On Friday, March 7, 2014 3:06:54 AM UTC-5, cdemorsella wrote:
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> *From:* everyth...@googlegroups.com <javascript:> [mailto:
> everyth...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>] *On Behalf Of *Craig Weinberg
> *Sent:* Thursday, March 06, 2014 8:46 PM
> *To:* everyth...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>
> *Subject:* Vehiculus automobilius
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> If the doctor became more ambitious, and decided to replace a species with
> a simulation, we have a ready example of what it might be like. Cars have
> replaced the functionality of horses in human society. They reproduce in a
> different, more centralized way, but otherwise they move around like
> horses, carry people and their possessions like horses, they even evolve
> into new styles over time.
>
> Bees fly around like bats, but no one confuses bees for bats. The first
> popular name for the automobile in fact was the horseless carriage, which
> is the negation of the horse… a carriage sans horse. The carriage evolved
> into the car, but the radical change was from the grass fed hooved external
> motive force – i.e. the horse(s) – to the ICE engine… electric motors came
> early as well… then later diesel and gas turbines. So what if both fill a
> locomotive niche?
>
> One is not the other; that is a rather forced analogy – IMO.
>
It's an intentionally forced analogy. The horseless carriage name only
emphasizes that the function which horses served for us was replaceable.
Just as technology freed the buggy from the horse, so too might AI free the
carriage of the mind (the power to store facts and to move them from one
application to another appropriately) from the horse of human consciousness
(the capacity to care, appreciate, and participate the journey). The change
from grass to gas is analogous to the change from live neurons to
electronic silicon (or whatever inorganic medium is used).
>So what if both fill a locomotive niche?
The 'so what' is that filling a locomotive niche is all that functionalism
requires. If AI fills the behavioral niches of a person, then it is a
success, as far as computationalism is concerned.
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> Notice, however, that despite our occasional use of a name like Pinto or
> Mustang, no horse-like properties have emerged from cars. They do not
> whinny or swat flies. They do not get spooked and send their drivers
> careening off of the road. They did not develop DNA. Certainly a car does
> not perform as many complex computations as a horse, but neither does it
> need to. The function of a horse really doesn't need to be very
> complicated. A Google self-driving car is a better horse for almost all
> practical purposes than a horse.
>
> Just for fun let me argue that they do.. in the abstract. A horse requires
> fuel just as a car does; its fuel is hay & grass (maybe oats and a few
> apples), but fuel never the less… the horse has an onboard chemical plant
> to extract the useable energy content – including elaborate symbiotic
> relationships with the microorganisms in its various stomachs and gut; it
> has an intricate fuel distribution network delivering highly available
> oxygen for catalyzed reaction with fuel to produce the energy to power the
> muscles to move the hooves that move the horse that moves the carriage. A
> car externalizes the refining process – but who knows maybe one day we will
> develop hay munching cars (probably not too fast though) – but it also
> clearly requires fuel.
>
> Both the horse and the car produce waste products as a result of
> performing the useful work they are being used for. Both a horse and a car
> increase entropy.
>
> There are legions of potential parallels that can be teased out between
> horse and car. But to what end; in my current case a bit of idle fun
> perhaps.
>
To the end of recognizing that functionalism is false. A particular quality
of consciousness cannot be emulated by feeding a robot human food and
programming it to say 'mmm'. Everything that you are saying about horses
supports my point. There is nothing especially horse-like about its
functions. The energy it uses and work it performs are not much different
than a zooplankton.
> As for your assertion of better.. that depends on a lot of factors.
> Perhaps the Google self driving car might be better in a urban commute
> situation – along urban freeway systems and arterial roadways. But what
> about for a travers of the Andes mountain chain from south to the Panama
> canal, which means of locomotion do you think has the better chance of ever
> even making it from the cold of Tierra del Fuego (odd name for such a cold
> dismal damp place) zig zagging along mighty Andean ranges, through deep
> roadless canyons, jungle, desert, swamp and mountains.
>
> I don’t know about you, but in that case I am going for the horse. As
> always, whenever one says the word “better”… well better depends doesn’t it.
>
Right, that's my point. Simulation is a brittle, superficial branch of the
tree of existence/consciousness that should not be relied on.
