Hi Bruno Marchal Are you saying that comp creates and controls all by means of some kind of code in some Pythagorean realm, where all is numbers ? That everything is computable ?
Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 8/31/2012 Leibniz would say, "If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function." ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-31, 10:27:35 Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On 31 Aug 2012, at 14:08, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Friday, August 31, 2012 4:47:30 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Aug 2012, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, August 30, 2012 1:11:55 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 29 Aug 2012, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, August 29, 2012 1:22:38 PM UTC-4, William R. Buckley wrote: Cells are indeed controlled by software (as represented in wetware form ? i.e. DNA). It isn't really clear exactly what controls what in a living cell. I can say that cars are controlled by traffic signals, clocks, and calendars. To whatever we ascribe control, we only open up another level of unexplained control beneath it. What makes DNA readable to a ribosome? What makes anything readable to anything? Encoding and decoding, or application and abstraction, or addition and multiplication, ... My problem is that this implies that a pile of marbles know how many marbles they are. Not necessarily. A n-piles of marbles can emulate a m-pile of marbles. I could rig up a machine that weighs red marbles and then releases an equal weight of white marbles from a chute. Assuming calibrated marbles, there would be the same number, but no enumeration of the marbles has taken place. Nothing has been decoded, abstracted, or read, it's only a simple lever that opens a chute until the pan underneath it gets heavy enough to close the chute. There is no possibility of understanding at all, just a mindless enactment of behaviors. No mind, just machine. To be viable, comp has to explain why these words don't speak English. It is hard to follow your logic. Like someone told to you, a silicon robot could make the equivalent argument: explain me how a carbon based set of molecules can write english poems ... By your logic, I would have to explain how Bugs Bunny can't become a person too. It can. In some universal environment, it is quite possible that bugs bunny like beings become persons. As far as we know, we can't survive on any food that isn't carbon based. As far as we know, all living organisms need water to survive. On our planet, but you extrapolate too much. Why should this be the case in a comp universe? Open and hard problem, but a priori, life can takes different forms. I think that the problem is that you don't take your own view that physical matter is not primitive seriously. Like you, I see matter not as a stuff that independently exists, but as a projection of the exterior side of bodies making sense of each other - or the sense of selves making an exterior side of body sense to face each other. From that perspective it isn't the carbon that is meaningful, the carbon (H2O, sugars, amino acids, lipids really), the carbon is just the symptom, the shadow. Carbon is the command line 'OPEN BIOAVAILABILITY DICTIONARY" which gives the thing access to the palette of histories associated with living organisms rather than astrophysical or geological events. This is not inconsistent with comp, but I don't find this plausible. In fact I believe that all civilisation in our physical universe end up into a giant topological computing machinery (a quark star, whose stability depends on sophisticated error tolerant sort of quantum computation) virtualising their past and future. Carbon might be just a step in life development. We might already be virtual and living in such a "star". But more deeply, we are already all in arithmetic. Bruno Sense is irreducible. >From the first person perspective. Yes. For machine's too. No software can control anything, even itself, unless something has the power to make sense of it as software and the power to execute that sense within itself as causally efficacious motive. This seems to me like justifying the persistence of the physical laws by invoking God. It is too quick gap filling for me, and does not explain anything, as relying on fuzzy vague use of words. I might find sense there, but in the context of criticizing mechanism, I find that suspicious, to be frank. I'm only explaining what comp overlooks. It presumes the possibility of computation without any explanation or understanding of what i/o is. ? How does the programming get in the program? Why does anything need to leave Platonia? OK. (comp entails indeed that we have never leave Platonia, but again, this beg the question: why do you think anything has even leave Platonia? Physics is just Platonia seen from inside, from some angle/pov). By "Seen from inside" you evoke a Non-Platonia. Why does Platonia need a Physics view? Why should that possibility even present itself in a Platonic universe? How does encoding come to be a possibility Because it exists provably once you assume addition and multiplication, already assumed by all scientists. If I begin with numbers and then add and multiply them together to get other numbers, where does the decoding come in? At what point do they suddenly turn into letters and colors and shapes and people? Why would they do that from an arithmetic perspective? We are not tempted to do this in a computer. We don't think 'maybe this program will run faster if we play it a happy song through tiny speakers in the microprocessor'. Even plants have been shown to benefit from being interacted with positively, but have computations shown any such thing? Has any computer program shown any non-programmatic environmental awareness at all? and why should it be useful in any way (given a universal language of arithmetic truth). ? Why should it be useful? Are babies useful? Are the ring of Saturn useful? No. They aren't. That's my point. Those things would never arise from number crunching alone. Numbers begat only more numbers. If you apply numbers to forms, then you get interesting forms. If you apply interesting colors, sounds, etc. But numbers will never discover these things. We discover them. Real things discover numbers, not the other way around. Comp doesn't account for realism, only a toy model of realism which is then passed off as genuine by lack of counterfactual proof - but proof defined only by the narrow confines of the toy model itself. It is the blind man proving that nobody can see by demanding that sight be put into the terms of blindness. You don't give a clue why it would be like that, except building on the gap between 1 and 3 view, but my point is that universal machine or numbers are already astonished by such gap. They can only say that they live it without being able to justify it, nor even to define precisely what their 1-view can be, until they bet on mechanism, and understand (already) why it has to be like that. Why do you think that I don't have a clue about epistemology but you claim to speak for the feelings and experiences of universal machines? Justification is a 3p epistemology. 1p doesn't need to prove itself in 3p because they are orthogonal to each other. 1p would need proof that it needs proof for itself. It is a given. You have to start somewhere - the cosmos has to have some point of orientation, and 1p is the name we can call that. Craig Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/bcygv7dpgXMJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
