. They certainly understand somethings about geometry and they can see shapes. That's how they avoid running into big rocks. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Friday, March 1, 2013 10:58:34 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 7:48 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: The point of this thread was to show that even geometry is not at all indicated from math or computation, and derives solely from sensory experiences of shapes. Can you dispute this? Sure. Can you prove it? Prove what, that geometry is related to shapes? Computers prove theorems in geometry. But they don't need geometry to do it. As Hilbert said geometry could as well be about tables, chairs, and beer steins as points, lines, and intersections. It could be, but it isn't. That's my point. Then you don't have a point. Geometry is nothing more than the axioms and theorems of geometry. Geometry could be about Boolean arithmetic and have no forms at all - which is obviously the case within a computer which is designed to have no capacity to render shapes that it can see. Most computers aren't provided with vision or the ability to manipulate objects in 3-space. Which is why I use Mars rovers as examples of intelligent, and possibly conscious, machines. They certainly understand somethings about geometry and they can see shapes. That's how they avoid running into big rocks. You could run the same software the Rover uses in a virtual environment which has no 3-space. If you plugged the Rover's inputs into a random number generator instead of a camera, it would still try to avoid certain kinds of expected patterns in the data, even though there is absolutely no connection to shapes, rocks, geometry, or understanding. 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-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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 01 Mar 2013, at 16:28, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 7:13 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Feb 2013, at 20:29, meekerdb wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:59 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian syllogisms. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted from the email johnkcl...@gmail.com is only accidentally meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where not chosen by a conscious act. I think we're safe in assuming that they are emitted by a process that is either random or deterministic. It could also be partially random and partially deterministic. Sure. It's hard to even define what might be meant by completely random. Algorithmic incompressability (Chaitin, Martin Loef, Solovay ...) make good attempts. This makes sense with Church's thesis. I guess you know that. Sequences algorithmically incompressible contains maximal information, but no way at all to decode it. I do have have a notion of completely random though, I define it by completely arbitrary. My favorite completely arbitrary sequence is 000... (only zeroes). But to make this arbitrariness precise you need actual infinities, and thus Set Theory, even enriched one by some strong axioms. There are also definitions by a collection of statistical test of normality. In that case PI is comepletely random, apparently. I think it is still an open problem to prove that, but it has been proved for Champerknow number Cn, if I remember well. Cn = 0, 1234567891011121314151617 It is normal (pun intended) as it contains all arbitrary sequences of digits. Things are only random in the sense of not being strictly deterministic. In most of the cases. It is easy to build a sequence of 0 and 1 which is partially deterministic, and partially non deterministic (in different senses). 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 01 Mar 2013, at 16:37, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 7:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: I don't think that what you ask is possible, even if I am pretty sure that x + 0 = x, x + s(y) = s(x + y), etc. I'm not at all sure that there is successor for every x. Then you adopt ultrafinitism, and indeed comp does not make sense with such hypothesis, and UDA1-7 suggests that ultrafinitism might save physicalism, but step 8 put a doubt on this. The axiom that all natural numbers have a successor is used in basically all scientific paper though. It is assumed, but I'm not sure it is used in an essential way. I recognize it difficult to do mathematics without it, but still it may be only a convenience. OK. I don't see the problem with this. Convenience is a fuzzy notion. A brain too is convenient. Universes can be convenient. I am not sure to see your point. In physics we sometimes get big numbers, like 10^88 or 10^120, but we never need 10^120 + 1. But physics is no more assumed in the TOE derived from comp. The number of chess games is about 10^120. The number of GO games is far bigger. And string theory points on 10^500 theories. And my friends the Roses have never seen a gardener dying. Some rare Roses have heard rumors that can happen, but all rational Roses knows that belong to fiction. Frankly, for a logician, 10^100 looks really like an infinitesimal :) We make an axiom of succession and assume it applies to 10^120 like other numbers, But then working on the prime number distribution, some bound on some function get *far* higher than that. but maybe that is because it easier than thinking of axioms to describe how we really calculate: 10^88 + 1 = 10^88. Like it is easier to make the earth turning around the sun than the contrary. If you are for complex theories a priori, ... There's a book Ad Infinitum by Rotman that proposes something along these lines, but he writes like a French philosopher so I found it hard to tell whether his idea really works. But we do know that real computers work, and their mathematics are finite. That's correct on one level, and incorrect on another level. The metamathematics of the finite mathematics is not finite. Some proof of the correctness of some algorithm in numerical analysis can requires big cardinals. Real computers might do finite things, but they do very complex things which might involve very large numbers, or high cardinal or ordinal, for human figuring out why they acts like they can act. With comp you can put infinities only in the mind, as I do, but we have still to study that mind, and needs infinite mathematics for that. With comp the ontology is finitist, but that ontology is seen by inside, by finite creatures,which have to imagine very large unboundable structure, needing stronger mathematics, just to get notions of meaning, etc. Also, some could argue that only the mathematical universal machine is finite, and that a real computer (if that notion makes sense) is an infinite analogical quantum field living in an infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. I put my card on the table, and reason. I don't defend a truth about some reality. To use the notion of universal machine to formulate the mind-body problem in the frame of some hypothesis is a different task than to program a computer to perform some useful task in real time. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 01 Mar 2013, at 16:42, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 10:23:24 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 01:11, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. You are the one claiming knowing that all machines cannot think. I don't know that all machines cannot think, Thanks God. but I understand why the reasons for assuming that they ever could are rooted in bad assumptions from the start. Which bad assumption? You never give them without begging the question. If we don't what consciousness actually is and what it does, then we skip the important part and reverse engineer a false confidence in unconscious programs. And Bruno said, from Memory, in Sylvie and Bruno (Lewis Carroll): I am so happy that I hate spinach, because, you know, if ever I could appreciate spinach, I guess I would eat some of them, and that is exactly what I would like never to think possible. You beg the question again. Betting that machine could be conscious does not entail that we know what consciousness is or rely on. You have a reductionist view of science, leading you to close prematurely an inquiry. All rational computationalist are open to the falsity of comp, and what I show is that [comp + precise theory of knowledge] becomes refutable, so that we can progress. But up to now, comp explains a lot of things, even if incorrect, notably the apparent many worlds, the quantum like logic of observation, the existence of non communicable truth and sensations, and eventually some non trivial Plotinian theology. In a sense comp explains why first person are not machine, and only borrow them to say hello to others machines. Why would not some immaterial programs be able to support human first person? I am not saying that this is true, only that it makes possible to formulate the mind problem, indeed to translate it into a problem in number theory. Bruno Craig Bruno 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-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=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. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 8:17 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 10:58:34 AM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 7:48 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: The point of this thread was to show that even geometry is not at all indicated from math or computation, and derives solely from sensory experiences of shapes. Can you dispute this? Sure. Can you prove it? Prove what, that geometry is related to shapes? Computers prove theorems in geometry. But they don't need geometry to do it. As Hilbert said geometry could as well be about tables, chairs, and beer steins as points, lines, and intersections. It could be, but it isn't. That's my point. Then you don't have a point. Geometry is nothing more than the axioms and theorems of geometry. Geometry could be about Boolean arithmetic and have no forms at all - which is obviously the case within a computer which is designed to have no capacity to render shapes that it can see. Most computers aren't provided with vision or the ability to manipulate objects in 3-space. Which is why I use Mars rovers as examples of intelligent, and possibly conscious, machines. They certainly understand somethings about geometry and they can see shapes. That's how they avoid running into big rocks. You could run the same software the Rover uses in a virtual environment which has no 3-space. If you plugged the Rover's inputs into a random number generator instead of a camera, it would still try to avoid certain kinds of expected patterns in the data, even though there is absolutely no connection to shapes, rocks, geometry, or understanding. All that shows is that the camera is part of the rover's understanding. If we fed false signals into your optic nerve you'd run into things too. There's absolutely no connection between your assertions and any facts. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Friday, March 1, 2013 12:41:52 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 16:42, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 10:23:24 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 Mar 2013, at 01:11, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. You are the one claiming knowing that all machines cannot think. I don't know that all machines cannot think, Thanks God. but I understand why the reasons for assuming that they ever could are rooted in bad assumptions from the start. Which bad assumption? You never give them without begging the question. The assumption is that sense can be reduced to or produced by arithmetic. We can see this in the language example that I mentioned: If we have some written characters is it possible to categorize them optically, but these categories don't lead to discovery of any phonetic information. Likewise, phonetic information doesn't lead to any semantic information. Each level of meaning of the text is defined by the capacities of the interpreter - not to compute arithmetic relations, but to have experienced meaningful expression through different sense modalities (visual, audio, grammatical, semantic, poetic...etc) . The fact that we can formalize these relations mathematically only accounts for the idea that any public presentation can be digitized and represented presented, not that there could be any such thing as presentation or private experience. There are countless examples of this which I have brought up, showing clearly that while logic or arithmetic is an obvious extraction of sensory-motor experience (as we ourselves learn math through gestures, moving fingers, beads, or other objects), sensory experience is not a plausible outcome of any arithmetic process. We have seen no arithmetic process which is not part of a human experience or public physics, yet life on Earth does not require us to perform mathematics at all. Some of the examples I have mentioned: John Wayne's Resurrection: Using a computer to reconstruct John Wayne's images and voice, high quality interactive movies are produced in real time, with an AI interpreter. While it should be easy to understand that this bit of interactive theater does not constitute a conversation with the Duke himself, it is argued here that I