On 20 Feb 2017, at 16:33, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Feb 18, 2017 at 1:19 AM, John Clark <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote:
Dark Matter and Dark Energy remain complete mysteries.
As far as I can tell, what we have is a falsification of current
theories. They appear to be good enough approximations for many
things, but then they fail at predicting the expansion rate of the
universe right? Maybe it's dark matter, maybe it's something else,
They are 2 separate mysteries. Dark Matter is a mysterious
something that
makes up 28% of the universe and holds galaxies and clusters of
galaxies
together. Dark Energy is a even more mysterious something that
makes up 69%
of everything and causes the expansion of the entire universe to
accelerate.
And about 4% of the universe is made of the sort of normal matter
and energy
that until about 20 years ago was the only type we thought existed.
There is a straightforward extension of General Relativity and
Quantum
Mechanics that explains Dark Energy, however it gives a figure that
is
10^120 too large, it's been called the worse mismatch between
theory and
observation in the entire history of science. I think it's fair to
say we
really don't have a clue about Dark Energy, and Dark Matter is
almost as
confusing.
If science failed so far at explaining something, then it doesn't
matter?
Science has an explanation for consciousness that works beautifully,
consciousness is the way information feels when it is being processed
intelligently.
I know that your position is that information processing is
nonsensical without matter. Many times you invited Bruno to compete
with Intel, etc. So what you are saying is that "consciousness is the
way matter feels when it participates in an intelligent computation".
This "explanation" begs the question already.
Then there's the issue of defining "processed intelligently". What
does that even mean? Where do you draw the line between intelligent
and non-intelligent processing? Let me guess: intelligent processing
is the kind that generates consciousness.
Nobody ever came up with a way to test for the presence of
consciousness (probably because it's the wrong way to think about it),
so there is no scientific theory about it. Zero. You make it worse by
introducing ill-defined concepts.
What science doesn't yet have is a complete theory explaining
how to produce intelligence, but enormous progress has been made in
just the
last few years.
Not really. What is happening is that the artificial neural network
models from the 80s are finally paying off, because of the orders of
magnitude more computational power and training data that we have now.
Progress is being made, but it has been very slow. It's a hard
problem.
I've worked in this field both in academia and industry, for what
it's worth.
The study of intelligence, now that's important!
That is a statement of faith. Gizmo worshiping.
At least 3 times a week for the last 5 years somebody on this list
has
accused me of being religious, apparently in the hope that I'll
burst into
tears and cry myself to sleep. It's not going to happen,
I can't talk for the others, but I have no interest in making you
feel bad.
I'm just pointing out dogmatic thinking.
Yes, it's important in
a sense. I too am interested in having medical breakthroughs,
freedom
from labour and all the nice things that AI can bring.
It's important even if you're only interested in philosophical
problems,
such as why did Evolution bother to make conscious animals at all.
Evolution is a theory on the origins of biological complexity. We know
nothing about consciousness.
Do you agree that consciousness is a form of knowledge? That is:
consciousness requires some knowledge, and (genuine) knowledge
requires some conscious person)?
Then do you agree with the S4 theory of rational knowledge, which is
that
(knowable x) implies x
(knowable (x implies y)) implies ((knowable x) implies (knowable y))
(knowable x) implies (knowable (knowable x))
With the inference rules:
If I prove x I can deduce (knowable x)
+ modus ponens
If you are OK with this, it is not difficult to explain why evolution,
or anything actually, cannot NOT bring consciousness, and a first
person knower, in the picture.
That is a consequence of incompleteness which make the machine aware
of the difference between []p and []p & p. The machine can know that
[]p obeys to the modal logic G and that ([]p & p), the definition of
"knowable" by Theaetetus, obeys to the modal logic S4 + Grz (with Grz
the Gregorczyk formula).
Now, consciousness is not exactly knowledge, but a knowledge of some
"reality". It is based on an implicit automated belief in our
consistency (which is equivalent with the existence of a "model" in
the logician sense, which means some "reality" satisfying our belief.
This makes consciousness close to inconsistency.
Then it can be shown that consciousness, which is unavoidable, has
still some important role in evolution, as it makes the machine self-
speed-up-able and more and more autonomous relatively to the probable
universal machine/number which supports them.
Similarly, we get the feeling and the qualia with the logic of []p a
p, and []p & <>t & p, with p sigma_1. This add the symmetrical (p
implies []p) in the picture, and leads to quantum sort of logics.
It makes also consciousness into a bridge between the 3p arithmetical
picture and the (many) 1p internal views, including the first person
plural physics, making this theory testable (and confirmed up to now,
both introspectively and quantitatively). cf NUMBER ==> CONSCIOUSNESS/
DREAM ==> PHYSICAL-REALITY.
This explains notably why consciousness is what we know the best from
the 1p view, and yet is completely NOT definable in any 3p sense (like
the notion of Arithmetical Truth).
Intutively: consciousness brings the semantics, or the meaning of our
beliefs, and that speed-up the possible actions of the machine, making
the development of consciousness an advantage in the evolution, even
if it brings some amount of self-delusion, like the many confusion
between the reality that we infer with a reification of the reality
that we observe ... until Pythagoras and Plato get back to the
scientific doubt and skepticism.
I don't quite understand why an omnipotent being
would "want" anything, He should already have it. Nevertheless the
religious say God does want certain things and they know exactly
precisely
what they are and they insist on telling us about it; and they also
insist
God can't get what He wants on His own, we have to help the poor
fellow
achieve His aims.
You are describing Abrahamic religions. I don't believe in them
either.
I don't think the
Hindu religion
is significantly less stupid. There are some forms of Buddhism and
Taoism
that aren't stupid but they aren't religions, they don't say
anything about
God, don't say faith is a virtue, and don't even claim they are
revealing
something new about the world, instead they are doing something
much more
modest, they are giving personal advice; they are saying this is a
way to be
happy. Not the only way, maybe not the best way, just a way.
Ok, so you only recognise something as a religion if you think it's
stupid. Not hard to win an argument with that move...
I think you are not interested in what Bruno has to say. There's
nothing wrong with that, but it's just a personal preference of
yours.
Well yes, but how could not being interested in something not be a
personal
preference.
It could not be "just a personal preference", which is what I wrote.
Indeed, all what I say is deducible from the computationalist
assumption, intuitively and formally. The only way a God, or a Matter,
can change the consequences is by attaching consciousness to something
which is not Turing emulable nor recoverable from the First Person
Indeterminacy in the set of all (relative) computational consistent
continuations, with or without oracle. This makes the physical reality
stable for some Random Oracle, as the observation confirmed with the
quantum indeterminacy. It leads also to apparent non-locality.
Bruno
Telmo.
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 [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to everything-
[email protected].
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
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 [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
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 [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
