On 3/11/2025 5:28 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 1:54 AM Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
*>>2) Natural selection can see intelligent behavior but it
can't see consciousness.*
/> That's questionable./
*I don't think there is anything we can be more sure about
than natural selection can't see consciousness.And you can't see it
either except in yourself. *
/> I can certainly see the difference between conscious and
unconscious./
*No you cannot!*Si
Sure I can. If he's breathing and got a heartbeat but unresponsive,
he's unconscious. If he's breathing and got a heartbeat and responsive,
he's conscious.
I notice you claim to be able to tell whether people are intelligent or
not by their actions...something that require inferences about their
internal motives and intents.
/> Conscious thought in the sense of imagining scenarios/
*But the thing is, you may be able to "imagine scenarios" but natural
selection can not.And there is no reason to think your "imaginary
scenarios" correspond with anything in the physical world.*
Which is why natural selection is not conscious.
There are very good reasons to think my imaginary scenarios correspond
to physical processes in my brain. A blow to my head or consumption of
a bottle of bourbon drastically affects the effectiveness of those
scenarios in guiding my behavior.*
*
*
*
/> with one's self in them is pretty damned useful./
*I could not say this two years ago but todayif you could only observe
what an intelligent agent didthen not only natural selection but also
YOU could not tell if it was performed by an AI or a human, provided
that the AI pretended to be stupider and think slower than it really can.
*
What does have that to do with anything I wrote?? I didn't say anything
about discriminating AI and natural intelligence.
**
*
*
*>> 1) Why do you think definitions are better than examples?*
/> Examples are more ambiguous./
*Examples can contain such little ambiguity that even a child is not
confused by them. You didn't learn English by reading a dictionary,
you learned it because some adult pointed to a tall thing in the
ground that had green stuff at the top and said "tree". *
And I learned that a bird or maybe a leaf was called "tree". It usually
takes several examples to be definitive.
*All definitions are ultimately circular, *
*Not unltimately. Ultimately they bottom out in ostensive definitions*
*that's why if you're totally unfamiliar with a concept in higher
mathematics a definition of that concept will not help you understand
it, it'll just be a bunch of gobbledygook, unless somewhere in that
definition there are words equivalent to "such as".
*
*>> 2) Where do you think lexicographers obtained the
knowledge they needed to write the definitions that are in
their dictionaries?
**3) Are definitions of words also made of words, and do those
words in the definition also have definitions made of words,
**and do those words in the definition of the definition of
words also have definitions made of words, and ....?*
/> They terminate in ostensive definitions which are special examples/
*Yesexamples, if you dig deep enoughinto a definition you'll always
come to an example at its root, or at least you will if the definition
is worth a damn.
*
But not *a *example, rather examples.
*>>4) What is the definition of "definition"? *
/> A _description _ that picks out a single _meaning_ of a word.
/
*I asked Google for a synonym for the word "meaning" and it listed a
bunch of them, but the very first one was "definition". And I asked
for a synonym for "description" and it said"exemplification". As I
said , all definitions are ultimately circular. *
So in spite me giving an example of the words use you have still never
hear of ostensive definition.
Brent
*Without examples language would be useless because there would be no
way to make a connection between the squiggles on a page and something
in the real world, a dictionary would just be a book that links one
squiggle to another squiggle. *
*
*
*John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>*
tbs
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