can't know that this absurdity isn't true. Elvis the Anti-Zombie: Having a computer articulate my limbs and vocal chords to imitate Elvis Presley perfectly, by Comp, there is no reason to believe that I would begin to experience more and more Elvis qualia. That if I acted enough like The King, then I must have memories of his life, know the people he knew, etc. Again, the absurdity is plain, but here, it is sufficient to dismiss it with You Don't Know That. Geometry is A Zombie: It's pretty simple really. An abacus can be used to compute geometric functions - we could find the length of a hypotenuse if we knew the other sides, for example. Moving these beads around and counting them does not require any kind of triangular presentation. If the universe were truly arithmetic - if it was all one giant quantum abacus...where would we get geometry from, even in principle. Forget the fact that it is obviously impossible for beads on bamboo sticks to 'imply' triangles without an abacus user imagining that - the deeper problem is that sense is completely redundant to computation. There is no good reason, no bad reason, no maybe reason, no reason at all for computation to assume any form other than the one it is already in, which is *no form*. Then there's the pathetic fallacy. We know that language has these poetic, metaphorical layers of meaning. We know that we use language to anthropomorphize inanimate objects. We can call a ship 'she' or give a computer a name like Watson. Not only is it absurd to take these uses of languages literally, we should actively beware of the influence of this kind of cognitive bias. It's complicated because we can be too generous with some things and too prejudiced against some people, but at the same time, we can still be right about correctly recognizing the impersonal nature of objects and machines. We don't get in the line of fire of a machine gun and try to scare it or bluff it. If you conflate arithmetic and sense from the beginning, then you have no chance of finding the hard problem or explanatory gap, because realism
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 9:20 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: In physics we sometimes get big numbers, like 10^88 or 10^120, but we never need 10^120 + 1. But physics is no more assumed in the TOE derived from comp. I'll bet you've never needed to calculate 10^120 + 1 in the world whose TOE is derived from comp either. :-) The number of chess games is about 10^120. The number of GO games is far bigger. And string theory points on 10^500 theories. Exactly why almost all chess, go games, and string theories are uninteresting. And my friends the Roses have never seen a gardener dying. Some rare Roses have heard rumors that can happen, but all rational Roses knows that belong to fiction. Frankly, for a logician, 10^100 looks really like an infinitesimal :) And to mathematicians too, almost all numbers are infinitesimal. Except instead of seeing this as a bizarre problem indicating something is awry about their theories, they happily invent transfinite numbers. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 11:03 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: If we have some written characters is it possible to categorize them optically, but these categories don't lead to discovery of any phonetic information. Sure they do. Just try http://www.naturalreaders.com/howto.php?referp=mainbar Likewise, phonetic information doesn't lead to any semantic information. Have it read Fetch the paper. to you dog and see if there's semantic information. Or if you have a modern house, have it read Lights ON. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Friday, March 1, 2013 3:10:30 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 11:03 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: If we have some written characters is it possible to categorize them optically, but these categories don't lead to discovery of any phonetic information. Sure they do. Just try http://www.naturalreaders.com/howto.php?referp=mainbar No. That is an example of taking data associated with optical characters and data associated with sound card signals as two given data sets and deriving a relationship statistically. If you don't have one of those data sets however, for example, if I make up a written language of symbols and I decide whether or not those symbols have sounds associated with them, the computer has no idea what I have decided. It makes no difference whether it's my private ad hoc language or a language with millions of speakers. Likewise, phonetic information doesn't lead to any semantic information. Have it read Fetch the paper. to you dog and see if there's semantic information. Or if you have a modern house, have it read Lights ON. That depends on whether the dog understands the commands or not, doesn't it? I remember back in the days when remote controls were actually 'clickers'. The Zenith console color TV did indeed respond differently to the three different metallic clicks the remote made - and it also responded randomly to keys jangling, coins spilling out on a glass table, loud noises, etc. There is *nothing* semantic about conditioned response behaviorism. It doesn't matter how many knee-jerk twitches you put together or in what order, they are still always going to be empty, mindless mechanisms. 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-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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 12:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: It doesn't matter how many knee-jerk twitches you put together or in what order, they are still always going to be empty, mindless mechanisms. Repeated assertions aren't evidence. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Friday, March 1, 2013 3:33:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: It doesn't matter how many knee-jerk twitches you put together or in what order, they are still always going to be empty, mindless mechanisms. Repeated assertions aren't evidence. It's interesting because my assertion is rooted in the same understanding, but you are applying a double standard. I say that repeated mechanical assertions aren't anything other than that. You say that they aren't evidence...but how do you know? If a mechanical potato peeler can someday learn to taste potatoes, then maybe repeated assertions can become evidence? 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-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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 12:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 3:33:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: It doesn't matter how many knee-jerk twitches you put together or in what order, they are still always going to be empty, mindless mechanisms. Repeated assertions aren't evidence. It's interesting because my assertion is rooted in the same understanding, but you are applying a double standard. I say that repeated mechanical assertions aren't anything other than that. You say that they aren't evidence...but how do you know? For one thing because you contradict them yourself. You just posted, in reply to Bruno, I don't know that all machines cannot think Then you turn around and assert,they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. If a mechanical potato peeler can someday learn to taste potatoes, then maybe repeated assertions can become evidence? If the potato peeler has a choice and chooses to peel potatoes more than tomatoes then that will be evidence. It's same kind of evidence that would tell you whether a human being preferred potatoes to tomatoes. I suppose you heard about the guy who worked in at fast food place and developed an irrational urge to put his penis in the potato peeler. He knew something bad would happen but he couldn't stop himself from thinking about it. He finally went to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist told him that if he couldn't stop thinking about it he might as well try it. So he did. When he got home from work, he told his wife what he'd done. She said,Oh, my God! and rushed to pull down his pants. She looked at him and said, What happened to the potato peeler? He said, I think she got fired too. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: All that matters is that we understand that there is no presentation quality to a file. Presentation is 100% in the interpreter. And a computer can be and often is the interpreter. You are really saying that we could use a program that acts like a video screen instead of an actual video screen. Exactly. If you don't want to look at a video screen to see a cat scan then a X ray computerized tomography machine will be happy to print out the spacial coordinates of the organs, although I don't know why you'd want that. There will never be an app on your iPhone to make it waterproof. As I've said before it's important not to confuse levels, a simulated flame won't burn your computer but it will burn a simulated object. A real flame won't burn the laws of chemistry but it will burn your finger. And some things cross all levels, like information processing; there is no difference between simulated arithmetic and real arithmetic or between simulated intelligence and real intelligence. Consciousness is the capacity to discern between menu and meal A computer with a optical character reader and a simple amino acid detector could easily tell the difference between a menu and a meal. A electronic cochlear implant that enables deaf people to hear produces no sound, all it makes is lots of zeros and ones. The same thing is true of the experimental artificial eye. Sure, because there is ultimately a living person there to hear and see. Without the person, the implants won't do anything worthwhile. Before you were saying only a eye or ear made of meat would do and now you've abandoned that position, how far back along the chain of perception will you retreat before you admit you were wrong? My guess is you will never change your position because a belief that was not formed by logic can not be destroyed by it. it won't be able to open any file without software to identify which application to associate it with. Yes, and you couldn't tell the difference between audio and video without a neural network inside a bone box sitting on your shoulders. How can you have spent any time programming a computer without noticing that everything must be explicitly defined and scripted or it will just halt/fail/error? Nobody has found anything in the human brain that didn't strictly follow the laws of physics either. And I have never been able to consistently predict what a computer is going to do even if I'm the one who wrote the program, and you're no better at making such predictions than I am, nor is anybody else. it's not an audio or video file. Not literally or physically. A file is just a source of generic binary instructions. And that's all a cochlear implant produces and yet the deaf report those generic binary instructions give them the qualia of sound. computer + user = high quality user experience. Computer + computer = no high quality experience. You have no pathway whatsoever to judge the quality of experience of even your fellow human beings, the best you can do is observe there behavior and then guess; and yet you continue to make these grand sweeping statements about what a computer does and does not feel without a shred of evidence or theoretical justification, and that's as tiresome as it is stupid. Plug a cochlear implant into a computer and the raw data remains raw all the way through. There is no conversion to any sense modality HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW! I understand why computers have no experience. Your understanding is based on amorphous mystical drivel. A computer is only going to say what it is programmed to say. BULLSHIT! The human programer himself does not know what the computer is going to say next. If it has no vocabulary which refers to human experiences of sound, it will have nothing to say about some new stream of generic data that related to aural sensation. It's not going to try to express anything about the experience of sound. Of course the computer could comment on aural sensation but it wouldn't matter if it did it 10 times a day and gave you brilliant insights into Beethoven's music you never had before, you would not change your ideas one iota, you'd just say that's just something or another and so it doesn't count. It's a fact that thus far implants do not compare favorably to natural cochlea. Is that what your ideas hinge on, the lack of audio fidelity using current electronic technology? When future technology makes electronic ears that provides better fidelity than ears made of meat will you then admit you were wrong. Of course not! It's not important though - even if the implant sounded perfect, I thought as much. you would rather believe that a roll of toilet paper with holes in it is as smart as anyone Although for practical reasons I would recommend using electronics, a roll of toilet paper can indeed be as smart or
