Re: Theories that explain everything explain nothing

[Colin Hales]

You've done it again.
There could be 1000 mathematical abstractions (not simple) that, as a
depiction of reality, may reveal a process called scientific observation.

You think that abstraction is an instance of scientific observation.

I say that this entire comp argument is about confusing the two things.

All you ever do is write ^*^$^%#$12324op][][][][ descriptions and endlessly
discuss that confusion.

0) Reality.
1) Descriptions of how it appears (observations)
2) Descriptions of what it is made of (including how observation works).

What you endlessly reiterate is one of a 1000 item 2). In order to talk to
you I have to make the same mistakes as you and I won't do that.

Look. I am so over this. Just forget I ever said anything.





On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 3:41 AM, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

>
> On 15 May 2015, at 00:44, colin hales wrote:
>
> Your suggestion presupposes  a limit to reach that we don't necessarily
> have to assume.
>
> Theories of  everything but the scientific observer  (what tends to be
> called a TOE historically)
>
>
> In the aristotelian picture. In the beginning it meant only unification of
> the known force and objects.
> In this list, we take into account consciousness and the first person
> points of view.
>
>
>
> and
> Theories of everything including the scientific observer.( what I am
> suggesting as a real TOE)
>
>
> Like Comp and Everett already.
> Arithmetic or any universal system (in the CT sense) allows that, and much
> more, by the closure for the diagonalization.
>
>
>
>
>  Can be different categories of scientific account.
>
>
> The arithmetical hypostases. The same sigma_1 reality, viewed by 8 points
> of viewed, multiplied by aleph_0, if not aleph_1 in the first-person
> delay-amnesia limit.
>
>
> Find the way that this can be the case and you have solved the problem.
>
>
> You have begun, only. Comp makes it mathematical, and it is not simple.
>
>
>
> Confuse the two and become part of the problem. Fail to realize there are
> two theory categories and you are also part of the problem.
>
> This dual-'theory' state is a Comp-agnostic position and forms a place
> from which arguments about COMP get  clarity. The magic of COMP being true
> occurs when the two kinds are identities. Under what conditions might that
> be?
>
>
> Hmm... You seem to intuit, or understood the key things:
>
> - that the universal numbers can prove p -> []p, for the p in the sigma_1
> reality,
>
> - but that they cannot yet identify p and []p, because the other side: []p
> -> p is still what they can only pray for, or work for.
>
>
>
>
> Rhetorical question intended to provoke a bit of thought.
>
>
> The first post which I can understand!
>
> G1 proves p -> []p
> G1* \ G1 proves []p -> p.
>
> Best,
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
>
> Cheers
> Colin
>
>
>
>
> --
> From: John Mikes 
> Sent: ‎15/‎05/‎2015 7:32 AM
> To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: Theories that explain everything explain nothing
>
> Colin: wouldn't it fit to call "TOE"  -  Theory of Everything WE KNOW
> ABOUT?  or: Everything in our reach?
> I mentioned my agnostic views.
> Greetings
> John Mikes
>
> On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 8:40 PM, colin hales  wrote:
>
>> 
>>
>> Perhaps better
>>
>> All posited (so far) scientific TOE are actually wrongly named. They
>> would be correctly named:
>>
>> "Theories predicting how the universe appears to an assumed scientific
>> observer inside it"
>>
>> Or maybe
>>
>> "Theories of everything except the scientific observer"
>>
>> By Scientific observer I mean consciousness... What scientific
>> observation uses/is.
>>
>> From here you might ask yourself what a scientist would be doing if they
>> _were_ explaining the scientific observer (consciousness). For whatever
>> that is, it's not a member of the set of  the kind of science outcomes in
>> which these so-called TOE sit, smugly claiming everything while actually
>> failing without realizing.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Colin
>> --
>> From: Bruce Kellett 
>> Sent: ‎14/‎05/‎2015 9:15 AM
>> To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
>> Subject: Theories that explain everything explain nothing
>>
>> As an aside to recent discussions, it is interesting to point out that
>> physics has some of the problems associated with over-confidence in
>> ideas coming from pure intuition too.
>>
>> http://aeon.co/magazine/science/

RE: Theories that explain everything explain nothing

[colin hales]

Your suggestion presupposes  a limit to reach that we don't necessarily have to 
assume.

