Hi Marc, */Eliezer/*'s hubris about a Bayesian approach to intelligence is nothing more than the usual 'metabelief' about a mathematics... or about computation... meant in the sense that "cognition is computation", where computation is done BY the universe (with the material of the universe used to manipulate abstract symbols) </search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=Eliezer+Yudkowsky&spell=1>.....
*You don't have to work so hard to walk away from that approach...* Computationalism is FALSE in the sense that it cannot be used to construct a scientist. A scientist deals with the UNKNOWN. If you could compute a scientist you would already know everything! Science would be impossible. So you *can* 'compute/simulate' a scientist, but if you could the science must already have been done... hence you wouldn't want to. Computationalism is FALSE in the sense of 'not useful', not false in the sense of 'wrong'. You cannot model a modeller of the intrinsically unknown. As a computationalist manipluator of abstract symbols you are required to deliver a model of how to learn - in which you must specify how all novelty shall be handled! In other words you can;t deal with the REAL unknown - where you have no such model!.... ie. a computationalist scientist is an oxymoron: a logical contradiction. If you say you can then you are question begging computationalism whilst failing to predict an a-priori unsupervised observer (a scientist). The Bayesian 'given' (the conditional) assumes knowledge of a given which is a-priori not available. It assumes observation of the kind we have.. otherwise how would you know any options to choose as givens?..... furthermore it assumes that if somehow we were to experiment to resolve a choice of 'givens' (Bayesian conditionals) as being the 'truth' - then there are potentially an enormous collection of 'givens', all of which can be inserted in the same bayesian predictor... resulting in degenerate knowledge.... you know NOTHING because you fail to resolve anything useful about the world outside. You don't even know there's an 'outside'. The bayesian (all computationalist) approach fails to predict observation (in the sense of ANY observation/an observer, not a particular observation) and fails to predict the science that might result from an observer. This is the achilles heel of the computationalist argument. The computationalist delusion (dressed up in Bayesian or any other abstract symbol-manipulator's clothes) has to stop right here, right now and for good. BTW This does not mean that 'cognition is not computation'.... I hold that cognition is NATURAL symbol manipulation, not ABSTRACT symbol manipulation. But that's a whole other story... The natural symbols are the key. Please feel free to deliver the above to Eliezer. He'll remember me! Tell him the AGI he is so fearful of are a DOORSTOP and will be pathetically vulnerable to human intervention. The whole AGI fear-mongering realm needs to get over themselves and start being scientific about what they do. It's all based on assumptions which are false. cheers, colin --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