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Friday, March 1, 2013 4:32:54 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 3:33:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: It doesn't matter how many knee-jerk twitches you put together or in what order, they are still always going to be empty, mindless mechanisms. Repeated assertions aren't evidence. It's interesting because my assertion is rooted in the same understanding, but you are applying a double standard. I say that repeated mechanical assertions aren't anything other than that. You say that they aren't evidence...but how do you know? For one thing because you contradict them yourself. You just posted, in reply to Bruno, I don't know that all machines cannot think Then you turn around and assert,they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. It's not a contradiction, it's an assertion that as far as we know they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. I don't know that to be the case for all possible machines executed in all possible ways... a fusion of biological and inorganic material could strike a thinking balance - the point though is to understand that the principle of mechanism (which is functions of forms) is the perpendicular axis from sensitivity to those forms and functions. This is what I keep trying to say - things which have a lot of consciousness are the least possible things to control externally. By definition, the more robotic something is, the less alive it is, and that is not trivial or coincidental. If you understand why that symmetry is meaningful, then you will have no problem being confident that although life uses mechanisms, it is not, in itself a mechanism at all. It's not just the boundary between living and non-living (which I would not rule out being more of an anthropic or biopic boundary), but all qualitative boundaries, between physics and chemistry, biology and zoology, anthropology and psychology, etc may not have purely quantitative bridges. The is no combination of yes and no which turns yellow. If a mechanical potato peeler can someday learn to taste potatoes, then maybe repeated assertions can become evidence? If the potato peeler has a choice and chooses to peel potatoes more than tomatoes then that will be evidence. Choice is a matter of perspective. It only exists because we (or most of us) can see that we can't rule it out without choosing to rule it out. We have no reason to extend this condition to inanimate objects. Nothing as ever suggest that we should, and it would generally be considered psychotic to do so adamantly in public. It's same kind of evidence that would tell you whether a human being preferred potatoes to tomatoes. Evidence cannot access consciousness. We can only use sensitivity, intuition, reason, and experience. It is consciousness upon which all forms of evidence supervene. I suppose you heard about the guy who worked in at fast food place and developed an irrational urge to put his penis in the potato peeler. He knew something bad would happen but he couldn't stop himself from thinking about it. He finally went to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist told him that if he couldn't stop thinking about it he might as well try it. So he did. When he got home from work, he told his wife what he'd done. She said,Oh, my God! and rushed to pull down his pants. She looked at him and said, What happened to the potato peeler? He said, I think she got fired too. Hehe. Hard times for Spud Sluts. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 4:32:54 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 3:33:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: It doesn't matter how many knee-jerk twitches you put together or in what order, they are still always going to be empty, mindless mechanisms. Repeated assertions aren't evidence. It's interesting because my assertion is rooted in the same understanding, but you are applying a double standard. I say that repeated mechanical assertions aren't anything other than that. You say that they aren't evidence...but how do you know? For one thing because you contradict them yourself. You just posted, in reply to Bruno, I don't know that all machines cannot think Then you turn around and assert,they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. It's not a contradiction, it's an assertion that as far as we know they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. I don't know that to be the case for all possible machines executed in all possible ways... a fusion of biological and inorganic material could strike a thinking balance You keep overlooking that atoms are not 'organic', yet a fusion of them forms your brain. - the point though is to understand that the principle of mechanism (which is functions of forms) is the perpendicular axis from sensitivity to those forms and functions. The point to understand it that calling mechanism and sensitivity perpendicular axes is just something you made up. This is what I keep trying to say - things which have a lot of consciousness are the least possible things to control externally. By definition, the more robotic something is, the less alive it is, and that is not trivial or coincidental. If you understand why that symmetry is meaningful, That's not a symmetry - you shouldn't use big words if you don't know what they mean. then you will have no problem being confident Yes, I noticed that ignorance begets confidence. that although life uses mechanisms, it is not, in itself a mechanism at all. It's not just the boundary between living and non-living (which I would not rule out being more of an anthropic or biopic boundary), but all qualitative boundaries, between physics and chemistry, biology and zoology, anthropology and psychology, etc may not have purely quantitative bridges. Qualitative is what you haven't been able to quantify yet. At one time many and big were just qualities. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Friday, March 1, 2013 4:37:41 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: All that matters is that we understand that there is no presentation quality to a file. Presentation is 100% in the interpreter. And a computer can be and often is the interpreter. If that were the case then computers could not understand an audio file was audio until they listened to it with innate computational ears which just so happened to match the rendering of human ears. This is the same reason why we can't play a DVD with our tongues. There is a huge difference to us between detecting pits on a Mylar disc and watching a move. To a computer, as long as it is labeled as a dvd image, it will try to open it with an application which is specified for that file - even if that application controls an electric can opener instead of a video screen. You are really saying that we could use a program that acts like a video screen instead of an actual video screen. Exactly. If you don't want to look at a video screen to see a cat scan then a X ray computerized tomography machine will be happy to print out the spacial coordinates of the organs, although I don't know why you'd want that. Right, you wouldn't want that because it would be all but worthless to a human being. As worthless as a video screen image is to a computer. All video display equipment is useless to computers for that reason; because there is no perceiver there. No high level sensory-motor participant. There are only numerous low level sensory-motor experiences which we have not seen transform themselves into anything more sophisticated by themselves. There will never be an app on your iPhone to make it waterproof. As I've said before it's important not to confuse levels, a simulated flame won't burn your computer but it will burn a simulated object. No, that argument is bogus. There is only one physical level. All simulations supervene on that physical level. This is why a simulated flame need not burn a simulated object at all. It is entirely up to the programmer's whim how the laws of physics will work, or indeed if they are lawful at all in any given sim, or across many nested sims. Simulated flame can work for 10,000 levels of simulation, but not a single one of those simulated flames can access the physical level...because they aren't real - they are figures..symbols...facades engineered to fool our body's public senses. A real flame won't burn the laws of chemistry but it will burn your finger. And some things cross all levels, like information processing; there is no difference between simulated arithmetic and real arithmetic or between simulated intelligence and real intelligence. There is no such thing as real arithmetic. It's all a simulation. That's why they call numbers figures or data - they have no reality to them except what coordinated sensory experience can provide. Consciousness is the capacity to discern between menu and meal A computer with a optical character reader and a simple amino acid detector could easily tell the difference between a menu and a meal. Nope. I could just print a menu on the back of a Turkey and spray a menu with aminos. It will be eating the menu in no time. A electronic cochlear implant that enables deaf people to hear produces no sound, all it makes is lots of zeros and ones. The same thing is true of the experimental artificial eye. Sure, because there is ultimately a living person there to hear and see. Without the person, the implants won't do anything worthwhile. Before you were saying only a eye or ear made of meat would do and now you've abandoned that position, how far back along the chain of perception will you retreat before you admit you were wrong? My guess is you will never change your position because a belief that was not formed by logic can not be destroyed by it. Only an eye or ear made of meat will be 100% satisfying - which is why the quality of the implants are crap. I don't see how anything I've said contradicts that. it won't be able to open any file without software to identify which application to associate it with. Yes, and you couldn't tell the difference between audio and video without a neural network inside a bone box sitting on your shoulders. False equivalence. Your computer would have to be missing it's electronics to compare properly. You are floating a premise that there is some state of consciousness in which we cannot tell the difference between an audio and a visual experience but your example allows no experience at all. How can you have spent any time programming a computer without noticing that everything must be explicitly defined and scripted or it will just halt/fail/error? Nobody has found anything in the human brain that didn't strictly
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Friday, March 1, 2013 7:47:14 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 4:32:54 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 3:33:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: It doesn't matter how many knee-jerk twitches you put together or in what order, they are still always going to be empty, mindless mechanisms. Repeated assertions aren't evidence. It's interesting because my assertion is rooted in the same understanding, but you are applying a double standard. I say that repeated mechanical assertions aren't anything other than that. You say that they aren't evidence...but how do you know? For one thing because you contradict them yourself. You just posted, in reply to Bruno, I don't know that all machines cannot think Then you turn around and assert,they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. It's not a contradiction, it's an assertion that as far as we know they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. I don't know that to be the case for all possible machines executed in all possible ways... a fusion of biological and inorganic material could strike a thinking balance You keep overlooking that atoms are not 'organic', yet a fusion of them forms your brain. I don't overlook that at all. If there were no important difference among atoms though, we would be able to eat sand and photosynthesize. I don't assume that atoms built the brain, I think that human experience built human brains out of living cells, using specific substances. It's a collaboration from top down eternal influences and bottom up trial and error. - the point though is to understand that the principle of mechanism (which is functions of forms) is the perpendicular axis from sensitivity to those forms and functions. The point to understand it that calling mechanism and sensitivity perpendicular axes is just something you made up. Every scientific discovery is made up by someone. Is that your only contribution to the topic - ad hominem sour grapes? This is what I keep trying to say - things which have a lot of consciousness are the least possible things to control externally. By definition, the more robotic something is, the less alive it is, and that is not trivial or coincidental. If you understand why that symmetry is meaningful, That's not a symmetry - you shouldn't use big words if you don't know what they mean. If you don't understand that it is symmetry, then you don't understand what I am talking about, which you just made clear above. then you will have no problem being confident Yes, I noticed that ignorance begets confidence. I have never heard you say anything which was not expressed with confidence. that although life uses mechanisms, it is not, in itself a mechanism at all. It's not just the boundary between living and non-living (which I would not rule out being more of an anthropic or biopic boundary), but all qualitative boundaries, between physics and chemistry, biology and zoology, anthropology and psychology, etc may not have purely quantitative bridges. Qualitative is what you haven't been able to quantify yet. At one time many and big were just qualities. No. Quantity is a quality of counting. Many and big are still qualities, counting just makes them impersonal and precise. 