Theories of  everything but the scientific observer  (what tends to be called a 
TOE historically)
and
Theories of everything including the scientific observer.( what I am suggesting 
as a real TOE)

 Can be different categories of scientific account. Find the way that this 
can be the case and you have solved the problem. Confuse the two and become 
part of the problem. Fail to realize there are two theory categories and you 
are also part of the problem.

This dual-'theory' state is a Comp-agnostic position and forms a place  from 
which arguments about COMP get  clarity. The magic of COMP being true occurs 
when the two kinds are identities. Under what conditions might that be? 

Rhetorical question intended to provoke a bit of thought.

Cheers
Colin






-Original Message-
From: "John Mikes" 
Sent: ‎15/‎05/‎2015 7:32 AM
To: "everything-list@googlegroups.com" 
Subject: Re: Theories that explain everything explain nothing

Colin: wouldn't it fit to call "TOE"  -  Theory of Everything WE KNOW ABOUT?  
or: Everything in our reach? 
I mentioned my agnostic views. 
Greetings
John Mikes


On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 8:40 PM, colin hales  wrote:


Perhaps better 

All posited (so far) scientific TOE are actually wrongly named. They would be 
correctly named:

"Theories predicting how the universe appears to an assumed scientific observer 
inside it"

Or maybe

"Theories of everything except the scientific observer"

By Scientific observer I mean consciousness... What scientific observation 
uses/is.

>From here you might ask yourself what a scientist would be doing if they 
>_were_ explaining the scientific observer (consciousness). For whatever that 
>is, it's not a member of the set of  the kind of science outcomes in which 
>these so-called TOE sit, smugly claiming everything while actually failing 
>without realizing.   

Cheers
Colin 


From: Bruce Kellett
Sent: ‎14/‎05/‎2015 9:15 AM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Theories that explain everything explain nothing


As an aside to recent discussions, it is interesting to point out that 
physics has some of the problems associated with over-confidence in 
ideas coming from pure intuition too.

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/has-cosmology-run-into-a-creative-crisis

This article by Ross Anderson in Aeon Magazine surveys some of the 
recent history of press announcements by leading cosmologists. Believing 
too strongly in your own pet theory can be a dangerous pastime.

Bruce

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Re: Theories that explain everything explain nothing

[Colin Hales]

:-)

Theories of everything except the scientific observer

TOEETSO

yuck.

Theory of appearances only . TAO
Theory of Appearances  TOA. (homophone!)

I have a TAO of doubt that TOEs are TOE.

cheers
colin



On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 7:39 AM, LizR  wrote:

> Now you just need a cool acronym.
>
> :-)
>
> On 15 May 2015 at 09:32, John Mikes  wrote:
>
>> Colin: wouldn't it fit to call "TOE"  -  Theory of Everything WE KNOW
>> ABOUT?  or: Everything in our reach?
>> I mentioned my agnostic views.
>> Greetings
>> John Mikes
>>
>> On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 8:40 PM, colin hales  wrote:
>>
>>> [image: 😊]
>>> Perhaps better
>>>
>>> All posited (so far) scientific TOE are actually wrongly named. They
>>> would be correctly named:
>>>
>>> "Theories predicting how the universe appears to an assumed scientific
>>> observer inside it"
>>>
>>> Or maybe
>>>
>>> "Theories of everything except the scientific observer"
>>>
>>> By Scientific observer I mean consciousness... What scientific
>>> observation uses/is.
>>>
>>> From here you might ask yourself what a scientist would be doing if they
>>> _were_ explaining the scientific observer (consciousness). For whatever
>>> that is, it's not a member of the set of  the kind of science outcomes in
>>> which these so-called TOE sit, smugly claiming everything while actually
>>> failing without realizing.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Colin
>>> --
>>> From: Bruce Kellett 
>>> Sent: ‎14/‎05/‎2015 9:15 AM
>>> To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
>>> Subject: Theories that explain everything explain nothing
>>>
>>> As an aside to recent discussions, it is interesting to point out that
>>> physics has some of the problems associated with over-confidence in
>>> ideas coming from pure intuition too.
>>>
>>> http://aeon.co/magazine/science/has-cosmology-run-into-a-creative-crisis
>>>
>>> This article by Ross Anderson in Aeon Magazine surveys some of the
>>> recent history of press announcements by leading cosmologists. Believing
>>> too strongly in your own pet theory can be a dangerous pastime.
>>>
>>> Bruce
>>>
>>> --
>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
>>> Groups "Everything List" group.
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RE: Theories that explain everything explain nothing