Craig
Chris
>
> Maybe the doctor can replace all species with a functional equivalent? We
> could even do without all of the moving around and just keep the cars in
> the factory in which they are built and include a simulation screen on each
> windshield that interacts with Google Maps. With a powerful enough
> artificial intelligence, why not replace function altogether?
>
> Have you ever entertained the thought that maybe you are not actually
> moving around, but rather what is really going on is that you are – to coin
> a word – informationing around. What if space and time, and hence moving,
> past, future are all emergent phenomena of our sensed reality.
>
Yes, sure. I like to take it a step further and try to see the entire world
moving under my feet when I walk or coming into being in front of me when
I'm driving as if I were moving the entire universe under me on a conveyor
belt. It's a form of meditation, although a little creepy.
> Consider how if the VR machine is deep enough – with layer upon layer of
> code operating on other code, which is built on code built on code – in an
> infinite regression of emergent complexity, of emergent nuance, of emergent
> whatever qualia you choose… all of it, reality and self in reality as well
> – emergent from an information manifold.. the multiverse Schrödinger
> equation. What seems impossible to synthesize, often can become
> synthesizable given more subtle tools.
>
I have no problem with that, but what is "code"? Why isn't isn't the
information manifold an emergent property of something that knows or cares
that there is information there? Something like consciousness?
> I understand your feelings on the matter of the soul being something that
> cannot arise from mere programs operating with numbers… there is no f(x)
> that produces the soul.
>
No, you actually don't. I don't have a problem with f(x) producing a soul.
I have a problem with f(x) producing vanilla. I have a problem with f(x)
appearing ex nihilo and creating a universe (in some magical way) while it
is unconscious. How does f(x) want to create something if it is unconscious?
> But when the f(x) regresses and we begin to have deep enclosures as in:
> p(o(n(m(l(k(j(h(g(f(x)))))))))) when any one of the computational nodes
> can become self-referent (given some termination condition); when further
> more massive (and for the multiverse infinite) parallelism is added… when
> so much of this machinery (as is the case in our actual brains) is
> susceptible to quantum effects the strange miraculous soul will finally
> emerge – given enough depth and breadth of informational complexity and
> memory.
>
> And why not? Can you give a reason; not based on metaphor?
>
Because the only difference between a complex collection of inert codes and
a collection of elementary inert codes is in our perception of it. Metaphor
is the key. Without metaphor, the pixels of the TV screen never form an
image, they are just pixels. There is no support for computation leading to
aesthetic phenomena in the absence of our ('pathetic') misidentification
with it. What props it is up is that we can't experience non-human
consciousness directly, so that if we are inclined to be dazzled by the
beauty of complexity and precision, we see our own face in those designs.
We see that something as seemingly simple as a moving a person down the
street can entail vast complication - just the engine of a car alone is
fantastically complex. It is easy to be convinced that complexity is
magical, but it can only seem that way if it has magical potentials from
the start.
> What if everything including our conscious self-aware, introspecting being
> is emergent phenomena.
>
Emergence is requires consciousness. Without consciousness to tell the
difference between H2O molecules colliding with each other and the deep
blue ocean, there is nohwere in which such qualities could appear or
disappear. Consciousness is the only phenomena that counts. Anything that
it could exist without consciousness does not really exist in any
meaningful way.
> What if all of reality is reducible to a primordial zero manifest… a
> self-emergent, auto-catalyzing, retro-casual zero that becomes both
> beginning and end… that just is, because it auto-emerges from its infinite
> self, to begin its own beginning – invoking a retro-casual effect. Nothing
> manifest becomes everywhere and everytime and every potential connection.
> Nothing becomes the null set {} both within and without the set and this
> really sets things off.
>
What if "zero" is not anything? What if the idea that anything is reducible
to anything else is itself a function of the limits of perception? Maybe
there is no 'sugar substitute', or 'water substitute', or 'Chris
substitute'? If we invert the whole 'universe from nothing' expectation,
then we get a primoridal context which includes all feeling and being which
plays with self-constraint to realize experience. Matter and information
are not the cheese, they are the Swiss holes. The cheese is awareness -
aesthetic, sensory-motive participation.
> What is the auto-catalyzing agency? What drives it? When you throw a rock
> into a pond ripples go out in spacetime
>
Do they? Or do they just go out into the matter of the pond and the air,
our ears and eyes...The pond is an experience, spacetime is an abstract
measure in which experiences are reduced to one dimensional ideal vectors.