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-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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 4:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 3:33:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: It doesn't matter how many knee-jerk twitches you put together or in what order, they are still always going to be empty, mindless mechanisms. Repeated assertions aren't evidence. It's interesting because my assertion is rooted in the same understanding, but you are applying a double standard. I say that repeated mechanical assertions aren't anything other than that. You say that they aren't evidence...but how do you know? For one thing because you contradict them yourself. You just posted, in reply to Bruno, I don't know that all machines cannot think Then you turn around and assert,they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. If a mechanical potato peeler can someday learn to taste potatoes, then maybe repeated assertions can become evidence? If the potato peeler has a choice and chooses to peel potatoes more than tomatoes then that will be evidence. It's same kind of evidence that would tell you whether a human being preferred potatoes to tomatoes. Hi Brent, Could you speculate a model of how a potato peeler can make such a choice? I suppose you heard about the guy who worked in at fast food place and developed an irrational urge to put his penis in the potato peeler. He knew something bad would happen but he couldn't stop himself from thinking about it. He finally went to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist told him that if he couldn't stop thinking about it he might as well try it. So he did. When he got home from work, he told his wife what he'd done. She said,Oh, my God! and rushed to pull down his pants. She looked at him and said, What happened to the potato peeler? He said, I think she got fired too. Brent -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 4:57 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 7:47:14 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 4:32:54 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 3:33:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: It doesn't matter how many knee-jerk twitches you put together or in what order, they are still always going to be empty, mindless mechanisms. Repeated assertions aren't evidence. It's interesting because my assertion is rooted in the same understanding, but you are applying a double standard. I say that repeated mechanical assertions aren't anything other than that. You say that they aren't evidence...but how do you know? For one thing because you contradict them yourself. You just posted, in reply to Bruno, I don't know that all machines cannot think Then you turn around and assert,they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. It's not a contradiction, it's an assertion that as far as we know they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. I don't know that to be the case for all possible machines executed in all possible ways... a fusion of biological and inorganic material could strike a thinking balance You keep overlooking that atoms are not 'organic', yet a fusion of them forms your brain. I don't overlook that at all. If there were no important difference among atoms though, we would be able to eat sand and photosynthesize. Do you just write the first thing that comes into your head? Did you not stop to reflect that the difference between organic and inorganic applies to *molecules*, not atoms? I don't assume that atoms built the brain, I know. You assume things like mechanism is perpendicular sensitivity but yes-and-no don't make yellow (although in quodlibet logic it does). I think that human experience built human brains out of living cells, using specific substances. So experience preceded brains. And what was it experience OF? It's a collaboration from top down eternal influences and bottom up trial and error. - the point though is to understand that the principle of mechanism (which is functions of forms) is the perpendicular axis from sensitivity to those forms and functions. The point to understand it that calling mechanism and sensitivity perpendicular axes is just something you made up. Every scientific discovery is made up by someone. Is that your only contribution to the topic - ad hominem sour grapes? What's ad hominem about calling word salad what it is. This is what I keep trying to say - things which have a lot of consciousness are the least possible things to control externally. By definition, the more robotic something is, the less alive it is, and that is not trivial or coincidental. If you understand why that symmetry is meaningful, That's not a symmetry - you shouldn't use big words if you don't know what they mean. If you don't understand that it is symmetry, then you don't understand what I am talking about, which you just made clear above. That's the first thing you've written that I can fully agree with. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 3/1/2013 5:04 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 3/1/2013 4:32 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:52 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, March 1, 2013 3:33:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 3/1/2013 12:20 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: It doesn't matter how many knee-jerk twitches you put together or in what order, they are still always going to be empty, mindless mechanisms. Repeated assertions aren't evidence. It's interesting because my assertion is rooted in the same understanding, but you are applying a double standard. I say that repeated mechanical assertions aren't anything other than that. You say that they aren't evidence...but how do you know? For one thing because you contradict them yourself. You just posted, in reply to Bruno, I don't know that all machines cannot think Then you turn around and assert,they are always going to be empty mindless mechanisms. If a mechanical potato peeler can someday learn to taste potatoes, then maybe repeated assertions can become evidence? If the potato peeler has a choice and chooses to peel potatoes more than tomatoes then that will be evidence. It's same kind of evidence that would tell you whether a human being preferred potatoes to tomatoes. Hi Brent, Could you speculate a model of how a potato peeler can make such a choice? Sure. But it'd be same kind of speculation as to how a human might prefer potatoes to tomatoes. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 28 Feb 2013, at 05:04, meekerdb wrote: On 2/27/2013 7:17 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 27 Feb 2013, at 20:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/27/2013 2:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 26 Feb 2013, at 21:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/26/2013 1:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: How did number arise? We don't know that, but we can show that if we don't assume them, or equivalent (basically anything Turing Universal), then we cannot derive them. I'm not sure how you mean that? I meant that you cannot build a theory, simpler than arithmetic in appearance, from which you can derive the existence of the numbers. All theories which want talk about the numbers have to be turing universal. So I meant this in the concrete sense that if you write your axioms, and want talk about numbers, you need to postulate them, or equivalent. You can derive the numbers from the equational theory: Kxy = x Sxyz = xz(yz) + few equality rules, But that theory is already Turing universal, and assume as much the number than elementary arithmetic. We know that we experience individual objects and so we can count them by putting them in one-to-one relation with fingers or notches or marks. So what are you calling an assumption in this? A theory is supposed to abstract from the experiences. The experiences motivates the theory, but does not justify it logically. But justify logically seems like a bizarre concept to me. We just make up rules of logic so that inferences from some axioms, which we also make up, preserve 'true'. We have intuition and/or evidences for accepting the axiom. Here the question is really: do you accept the axiom of Peano Arithmetic (for example). And with comp we don't need more. Then we prove theorems, which can be quite non trivial. To say that it is justified logically seems to mean no more than we have avoided inconsistency insofar as we know. Yes. We can't hope for more. But in case of arithmetic, we do have intuition. Well, in physics too. Sure it's important that our model of the world not have inconsistencies (at least if our rules of inference include ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet) but mere consistency doesn't justify anything. Consistency justifies our existence. I would say. We are ourself hypothetical with comp. We are divine hypotheses, somehow. I think you ask too much for a justification. You are assuming that justification comes from logic; and indeed it is too much to expect from such a weak source. I look for such justification as can be found from experience, which you demoted to mere motivation. Where did I say motivation? I use the term intuition, and I demote nothing, as it correspond to to the first person (the hero of comp, the inner God, the third hypostase, Bp p; S4Grz1, etc.). But justification for me invokes proof, formal or informal. I don't think that what you ask is possible, even if I am pretty sure that x + 0 = x, x + s(y) = s(x + y), etc. I'm not at all sure that there is successor for every x. Then you adopt ultrafinitism, and indeed comp does not make sense with such hypothesis, and UDA1-7 suggests that ultrafinitism might save physicalism, but step 8 put a doubt on this. The axiom that all natural numbers have a successor is used in basically all scientific paper though. You need it, or equivalent, to define machine, formal systems, programs, Church's thesis, string theory, eigenvector, trigonometry, etc. My intuition doesn't reach to infinity. It seems like an hypothesis of convenience. I propose a theory, that's all. You don't need to believe in infinity, unlike in set theory (yet also used by many). You need just to believe (assume) that 0 ≠ s(x), and that x ≠ y entails s(x) ≠ s(y). Notion like provability and computability are based on this. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 2/28/2013 7:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Feb 2013, at 05:04, meekerdb wrote: You are assuming that justification comes from logic; and indeed it is too much to expect from such a weak source. I look for such justification as can be found from experience, which you demoted to mere motivation. Hi Bruno and Brent, Where did I say motivation? I use the term intuition, and I demote nothing, as it correspond to to the first person (the hero of comp, the inner God, the third hypostase, Bp p; S4Grz1, etc.). ISTM that 'motivation' is a 3p view of 'intuition'! But justification for me invokes proof, formal or informal. Justification requires a model and/or implementation,no? [BM] I don't think that what you ask is possible, even if I am pretty sure that x + 0 = x, x + s(y) = s(x + y), etc. I'm not at all sure that there is successor for every x. Then you adopt ultrafinitism, and indeed comp does not make sense with such hypothesis, and UDA1-7 suggests that ultrafinitism might save physicalism, but step 8 put a doubt on this. The axiom that all natural numbers have a successor is used in basically all scientific paper though. You need it, or equivalent, to define machine, formal systems, programs, Church's thesis, string theory, eigenvector, trigonometry, etc. I need to be sure that I understand this: Numbers are prior to computations. Is that correct? If so, then ultrafinitism fails, but if computations are prior to numbers, ultrafinitism (of some kind) seems inevitable. I have always balked at step 8 in that is seems a bridge too far... Why does the doubt have to be taken so far? My intuition doesn't reach to infinity. It seems like an hypothesis of convenience. I propose a theory, that's all. You don't need to believe in infinity, unlike in set theory (yet also used by many). You need just to believe (assume) that 0 ≠ s(x), and that x ≠ y entails s(x) ≠ s(y). Notion like provability and computability are based on this. Bruno I still don't understand how we cannot assume some implicit set with even arithmetic realism. How are integers not a set? -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Even if it could [ tell the difference between a audio and a video file] that would only represent a more advanced file analysis function, not any kind of audio or video sensitivity. Please explain the difference between the two. when I play a video on a web page my computer always sends the audio signal to the speaker and the video signal to the screen and not the other way round. How can it do that it it doesn't know if the output should go to the screen or speaker? Is it just lucky? Uh, no. The web browser is explicitly instructed by the code of the file which application list is appropriate. I don't know what to make of that. You're saying