[colin hales]

😊
Perhaps better 

All posited (so far) scientific TOE are actually wrongly named. They would be 
correctly named:

"Theories predicting how the universe appears to an assumed scientific observer 
inside it"

Or maybe

"Theories of everything except the scientific observer"

By Scientific observer I mean consciousness... What scientific observation 
uses/is.

>From here you might ask yourself what a scientist would be doing if they 
>_were_ explaining the scientific observer (consciousness). For whatever that 
>is, it's not a member of the set of  the kind of science outcomes in which 
>these so-called TOE sit, smugly claiming everything while actually failing 
>without realizing.   

Cheers
Colin 

-Original Message-
From: "Bruce Kellett" 
Sent: ‎14/‎05/‎2015 9:15 AM
To: "everything-list@googlegroups.com" 
Subject: Theories that explain everything explain nothing

As an aside to recent discussions, it is interesting to point out that 
physics has some of the problems associated with over-confidence in 
ideas coming from pure intuition too.

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/has-cosmology-run-into-a-creative-crisis

This article by Ross Anderson in Aeon Magazine surveys some of the 
recent history of press announcements by leading cosmologists. Believing 
too strongly in your own pet theory can be a dangerous pastime.

Bruce

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RE: The dovetailer disassembled

[colin hales]

Hi John (Mikes),
If it helps  I went into academia and got 'Doctored' specifically so I had 
some way to get listened to by science ... That might actually have an impact.

I am now out... But have ties. I am taking the alternate route: The detestable 
soul-sucking devil called commerce. I build it and will explain it later.

Your 'hanging in there' is appreciated.

Cheers

Colin 

-Original Message-
From: "John Mikes" 
Sent: ‎7/‎05/‎2015 7:03 AM
To: "everything-list@googlegroups.com" 
Subject: Re: The dovetailer disassembled

Colin:
some 15-20 years ago I read your texts - even made some tenets part of my 
"worldview" text. Now I had difficulty to force myself reading along your post.
Maybe I got older, maybe your style became "more sophisticated". Both?
I still struggle with the 'jargon' of this (and other) lists and took umbrage 
by developing into my agnostic views: there are lots of items 'out there' we so 
far did not take information from, yet those items (factors?) influence  
changes we experience "in here" on our better known(?) unknowables. 


I lost you when you deepend your connection to the establishment-science to get 
the degree. I may call it adjustment, not necessarily a cave-in. 


I still hold you in high esteem. Thanks for your post, I did not give up yet.


John Mikes






On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 11:11 PM, Colin Hales  wrote:





On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 11:21 AM, LizR  wrote:

It also appears to me that the computing entity would not be conscious for the 
same reason computed flight physics is not flight.



I don't have the benefit of thinking about this for ten years, but it does seem 
that there is a map/territory confusion here. Comp* is the idea that a computer 
programme could be conscious. Simulated flight isn't real flight, but 
(according to comp) consciousness can't be simulated, because it's already the 
result of computations.


*or comp1 if you prefer


With respect I will refuse to buy into the jargon of this milieu. I don't care 
what comp-x or any other variant of it is. I care even less what a dovetailer 
is. Yet you have touched right on the very essence of the map/territory 
confusion. 


But it is even worse than you think. First consider 


A) The universe is a massive collection of interacting elemental primitives of 
kind X whose interactions could be characterised as a computation. Call it a 
noumenon. Underlying fabric of whatever it is we are inside.
and
B) A computer K  inside A made by entities (us), also inside the set A, that is 
running and exploring a _model_  of a set of abstracted (by us) X.


