On 4/26/2019 7:36 AM, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List wrote:
On Friday, 26 April 2019 01:52:19 UTC+3, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 1:49 PM 'Cosmin Visan'??
<everyth...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>> wrote:
>> it would be perfectly correct to say I scratched my nose
because I wanted to, but it would be equally correct to
say the nerves in my nose triggered the nerves in my hand
to move.
> /Except that this is not what happens. You stretch your nose
because you want,
/
If the "nonexistent" nerves in your "nonexistent" hand were not
triggered your "nonexistent" nose would not get scratched. And if
the correct "nonexistent" neurons in your "nonexistent" brain were
not triggered you wouldn't even want to.
I want to because I am a consciousness with free will.
But why do you want this rather than that??? Do the "wants" of your free
will just spring up at random??? Are they unrelated to your situation,
perception, the evolutionary history of your species. What does it mean
that your will is "free"??? Free of what?
> /not because nerves are triggered randomly from "physical laws"./
Gibberish. If something happens because of physical law then
obviously it happens for a reason. and if something happens for a
reason it can't be random
Reason is a quale based on which a consciousness makes a choice.
Billiard balls bumping into eachothers are not doing this for reason,
since they don't make the bumping their choice.
/> computers don't get to any answers, they just activate
certain pixels on the screen and you as a conscious being
interpret those pixels as an answer. /
College professors don't give any answers in their lectures, they
just activate certain sound waves and you as a conscious being
interpret those sound waves as an answer.
Of course. And you might interpret them correctly or not.
>> How can you prove to me your wet squishy brain has some
sort of magic that a computer's dry hard brain does not?
And I don't want to hear about qualia unless you can prove
to me you even have qualia.
/> There is no brain, so I don't know what you want me to prove./
I'd like you to prove you can engage in an interesting
conversation and can do more than just repeat that nothing exists.
Consciousness exists. And if you don't start from this fact, then
conversations are meaningless anyway.
> a computer (besides the fact that it doesn't even exist, of
course) it doesn't even have qualia,
Two can play this silly game: Qualia doesn't exist. So there!
I was sure that you will eventually bring this meaningless assertion
to the table. Why ? Because you are not interested in having a
meaningful conversation, you are only interested in preaching your
religious belief in live objects.
>> The fact is you DO have a method of judging the
intelligence in other people and you have made use of it
every hour of your waking life from the moment you were
born. And that method certainly can't have anything to do
with the qualia that other people experience because you
have no way of determining that.
/> I'm not judging the intelligence of other people, I'm only
looking at my own intelligence./
That is a disingenuous thing to say. Every human being who ever
lived is constantly judging the intelligence??of the objects in its
environment, that's why we treat puppies differently than rocks.
If you think that a rock is intelligent, then go ahead. I don't think
that.
/> And I see that it means bringing new qualia into existence
out of nothing. And I use my reason to understand//that /[...]
If you use reason then you did it for a reason, there was a cause,
and the qualia that you keep talking about came into existence
through a deterministic process.
I don't know how qualia appear. Sometimes they appear at our own will,
other times they appear by themselves. How they do that I don't know.
But I do.?? I know how certain photons interact with retina and generate
neural signals that interact with memories that encode the symbol
"red".???? To bad you missed the 20th century.
Brent
>> are you saying a computer could never pick out pictures
of dogs from pictures of other animals better than a human
could, and if it could that would prove your ideas are
wrong? Are you brave enough to come right out and say that?
/> Since you need to specifically put the word "dog" in the
database, a computer will never identify dogs if you don't
specifically put that information in the database. /
How could you do it any differently if you've never heard the word
"dog" before?
The same way you do everything for the first time: by using the
creation property of consciousness. How did you think you learn to
speak in the first place ? Because consciousness has the ability to
create new qualia out of nothing.
>> Can you do better? If you had never seen a dog and had no
information about dogs how on earth could you identify a dog?
/> The way you already did it, how else ? When you first saw a
dog, did you have any prior information about it ? Of course
not. You just did it./
Did what? The first time I saw a dog I knew no language and so
would have been unable to put a picture of a dog in the pile
marked "dog", but people kept pointing at the animal and saying
"dog" and eventually I got the idea. And recently computers have
gained the ability to learn from examples the same way humans do,
Yeah, and how did you get the picture of "people pointing" ? You can
push this "first time" event as far back as you want to try to escape
the inevitable, but you will not escape it. You still have to
aknowledge a first point of creation of something out of nothing.
>> if you want to know what it's going to do all you can do
is watch it and see. It would only take me a few minutes
to write a computer program to find the smallest even
number that is not the sum of 2 prime numbers and then
stop. Will my computer ever stop? Nobody knows, nobody can
determine that. Maybe it will stop in the next second,
maybe it will stop next year, maybe it will stop in a
billion years, maybe it will never stop and you will be
waiting forever.