that if there was no audio or video properties in the file then the computer could not tell if it was audio or video, but if there are no audio or video properties in it what on earth makes it a audio or video file? It's like saying you can't tell if a book is written in English if there are no English words in it! The computer has no idea what audio is. It must be grand being a hard problem theorist because it's the easiest job in the world bar none, no matter how smart something is you just say yeah but it's not conscious and there is no way anybody can prove you wrong. A computer can only look at everything one way - as a binary code. And yet a computer can display music, speeches, sound effects, text, and video of anything. Apparently the word look has some weird mystical meaning for you that it doesn't have for me. but the computer has no experience either way. It must be grand being a hard problem theorist because it's the easiest job in the world bar none, no matter how smart something is you just say yeah but it's not conscious and there is no way anybody can prove you wrong. A computer doesn't know anything about the world beyond its peripherals. It must be grand being a hard problem theorist because it's the easiest job in the world bar none, no matter how smart something is you just say yeah but it's not conscious and there is no way anybody can prove you wrong. It can't tell whether a bitstream ends up in your ears or eyes. It doesn't know if it's running on a laptop in the middle of a warzone or on a virtual server in a data center. It must be grand being a hard problem theorist because it's the easiest job in the world bar none, no matter how smart something is you just say yeah but it's not conscious and there is no way anybody can prove you wrong. You don't need file extensions in every OS, but the fact that they exist at all should show you [...] that computer technology advances and things that were once necessary for those machines to operate correctly no longer are. There is no condition which will make a machine queasy It must be grand being a hard problem theorist because it's the easiest job in the world bar none, no matter how smart something is you just say yeah but it's not conscious and there is no way anybody can prove you wrong. our sense of queasiness is not in any way a logical result of a data mismatch. You are entirely wrong. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_sickness When feeling motion but not seeing it (for example, in a ship with no windows), the inner ear transmits to the brain that it senses motion, but the eyes tell the brain that everything is still. As a result of the discordance, the brain will come to the conclusion that one of them is hallucinating and further conclude that the hallucination is due to poison ingestion. The brain responds by inducing vomiting, to clear the supposed toxin. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And it's not ad hominem if it's true. Why would it make a difference whether your personal accusations are true or not? It would mean that I did not engage in name calling. What I actually said was that ASCII symbols with zero informational content ( like X is Y and X is not Y) is just blather, you're the one who equated blather with ad hominem; apparently you identify with blather and feel that a attack on blather is a attack on you personally. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thursday, February 28, 2013 10:08:07 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: Even if it could [ tell the difference between a audio and a video file] that would only represent a more advanced file analysis function, not any kind of audio or video sensitivity. Please explain the difference between the two. In the former, the computer can read up the file and pick up some bytes which can tell it which applications would be likely to open it. In the latter, the computer could actually see or hear the file when it is being played and know the difference between those two experiences. It's like a computer could be programmed to choose a healthy entree on a menu, but it can't actually eat the meal and tell you whether it was any good. when I play a video on a web page my computer always sends the audio signal to the speaker and the video signal to the screen and not the other way round. How can it do that it it doesn't know if the output should go to the screen or speaker? Is it just lucky? Uh, no. The web browser is explicitly instructed by the code of the file which application list is appropriate. I don't know what to make of that. You're saying that if there was no audio or video properties in the file Meaning that there are no pictures or sounds within the file, yes. The file is only a pattern of countable switch positions, like a piano roll. A player piano has no awareness of music, nor to the paper rolls that it plays have any properties which are musical. If it had properties which were inherently musical, then you would not need ears to hear it, and you could simply hold the piano roll in your hands and experience music. then the computer could not tell if it was audio or video, I didn't say that at all. The computer can't tell if its audio or video no matter what. It can only tell what application might be associated with opening that file. but if there are no audio or video properties in it what on earth makes it a audio or video file? It's not an audio or video file. Not literally or physically. A file is just a source of generic binary instructions. If you feed those instructions into a monitor, it becomes visual - even if its a song (hence an oscilloscope visualization), if you unplug the monitor, the computer doesn't know the difference. It's like saying you can't tell if a book is written in English if there are no English words in it! No, it's like saying that you can tell if a book is written in Japanese even if you don't speak Japanese. You know enough to be able to identify who of your friends might be able to read it phonetically to someone who speaks Japanese, but nobody understands the meaning of the words except the final Japanese-speaking end-user. Those three levels of quality represent the low level OS recognition, the application level, and the user level. The user level is very different from the other two, however. Identifying the general category of written language and translating language from one generic code into another are mechanical processes which can be easily programmed. We can formalize our expectations about the appearance of written language and write a program which uses that key to guide a translation from one stream of binary instructions to another stream which has been designed to be output to a sound card. This can't be done at the user level, however. It's not a matter of choosing and matching input and output categories as in the optical scanning and phonetic output phases, it's a matter of ultimately experiencing the meaning itself. The Japanese speaking user hears the words not as an a-signifying code or strung together synthetic phonemes, they hear language and significance. This is not just a different function, it is the opposite of all functions. Experience can only be the beginning and ending of all possible functions. The computer has no idea what audio is. It must be grand being a hard problem theorist because it's the easiest job in the world bar none, no matter how smart something is you just say yeah but it's not conscious and there is no way anybody can prove you wrong. It's funny, sometimes ideas which can't be proved wrong are that way because they are actually right. A computer can only look at everything one way - as a binary code. And yet a computer can display music, speeches, sound effects, text, and video of anything. Apparently the word look has some weird mystical meaning for you that it doesn't have for me. All displays are for the user. A computer, on its own, could not possibly have any use for any kind of display at all. but the computer has no experience either way. It must be grand being a hard problem theorist because it's the easiest job in the world bar none, no matter how smart something is you just
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 2/28/2013 4:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Feb 2013, at 05:04, meekerdb wrote: On 2/27/2013 7:17 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 27 Feb 2013, at 20:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/27/2013 2:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 26 Feb 2013, at 21:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/26/2013 1:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: How did number arise? We don't know that, but we can show that if we don't assume them, or equivalent (basically anything Turing Universal), then we cannot derive them. I'm not sure how you mean that? I meant that you cannot build a theory, simpler than arithmetic in appearance, from which you can derive the existence of the numbers. All theories which want talk about the numbers have to be turing universal. So I meant this in the concrete sense that if you write your axioms, and want talk about numbers, you need to postulate them, or equivalent. You can derive the numbers from the equational theory: Kxy = x Sxyz = xz(yz) + few equality rules, But that theory is already Turing universal, and assume as much the number than elementary arithmetic. We know that we experience individual objects and so we can count them by putting them in one-to-one relation with fingers or notches or marks. So what are you calling an assumption in this? A theory is supposed to abstract from the experiences. The experiences motivates the theory, but does not justify it logically. But justify logically seems like a bizarre concept to me. We just make up rules of logic so that inferences from some axioms, which we also make up, preserve 'true'. We have intuition and/or evidences for accepting the axiom. Here the question is really: do you accept the axiom of Peano Arithmetic (for example). And with comp we don't need more. Then we prove theorems, which can be quite non trivial. To say that it is justified logically seems to mean no more than we have avoided inconsistency insofar as we know. Yes. We can't hope for more. But in case of arithmetic, we do have intuition. Well, in physics too. Sure it's important that our model of the world not have inconsistencies (at least if our rules of inference include ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet) but mere consistency doesn't justify anything. Consistency justifies our existence. I would say. We are ourself hypothetical with comp. We are divine hypotheses, somehow. I think you ask too much for a justification. You are assuming that justification comes from logic; and indeed it is too much to expect from such a weak source. I look for such justification as can be found from experience, which you demoted to mere motivation. Where did I say motivation? The experiences motivates the theory, but does not justify it logically. I use the term intuition, and I demote nothing, as it correspond to to the first person (the hero of comp, the inner God, the third hypostase, Bp p; S4Grz1, etc.). But justification for me invokes proof, formal or informal. Logical proof is relative to axioms. So the justification can be no stronger than the axioms. I don't think that what you ask is possible, even if I am pretty sure that x + 0 = x, x + s(y) = s(x + y), etc. I'm not at all sure that there is successor for every x. Then you adopt ultrafinitism, and indeed comp does not make sense with such hypothesis, and UDA1-7 suggests that ultrafinitism might save physicalism, but step 8 put a doubt on this. The axiom that all natural numbers have a successor is used in basically all scientific paper though. It is assumed, but I'm not sure it is used in an essential way. I recognize it difficult to do mathematics without it, but still it may be only a convenience. You need it, or equivalent, to define machine, formal systems, programs, Church's thesis, string theory, eigenvector, trigonometry, etc. My intuition doesn't reach to infinity. It seems like an hypothesis of convenience. I propose a theory, that's all. You don't need to believe in infinity, unlike in set theory (yet also used by many). You need just to believe (assume) that 0 ≠ s(x), and that x ≠ y entails s(x) ≠ s(y). Notion like provability and computability are based on this. I think you need to accept that every number has a successor in order to prove things like Godel's theorems. Brent Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.2899 / Virus Database: 2641/6133 - Release Date: 02/25/13 -- 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