> – we experience the one way arrow of time and live in a causal universe,
> according to our sensorial perception and according to our macro scale
> observations of the universe we inhabit.
>
Not always. Just when we are awake, sober, healthy adults. There are other
possibilities.
> But what if waves of ripples can communicate cause in the reverse arrow of
> time. The mysterious auto-catalyzing agent… these operators that animate
> enumerations into Platonic mathematical entities… on some level
> retro-casual channels may exist – at the quantum scale it seems to happen…
> virtual particle pairs, quantum wormholes…. Entanglement itself – spooky
> action at a distance.
>
Of course, yes. I assume from the start that the arrow of time may be
purely local to our frame of reference. All of these exotic phenomena in
physics are to me like the new version of spirits. We are looking at a
model of half of the universe and flattening the other half. Our
understanding of consciousness now is almost as misguided as our
understanding of physics was in the Dark Ages. It's not that that what we
are measuring isn't there, just the opposite: it is only "there" but it
isn't "here".
Did you ever hear the one about why are fire engines red?
"A fire truck has four wheels in the front, eight wheels in the back. Four
plus eight is twelve. Twelve inches is a ruler. Queen Mary was a ruler, but
a ruler was also a ship. A ship sails the seven seas. The seas have fish.
The fish have fins. The Finns fought the Russians, and the Russians are
Red."
The more I think about it the more I am starting to come to the conclusion
> that it actually seems quite possible that everything – the multiverse – at
> all its orthogonal dimensions of mushrooming mind blowing scale out, is a
> self-referent, auto-catalyzing (through retro-causation) mathematical
> entity, of infinite complexity and infinite depth and that we first person,
> beings are, self-referent, self-emerging phenomena that can experience our
> illusion of being and identity through the seeming magic of quantum MWI –
> each quantum information event a branching universe, giving us an illusion
> of causality, of space and time. It is by this informational
> self-censorship, this MWI branching effect with no communication between
> the branches (at least, at our sensorial level, within the infinite
> mathematical self-referent entity that is being) that provides the means by
> which we can experience our “free will”.. our self-aware beingness… our
> ability to choose.
>
You're embracing the counter-aesthetic myth (which I found to be necessary
myself). The problem is that
1) The description you offer would be exactly the same without any
awareness or sensation involved. There is no plausible reason for
self-reference or information events to entail the invention of flavors,
feelings, etc. Numbers work for everything? Great, but why and how do they
pretend to be something other than numbers?
2) The result of this view is essentially this: "Everything that anyone in
the history of the universe has experienced is an "illusion", and the only
thing that has any reality to it is that which nothing can ever encounter
directly in any way." It is a case of "The emperor must be an illusion,
because we know his invisible clothes are real."
I am starting to wonder if information censorship explains a lot of things
> about reality. The fact that me and my vast array of clones say cannot
> communicate or ever know about each other, each believing itself to be the
> one and only me, could really explain a lot about the seemingly spontaneous
> auto-generation of me as I experience the beingness of me auto-emerging
> from within me without me invoking or causing the emergence.
>
Meh. You don't have any clones. I think that MWI is psychotic if taken
literally. Look where you are. How do you know any of this stuff about
Quantum etc? It's all through your experience, and nothing but experience.
Math doesn't do anything or care about anything, it's just the reflection
of the common sense of countable things.
> But when the perspective is from the mathematical bird’s eye view of all
> the branches that ever were or will be of me things may be playing out very
> differently and could even be the result of quite simple initial conditions
> (the butterfly effect) – but for each branch of “me” I instead experience a
> mystery of being… an inexplicable, ineffable sense of something I can never
> grasp or reach.
>
> Information hiding, may paradoxically explain a lot.
>
The universe is much more interesting when we see that not only is most of
it hidden from us most of the time, but that it is not just a theoretical
context in which all options are played out mathematically. This is not all
a game. The universe is also catastrophically finite...a blood sport, where
the stakes are much higher because there are no second chances. Can't you
imagine who comforting it would be to pull the wool over our eyes and dream
of a multiverse of simulation. "In some world, my life is great.". To get
at reality and gravity, we have to look beyond math and even physics. The
universe speaks every language, not just the language of computers and
philosophers.
Craig
Chris
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