/> No wonder people start to believe in living objects when
they have no understanding of basic computer science.You have
a bad understanding of determinism./
You sir are a phoney. You have demonstrated??little understanding
of computer science and apparently have never even heard of Turing
or the Halting Problem, you sure don't sound as if you have. Make
me eat my words, specify exactly what facts I got wrong in the
above. Go on, *I DARE YOU!*
You personified an object. You named a bunch of atoms "a computer
doing the halting problem", and you forgot that this is only a label
that you applied to other causal events that don't happen at the level
of the "computer doing the halting problem", but at the level of
atoms. And there you have determinism, regardless of whether the
"computer" stops or not, since "computer" is just a label that you
apply to something else. Like a child applies the label "Santa Claus"
to a drawing on the piece of paper and then starts to believe in Santa
Claus.
> Chess and everything, every moment of our lives, is a moment
of creativity.
Then a computer is creative because even a small computer can now
EASILY beat ANY human Chess player.
That's not the definition of creation. Creation is bringing into
existence something out of nothing. And that something is only
consciousness, because only consciousness exists. It seems that you
still cannot escape your upside down logic.
By the way, you sound like the sort of person who believes in the
invisible man in the sky theory. Am i correct?
You are the one that believes that objects are alive. I am a rational
person that believes in rational things.
/> The fact that you made some objects behave in certain ways
doesn't change the fact that consciousness is creative./
OK let's see where this leads. You just said Chess is creative and
computers play much better Chess than any human, thus according to
you computers must be conscious,
No, this is again your upside down logic in which you put the
conclusion before the hyphothesis. If like saying: Santa Claus has
legs and arms like a human, human exists, therefore Santa Claus
exists. I don't even know what name this logic error has.
>> Now it's your turn, ??tell me how things would be
different if matter *DID* exist
??> /since the brain does not exists[...] Since matter CANNOT
exist, this would be just an exercise in futility./
Yes, this is indeed starting to look like an exercise in futility
if the only thing you can bring to the table is "X does not exist".
I can bring lots of things, and I invite you to either read my book "I
Am", or if you consider that money are evil, you can read for free my
ideas published in papers: https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan
/> Thinking is a non-deterministic phenomenon/
And that is a monumentally UN*REASON*ABLE thing to say. Things
either happen for a reason or they don't and non-deterministic
phenomenon can occur??because there is no law of logic that demands
every event have a cause. But if something happens for no *REASON*
then is by definition random. And randomness is the very??opposite
of thinking or intelligence, that's why you can't write a Nobel
Prize winning paper by just banging your fist on a keyboard, and
you can't even write a good post that way.
I don't see how that contradicts that fact that thinking is
non-deterministic.
> /Computers are irrational deterministic objects./
If computers are deterministic then they do things for a *REASON*
so they can't BE IR*RATIONAL*. And if they are IR*RATIONAL* then
they would be useless at everything except as random number
generators; so how did they become a multi trillion dollar
industry and why are you wasting your time using one at this very
instant?
Reason is a quale based on which a consciousness makes a choice.
Billiard balls bumping into eachothers are not doing this for reason,
since they don't make the bumping their choice.
You are making a confusion between i-rational and useless. An
i-rational object (an entity that has no life) can still be useful if
it is made that way by a rational being.
>///I know what intelligence is: bringing of new qualia into
existence,/
A definition that has precisely zero value because there is
absolutely no way to ever make use of it.
Of course you can make use of it: You stop believing in the fantasy of
AIs.
> /and I can tell you that this cannot be done artificially. /
Why the hell not? Anything random mutation and natural selection
can do a human engineer can do better, and unlike Evolution it
won't take a billion years either. And then the engineer's
"nonexistent" computer made of "nonexistent" matter will beat the
"nonexistent" brain in your "nonexistent" head at every
conceivable "nonexistent" task.
Except that evolution doesn't happen by random mutations. That is just
an unproven dogma repeated by people afraid of admitting that
consciousness is primary, not matter.
>> I issue you the following challenge, give me one reason
to think a computer could not be conscious that could not,
with trivial modification, also be used to support the
proposition??that none of your fellow human beings are
conscious. I don't believe you have a snowball's chance in
hell of meeting my challenge.
/> Because bringing new qualia into existence is a
non-deterministic phenomenon, while computers are deterministic. /
What evidence do you have that other people bring new qualia into
existence??or even that they have the ability to experience??qualia
at all? I know with certainty of only one fellow in the entire
universe who most certainly has qualia, and it ain't you.
I assume that there are other consciousnesses like me out-there.
John K Clark
PS: I'm really REALLY *REALLY* looking forward to you telling me
what I got wrong when I talked about the Halting Problem.
See above. "Halting problem" is just a label that you apply to a
system whose causal powers are at the level of atoms, not at the level
of "computers", since "computer" is just a label.
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