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thursday, February 28, 2013 1:03:40 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 4:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 28 Feb 2013, at 05:04, meekerdb wrote: On 2/27/2013 7:17 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 27 Feb 2013, at 20:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/27/2013 2:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 26 Feb 2013, at 21:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/26/2013 1:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: How did number arise? We don't know that, but we can show that if we don't assume them, or equivalent (basically anything Turing Universal), then we cannot derive them. I'm not sure how you mean that? I meant that you cannot build a theory, simpler than arithmetic in appearance, from which you can derive the existence of the numbers. All theories which want talk about the numbers have to be turing universal. So I meant this in the concrete sense that if you write your axioms, and want talk about numbers, you need to postulate them, or equivalent. You can derive the numbers from the equational theory: Kxy = x Sxyz = xz(yz) + few equality rules, But that theory is already Turing universal, and assume as much the number than elementary arithmetic. We know that we experience individual objects and so we can count them by putting them in one-to-one relation with fingers or notches or marks. So what are you calling an assumption in this? A theory is supposed to abstract from the experiences. The experiences motivates the theory, but does not justify it logically. But justify logically seems like a bizarre concept to me. We just make up rules of logic so that inferences from some axioms, which we also make up, preserve 'true'. We have intuition and/or evidences for accepting the axiom. Here the question is really: do you accept the axiom of Peano Arithmetic (for example). And with comp we don't need more. Then we prove theorems, which can be quite non trivial. To say that it is justified logically seems to mean no more than we have avoided inconsistency insofar as we know. Yes. We can't hope for more. But in case of arithmetic, we do have intuition. Well, in physics too. Sure it's important that our model of the world not have inconsistencies (at least if our rules of inference include ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet) but mere consistency doesn't justify anything. Consistency justifies our existence. I would say. We are ourself hypothetical with comp. We are divine hypotheses, somehow. I think you ask too much for a justification. You are assuming that justification comes from logic; and indeed it is too much to expect from such a weak source. I look for such justification as can be found from experience, which you demoted to mere motivation. Where did I say motivation? The experiences motivates the theory, but does not justify it logically. I use the term intuition, and I demote nothing, as it correspond to to the first person (the hero of comp, the inner God, the third hypostase, Bp p; S4Grz1, etc.). But justification for me invokes proof, formal or informal. Logical proof is relative to axioms. So the justification can be no stronger than the axioms. And axioms are no stronger than the capacity to make sense of them. I don't think that what you ask is possible, even if I am pretty sure that x + 0 = x, x + s(y) = s(x + y), etc. I'm not at all sure that there is successor for every x. Then you adopt ultrafinitism, and indeed comp does not make sense with such hypothesis, and UDA1-7 suggests that ultrafinitism might save physicalism, but step 8 put a doubt on this. The axiom that all natural numbers have a successor is used in basically all scientific paper though. It is assumed, but I'm not sure it is used in an essential way. I recognize it difficult to do mathematics without it, but still it may be only a convenience. You need it, or equivalent, to define machine, formal systems, programs, Church's thesis, string theory, eigenvector, trigonometry, etc. My intuition doesn't reach to infinity. It seems like an hypothesis of convenience. I propose a theory, that's all. You don't need to believe in infinity, unlike in set theory (yet also used by many). You need just to believe (assume) that 0 ≠ s(x), and that x ≠ y entails s(x) ≠ s(y). Notion like provability and computability are based on this. I think you need to accept that every number has a successor in order to prove things like Godel's theorems. Brent Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.2899 / Virus Database: 2641/6133 - Release Date: 02/25/13 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian syllogisms. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted from the email johnkcl...@gmail.com is only accidentally meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where not chosen by a conscious act. And it's not ad hominem if it's true. Why would it make a difference whether your personal accusations are true or not? It would mean that I did not engage in name calling. What I actually said was that ASCII symbols with zero informational content ( like X is Y and X is not Y) is just blather, you're the one who equated blather with ad hominem; apparently you identify with blather and feel that a attack on blather is a attack on you personally. John K Clark What about the case where some supposedly conscious being constantly calls itself names? Auto ad hominem? LOL! By your own logic we are force to consider you a self-inflicted zombie. -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
Thanks. I think you pretty much covered it :) On Thursday, February 28, 2013 1:59:55 PM UTC-5, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian syllogisms. Yeah I think even seeing a Venn diagram would be too frightening. How can seawater be both the sea and water? It must be gibberish. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted from the email johnk...@gmail.com javascript: is only accidentally meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where not chosen by a conscious act. And it's not ad hominem if it's true. Why would it make a difference whether your personal accusations are true or not? It would mean that I did not engage in name calling. What I actually said was that ASCII symbols with zero informational content ( like X is Y and X is not Y) is just blather, you're the one who equated blather with ad hominem; apparently you identify with blather and feel that a attack on blather is a attack on you personally. John K Clark What about the case where some supposedly conscious being constantly calls itself names? Auto ad hominem? LOL! By your own logic we are force to consider you a self-inflicted zombie. -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 2/28/2013 10:59 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian syllogisms. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted from the email johnkcl...@gmail.com is only accidentally meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where not chosen by a conscious act. I think we're safe in assuming that they are emitted by a process that is either random or deterministic. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote Even if it could [ tell the difference between a audio and a video file] that would only represent a more advanced file analysis function, not any kind of audio or video sensitivity. Please explain the difference between the two. In the former, the computer can read up the file and pick up some bytes which can tell it which applications would be likely to open it. In the latter, the computer could actually see or hear the file You have no way of knowing if I can actually see or hear, all you know is that I behave as if I do. It's exactly precisely the same situation with a smart computer. It's like a computer could be programmed to choose a healthy entree on a menu, but it can't actually eat the meal and tell you whether it was any good. Are you now saying that a digestive system is linked to consciousness? You're saying that if there was no audio or video properties in the file Meaning that there are no pictures or sounds within the file, yes. The file is only a pattern of countable switch positions, like a piano roll. A electronic cochlear implant that enables deaf people to hear produces no sound, all it makes is lots of zeros and ones. The same thing is true of the experimental artificial eye. A player piano has no awareness of music, It must be grand being a hard problem theorist because it's the easiest job in the world bar none, no matter how smart something is you just say yeah but it's not conscious and there is no way anybody can prove you wrong. The computer can't tell if its audio or video no matter what. It can only tell what application might be associated with opening that file. As there are zero empirical differences between those two things HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW? it's not an audio or video file. Not literally or physically. A file is just a source of generic binary instructions. And that's all a cochlear implant produces and yet the deaf report those generic binary instructions give them the qualia of sound. If you believe that the deaf reported truthfully ( do you?) why wouldn't you believe a computer if it said the same thing? But maybe the deaf person is lying too, of course we could tell a story to a deaf person with a cochlear implant and they could correctly answer questions about it but that's just behavior and were talking about qualia and deafness does not make you incapable of lying. Or maybe they think they experience the qualia of sound but its nothing like the grand and glorious thing you experience. Or maybe Mozart would say you think you have experienced the qualia of sound but it's nothing at all like the wonderful thing he has. All this is pointless time wasting speculation because none of it can ever be proved or disproved. It's like saying you can't tell if a book is written in English if there are no English words in it! No, it's like saying that you can tell if a book is written in Japanese even if you don't speak Japanese. Maybe you can but I can't, I couldn't tell if it was Chinese or Korean or just a bunch of squiggles made up by a graphics designer yesterday. translating language from one generic code into another are mechanical processes which can be easily programmed. No, translating languages is extremely difficult and until about 5 years ago computer translations were so bad that the only reason to do it is the belly laugh you'd get out of it. Back in the computer Precambrian of 2007 or 2008 the consensus was that computers couldn't make good translations unless they had some understanding of what was being said, I think they were right, and computers make dramatically better translations now than they did in 2007. It's funny, sometimes ideas which can't be proved wrong are that way because they are actually right. Don't be so modest, your ideas about consciousness are twice as good as that, not only can they never be proven wron they can never be proven right either. People with a hard left-brained approach are not going to be able to look at consciousness independently of forms and functions I understand as well as you do that there is such a thing as consciousness, but I also understand that because it has no observable consequences obsessing over it is a complete waste of time if your goal is to obtain some understanding of how the world works. So when you make rubber stamp comments like a computer can never know X or a computer can never feel Y, comments that you simply decree without evidence, comments you have no way of knowing, comments neither you nor anybody else can ever prove or disprove even if the machine behaves as if it knows and feels those things then I respond with rubber stamp comments of my own. 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
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thursday, February 28, 2013 3:52:59 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote Even if it could [ tell the difference between a audio and a video file] that would only represent a more advanced file analysis function, not any kind of audio or video sensitivity. Please explain the difference between the two. In the former, the computer can read up the file and pick up some bytes which can tell it which applications would be likely to open it. In the latter, the computer could actually see or hear the file You have no way of knowing if I can actually see or hear, all you know is that I behave as if I do. It's exactly precisely the same situation with a smart computer. You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You are using a double standard whereby you claim to be omniscient about what I can or can't know. Of course this is all sophistry. All that matters is that we understand that there is no presentation quality to a file. Presentation is 100% in the interpreter. Since you can open any raw file as a video, audio, text, 3-D printing, etc that would mean that all data would have to inherently have all possible sensory modalities contained within it. You are really saying that we could use a program that acts like a video screen instead of an actual video screen. That would be nice, but it can never happen, regardless of how sophisticated software becomes. There will never be an app on your iPhone to make it waterproof. It's like a computer could be programmed to choose a healthy entree on a menu, but it can't actually eat the meal and tell you whether it was any good. Are you now saying that a digestive system is linked to consciousness? I am saying that the menu is not the meal. Computers do menus, but not meals. Consciousness is the capacity to discern between menu and meal (among other things). You're saying that if there was no audio or video properties in the file Meaning that there are no pictures or sounds within the file, yes. The file is only a pattern of countable switch positions, like a piano roll. A electronic cochlear implant that enables deaf people to hear produces no sound, all it makes is lots of zeros and ones. The same thing is true of the experimental artificial eye. Sure, because there is ultimately a living person there to hear and see. Without the person, the implants won't do anything worthwhile. A player piano has no awareness of music, It must be grand being a hard problem theorist because it's the easiest job in the world bar none, no matter how smart something is you just say yeah but it's not conscious and there is no way anybody can prove you wrong. Your argument then is that a player piano has an awareness of music. Maybe we should give scarecrows the right to vote also. The computer can't tell if its audio or video no matter what. It can only tell what application might be associated with opening that file. As there are zero empirical differences between those two things HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW? Because it won't be able to open any file without software to identify which application to associate it with. If the computer could tell the difference, then we wouldn't need to have programmed instructions. Do you seriously believe that changing an .mp3 to a .txt file makes the computer dizzy? How can you have spent any time programming a computer without noticing that everything must be explicitly defined and scripted or it will just halt/fail/error? How could it be any clearer that a player piano has no experience of music. It's a piano being played by a paper roll. it's not an audio or video file. Not literally or physically. A file is just a source of generic binary instructions. And that's all a cochlear implant produces and yet the deaf report those generic binary instructions give them the qualia of sound. Sure, computer + user = high quality user experience. Computer + computer = no high quality experience. Plug a cochlear implant into a computer and the raw data remains raw all the way through. There is no conversion to any sense modality - no way so simulate synesthesia or blindsight. If you believe that the deaf reported truthfully ( do you?) why wouldn't you believe a computer if it said the same thing? Because I understand why computers have no experience. A computer is only going to say what it is programmed to say. If it has no vocabulary which refers to human experiences of sound, it will have nothing to say about some new stream of generic data that related to aural sensation. It's not going to try to express anything about the experience of sound. But maybe the deaf person is lying too, of course we could tell a story to a deaf person with a cochlear implant and they could correctly answer
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 2/28/2013 2:29 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:59 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian syllogisms. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted from the email johnkcl...@gmail.com is only accidentally meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where not chosen by a conscious act. I think we're safe in assuming that they are emitted by a process that is either random or deterministic. Brent Hi Brent, Perhaps you are trapped in a false dichotomy. Both of those terms (random and deterministic) assume, ISTM, a classical model of the universe. I accept the classical model only as a cartoon that has worked so so for a long time, but has outlived it utility. We know better, the universe is quantum mechanical. I believe that our minds are only capable of comprehending Boolean representable (or degradations thereof) concepts of the universe, thus we fail miserably to comprehend what it means to live in a QM universe. -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 2/28/2013 4:11 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. But I can make an empirically informed one. Brent strawman, n. a misstatement or exaggeration of an opponents position in order to make it easier to refute. -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 2/28/2013 4:48 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/28/2013 2:29 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:59 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 2/28/2013 10:33 AM, John Clark wrote: On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Exactly, and 2 negatives, like isn't not cancel each other out so you get alcohol is not a poison and alcohol is a poison which is gibberish just like I said. Alcohol both is and isn't a poison, duh! It is the quantity that makes the difference. Are you too coarse to notice that there are distinctions in the real world that are not subject to the naive representation of Aristotelian syllogisms. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII symbols free will mean. And we can safely assume that all text that is emitted from the email johnkcl...@gmail.com is only accidentally meaningful, aka gibberish as well, as it's referents where not chosen by a conscious act. I think we're safe in assuming that they are emitted by a process that is either random or deterministic. Brent Hi Brent, Perhaps you are trapped in a false dichotomy. Both of those terms (random and deterministic) assume, ISTM, a classical model of the universe. I accept the classical model only as a cartoon that has worked so so for a long time, but has outlived it utility. We know better, the universe is quantum mechanical. I believe that our minds are only capable of comprehending Boolean representable (or degradations thereof) concepts of the universe, thus we fail miserably to comprehend what it means to live in a QM universe. So what's your third way that is neither random nor deterministic? 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Thursday, February 28, 2013 8:01:48 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 4:11 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. But I can make an empirically informed one. That means that you claim to have empirical information about consciousness beyond another person's information about their own consciousness. How can you claim to have that at the same time that you claim someone else can't? Craig Brent strawman, n. a misstatement or exaggeration of an opponents position in order to make it easier to refute. -- 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 2/28/2013 5:30 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 8:01:48 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 4:11 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:37:50 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 2/28/2013 1:50 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: You have no way of knowing what I can't know about you either. You have no way of knowing what ways I have of knowing what you know about what ways John knows of having ways of knowing about what you can know...either. :-) Brent blather, n. strings of words in the form of assertions having no testable consequences. Calling it blather doesn't change the fact that you can't make an omniscient claim against someone else's non-omniscience. But I can make an empirically informed one. That means that you claim to have empirical information about consciousness beyond another person's information about their own consciousness. (a) I said I have empirical information. I didn't say it is beyond somebody elses. How can you claim to have that at the same time that you claim someone else can't? (b) It was you who claimed to know what John couldn't know. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 26 Feb 2013, at 21:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/26/2013 1:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: How did number arise? We don't know that, but we can show that if we don't assume them, or equivalent (basically anything Turing Universal), then we cannot derive them. I'm not sure how you mean that? I meant that you cannot build a theory, simpler than arithmetic in appearance, from which you can derive the existence of the numbers. All theories which want talk about the numbers have to be turing universal. So I meant this in the concrete sense that if you write your axioms, and want talk about numbers, you need to postulate them, or equivalent. You can derive the numbers from the equational theory: Kxy = x Sxyz = xz(yz) + few equality rules, But that theory is already Turing universal, and assume as much the number than elementary arithmetic. We know that we experience individual objects and so we can count them by putting them in one-to-one relation with fingers or notches or marks. So what are you calling an assumption in this? A theory is supposed to abstract from the experiences. The experiences motivates the theory, but does not justify it logically. Bruno Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 26 Feb 2013, at 23:38, John Mikes wrote: Bruno, I appreciate your effort to reply to my silly questions. Question are never silly. Answer are always silly. I accept your positions, nothing 'new' or 'surprising' in them now. Yet I raised one little suspicion in ...How did number arise? We don't know that, but we can show that if we don't assume them, or equivalent (basically anything Turing Universal), then we cannot derive them... of circularity: we have to assume them to be able to derive them. Well, that the definition of an axiom. We just accept it, if only for the sake of the argument. Then we can prove them, by using the rule that we accept the axioms. It is not circular, it is based on the fact that we accept that p - p, or the rule that from p, we can derive p. For example in group theory, we accept that there is a neutral element. Then later one, if we are asked to justified the use of a neutral element, we can just say that we are working in a group, in which it exists, by definition, or axiom. If not, not. BTW I feel free to disagree with your just assumed argument WITHOUT being obliged to produce a (better?) counter-theory. That is your right. No doubt. Then again: ...Numbers have nothing to do with sign. Signs are human tools to talk about them... Talk about WHAT? if they are NOT quantizing factors, NOT representing signs, how could you IDENTIFY the t e r m : NUMBER? (not just by another word of course). By doing a lot of exercise, like in high school, you can develop a familiarity with them, and accept some defining axioms. The brain does not really help; you need your heart. I might ask you how you identify the term woman. It is the same difficulty. We have to live with many things that we cannot defined. It seems your mental base builds ON numbers (whatever they may be) - not on qualia (musical complexity, emotions, feelings, etc. that do not spring from 'numbers'). That is due to cultural factor. But then in science, we want our theories not depending on interpretation, still less on emotions. But in private we sometimes point on them, like Einstein said that a theory, to be true, needs to be beautiful. Same with the numbers. Mathematicians are usually super-emotional beings, for the best, and the worst. Sorry about the last sentence (conclusion of the previous passage) in which I used Nature instead of world existence or whatever. Thanks for reassuring me. The reductionistic part of the totality to which we assign all we think about. ... to which some people assign what they all think about, I would say. About nature, I am agnostic. But when I'm in the comp mood, I definitely don't believe in it. Bruno JM On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 4:24 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: John, On 24 Feb 2013, at 21:07, John Mikes wrote: Bruno you wrote (among a big HOOPLA of indentations galore, an art to measure each one into a proper participant): ...Explain us what is an electrical reaction in a brain without using 2+2=4 Bruno Explain, why 2+2=4 - without (human?) quantizing - even without using dots or marks and 'counting' them. Numbers? a joke. Because you said so? How did it arise? I assume them. It is part of the card I put on the table. Feel free to develop another theory. How did number arise? We don't know that, but we can show that if we don't assume them, or equivalent (basically anything Turing Universal), then we cannot derive them. What is 'counting'? assigning SOMEHOW a 'heap' to a sign you invented? Numbers have nothing to do with sign. Signs are human tools to talk about them. Numbers status is independent of the signs used to refer to them, a bit like galaxies in the physical universe are usually supposed to be independent of human telescope. How 'bout another logic, another vision? (Zarathustran?) How could I understand what you mean by another logic or another vision without using the intuition of numbers? This just make no sense for me. Also numbers have nothing to do with logic. Again, logic is a mental tool, and formal logics presuppose our understanding of numbers. Then computationalism derived eight important different logics that the numbers already develop by themselves to understand themselves, so here you have your another logics. Numbers agree with you, somehow. But you have to recognize them to be able to listen to them, and indeed go farer than the human views. Go back and back and back in your presumptions/assumptions into more-and-more generalizations and you will find the human image you substitute for Nature (call it reality, existence, The World, - or Whatever (Everything). I do not assume Nature. The distinction between nature and human is a human artifice. More generally, the distinction between nature and numbers is a number artifice. It is an
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 27 Feb 2013, at 00:01, meekerdb wrote: On 2/26/2013 2:41 PM, John Mikes wrote: Brent: you jumped into 'counting'. What would that be without numbers? It's a one-to-one relation between objects. If you invent a special set of tokens (1, 2, 3) that everybody agrees on (i.e. a part of language) to use in the one-to-one relation then those are numbers. But I wasn't pretending to do without numbers; I was pointing out how they derived from experience - they were not just assumed. The fact that we see the world as composed of discrete objects (instead of wave functions or quantum fields or something else) might be an accident of the development of this universe - or it might be a necessary consequence of something about universes. I was just asking whether Bruno's comp had any bearing on that question. It certainly has, but it is difficult, because we can't throw out the fact that some very special programs, or collection of programs, win the measure battle for the first person indeterminacy problem. As long as physics is not derived from arithmetic, we can't answer to that question. I will not speculate, as people could confuse what is already derived and what is plausible, given the empirical facts and what we already know in computer science. Cluster of different sort of multiverses remain possible, especially if we derive less than QM from comp. Comp leads to a criterium to distinguish geographical truth from physical truth, but we have to progress a lot to be able to apply it. Bruno Brent On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 3:40 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 2/26/2013 1:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: How did number arise? We don't know that, but we can show that if we don't assume them, or equivalent (basically anything Turing Universal), then we cannot derive them. I'm not sure how you mean that? We know that we experience individual objects and so we can count them by putting them in one- to-one relation with fingers or notches or marks. So what are you calling an assumption in this? 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. No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.2899 / Virus Database: 2641/6133 - Release Date: 02/25/13 -- 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. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: when a computer is operating correctly it can most certainly tell the difference between a audio and a video file, Absolutely false. How so? It can tell the difference between one file format and another, Well that's all I said. but there is no relation between a file format and the ability for that file to be output to a screen as opposed to a speaker And yet when I play a video on a web page my computer always sends the audio signal to the speaker and the video signal to the screen and not the other way round. How can it do that it it doesn't know if the output should go to the screen or speaker? Is it just lucky? I have opened music files before as bitmaps. You can still open an mp3 file as text in Windows by renaming it's extender. Yes, and in exactly the same manner I can examine your ideas and I can also open your skull and examine your brain; one way of looking at things does not contradict the other but are complementary, and a computer can look at things both ways. If a computer could tell the difference between an audio file and a video file, you wouldn't need file extenders Some modern programs can get along without file extensions, although if you deliberately try to confuse it by giving it a incorrect extension the conflicting information will make the machine queasy; and if you receive information from your eyes that conflicts with information from your inner ear you will get motion sickness and feel nauseous. As you can see from my sample above, your assertion is false. The machine is happy to crap out ASCII garbage instead of music You specifically told the machine to interpret it as ASCII, so why are you complaining that it did exactly as you requested? You're saying that the ability of computers to look at any file as a bitmap or as a bunch of ASCII symbols shows some sort of inherent limitation of computers, and that makes no sense. 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Wednesday, February 27, 2013 11:25:41 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: when a computer is operating correctly it can most certainly tell the difference between a audio and a video file, Absolutely false. How so? Because if it could, then it wouldn't need any identifying bytes in the file to associate it with a program. Even if it could that would only represent a more advanced file analysis function, not any kind of audio or video sensitivity. It can tell the difference between one file format and another, Well that's all I said. No, you said when a computer is operating correctly it can most certainly tell the difference between a audio and a video file. You are missing the enormous leap between discerning the differences between two differently labeled files, and any sort of audio or video presentation qualities. This is the difference that I am pointing out in this thread: A geometric form like a circle is not the same thing as a list of numerical coordinates. but there is no relation between a file format and the ability for that file to be output to a screen as opposed to a speaker And yet when I play a video on a web page my computer always sends the audio signal to the speaker and the video signal to the screen and not the other way round. How can it do that it it doesn't know if the output should go to the screen or speaker? Is it just lucky? Uh, no. The web browser is explicitly instructed by the code of the file which application list is appropriate. If it says mp3 or wav, then the OS will try the default app to process that file. Whether or not you even have your speakers plugged in means nothing. The computer has no idea what audio is. I have opened music files before as bitmaps. You can still open an mp3 file as text in Windows by renaming it's extender. Yes, and in exactly the same manner I can examine your ideas and I can also open your skull and examine your brain; one way of looking at things does not contradict the other but are complementary, and a computer can look at things both ways. A computer can only look at everything one way - as a binary code. It is the job of all computer peripherals to act as a medium for accessing a facsimile of external events as binary code. This is the opposite of what consciousness does. We can listen to a song or have a completely different experience watching that song encoded as video graphics - but the computer has no experience either way. Even people with synesthesia can recognize the difference between color and sound, even when they are experienced together in an unconventional way. A computer doesn't know anything about the world beyond its peripherals. It can't tell whether a bitstream ends up in your ears or eyes. It doesn't know if it's running on a laptop in the middle of a warzone or on a virtual server in a data center. If a computer could tell the difference between an audio file and a video file, you wouldn't need file extenders Some modern programs can get along without file extensions, although if you deliberately try to confuse it by giving it a incorrect extension the conflicting information will make the machine queasy; and if you receive information from your eyes that conflicts with information from your inner ear you will get motion sickness and feel nauseous. You don't need file extensions in every OS, but the fact that they exist at all should show you how helpless a computer is to figure out anything that it isn't programmed to check for. There is no condition which will make a machine queasy, and our sense of queasiness is not in any way a logical result of a data mismatch. If your ears and eyes had a conflict, it could just as easily be presented as a ringing in our ears or profuse sweating or hallucinations of Mayan calendars. As you can see from my sample above, your assertion is false. The machine is happy to crap out ASCII garbage instead of music You specifically told the machine to interpret it as ASCII, so why are you complaining that it did exactly as you requested? It's not interpreting it as ASCII, it is identifying it as ASCII. It has no memory that it ever was anything else and couldn't tell that it was related to music if its life depended on it. You're saying that the ability of computers to look at any file as a bitmap or as a bunch of ASCII symbols shows some sort of inherent limitation of computers, and that makes no sense. The limitation is not that they can open a file as a bitmap or ASCI, its that they can't tell the difference between the two. If I tell it a file is text, it thinks its text. If someone hands a person a book, and tells them that it is dinner, that wouldn't really work as well. Everything that you are saying indicates that you swallow the 'pathetic fallacy' 100%, and even
Re: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On Monday, February 25, 2013 1:29:20 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote: On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: It is not ad hominem if it really is blather. I would define blather as a sound or a sequence of ASCII symbols with zero informational content because it means nothing, as in a burp, or because it means something self contradictory, such as free will or X is not random or deterministic. Translation: Anything that I don't agree with makes no sense and whoever says these things is subject to my ad hominem comments in lieu of valid criticism. It is a basic law of logic that if X is not Y and X is not not Y then X is gibberish, X = alcohol Y = poison. becomes alcohol is not poison and alcohol isn't not poison Can you see how narrow your concepts of logic are and how they have nothing to do with reality? Can you see that in sufficient quantities alcohol is indeed a poison but that is also is a popular beverage which does not have to carry a POISON label? and so obviously anyone asserting X is speaking gibberish. And obviously anyone asserting that the actual world can be reduced to simplistic distinctions is speaking solipsism. So if free will is not random and free will is not not random, or alternately if free will is not deterministic and free will is not not deterministic then free will is gibberish, Does that mean that alcohol is gibberish too, because it is neither 100% poison nor 100% not poison? and so obviously anyone asserting free will has abandoned logic and is speaking gibberish. If there were no free will then nobody could choose to assert anything, abandon anything, or speak anything other than gibberish. http://25.media.tumblr.com/208bb5a43ab31fd3250d9d2c7be4462f/tumblr_mfyu79B9qB1qeenqko1_500.jpg And it's not ad hominem if it's true. Why would it make a difference whether your personal accusations are true or not? The point is that they have nothing to do with the topic being discussed. If I say your position is robotic idiocy, it doesn't matter whether it's true, it still contributes nothing and distracts from the issue. What do my sentiments about you or your positions have to do with anything? Craig John K Clark A statement presented without justification, like computers can never be conscious like you and I are is not blather, just dull and dumb. Yet that is the opinion which I share with a neuroscientist who actually works in the field. Maybe your armchair opinion is just dull, dumb, blather? 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: Comp: Geometry Is A Zombie
On 2/27/2013 2:59 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 26 Feb 2013, at 21:40, meekerdb wrote: On 2/26/2013 1:24 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: How did number arise? We don't know that, but we can show that if we don't assume them, or equivalent (basically anything Turing Universal), then we cannot derive them. I'm not sure how you mean that? I meant that you cannot build a theory, simpler than arithmetic in appearance, from which you can derive the existence of the numbers. All theories which want talk about the numbers have to be turing universal. So I meant this in the concrete sense that if you write your axioms, and want talk about numbers, you need to postulate them, or equivalent. You can derive the numbers from the equational theory: Kxy = x Sxyz = xz(yz) + few equality rules, But that theory is already Turing universal, and assume as much the number than elementary arithmetic. We know that we experience individual objects and so we can count them by putting them in one-to-one relation with fingers or notches or marks. So what are you calling an assumption in this? A theory is supposed to abstract from the experiences. The experiences motivates the theory, but does not justify it logically. But justify logically seems like a bizarre concept to me. We just make up rules of logic so that inferences from some axioms, which we also make up, preserve 'true'. To say that it is justified logically seems to mean no more than we have avoided inconsistency insofar as we know. Sure it's important that our model of the world not have inconsistencies (at least if our rules of inference include ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet) but mere consistency doesn't justify anything. 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.