We in B you can look at the computer K and say: "The universe A, made of X, is 
computing a computer K running a program that is an abstraction of A". The 
computing of the computer by the universe A and the computing by K of the 
abstractions inside the program in the computer K are two utterly different 
things that are endlessly confused here.


The entire 10 years discourse can be characterised as a group of people 
variously mixing A and B and never realising they were talking about different 
things while not even knowing which of A or B they are in AND 


it gets worse. in neither case were they speaking about traditional 
'laws of nature'. This is a second cockup. These cockups are factorially 
confusing. 


In essence the study of the kind B is a different kind of science. It's not 
what traditional science, out here in the real world of Dr Colin science, does. 
B is a different kind of novel scientific enquiry/ epistemology that this list 
continually fails to recognise.


What we do as scientists out here in the non-Everything-list world is not B.


Instead we do something different(C). We create abstractions that predict 
how (A) appears (in a scientist's consciousness ... as a scientific observer) 
when you are inside it (A) (made of X). These regularities in appearances are 
NOT the regularities depicted as B. We call C the traditional 'laws of nature'. 
A completely different kind of epistemology.


Then, just to make everything even more confusing ...


 we scientists (C) then compute the abstract 'laws of nature' C, variously 
confusing them with the laws in B (= think C and B are the same epistemology), 
or completely miss B or shun B as metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. 


B and C are separate epistemologies. Their difference scientifically accounts 
for consciousness in the form of the scientific observer.


So...


One underlying unknowable (from the inside) universe A made of something. What 
that 'something' might be is what B explores.
and
Two sets of potential abstractions of A: B and C. B depicts/characterises what 
A is made of whereas C is what it appears like to an observer inside A (you 
know...atoms and space and stuff). Epistemol

Re: The dovetailer disassembled

[Colin Hales]

On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 11:21 AM, LizR  wrote:

> It also appears to me that the computing entity would not be conscious for
>> the same reason computed flight physics is not flight.
>>
>
> I don't have the benefit of thinking about this for ten years, but it does
> seem that there is a map/territory confusion here. Comp* is the idea that a
> computer programme could be conscious. Simulated flight isn't real flight,
> but (according to comp) consciousness can't be simulated, because it's
> *already* the result of computations.
>
> *or comp1 if you prefer
>

With respect I will refuse to buy into the jargon of this milieu. I don't
care what comp-x or any other variant of it is. I care even less what a
dovetailer is. Yet you have touched right on the very essence of the
map/territory confusion.

But it is even worse than you think. First consider

A) The universe is a massive collection of interacting elemental primitives
of kind X whose interactions could be characterised as a computation. Call
it a noumenon. Underlying fabric of whatever it is we are inside.
and
B) A computer K  inside A made by entities (us), also inside the set A,
that is running and exploring a _model_  of a set of abstracted (by us) X.

We in B you can look at the computer K and say: "*The universe A, made of
X, is computing a computer K running a program that is an abstraction of A*".
The computing of the computer by the universe A and the computing by K of
the abstractions inside the program in the computer K are two *utterly
different things *that are endlessly confused here.

The entire 10 years discourse can be characterised as a group of people
variously mixing A and B and never realising they were talking about
different things while not even knowing which of A or B they are in AND

it gets worse. *in neither case were they speaking about
traditional 'laws of nature'. **This is a second cockup. These cockups are
factorially confusing. *

In essence the study of the kind B is a different kind of science. It's not
what traditional science, out here in the real world of Dr Colin science,
does. B is a different kind of novel scientific enquiry/ epistemology that
this list continually fails to recognise.

What we do as *scientists *out here in the non-Everything-list world is *not
*B.

Instead we do something different(C). We create abstractions that
predict how (A) appears (in a scientist's consciousness ... as a scientific
observer) when you are inside it (A) (made of X). These regularities in
appearances are NOT the regularities depicted as B. We call C the
traditional 'laws of nature'. A completely *different *kind of epistemology.

Then, just to make everything *even more confusing ...*

* *we scientists (C) then compute the abstract 'laws of nature' C,
variously confusing them with the laws in B (= think C and B are the same
epistemology), or completely miss B or shun B as metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.

B and C are separate epistemologies. Their difference scientifically
accounts for consciousness in the form of the scientific observer.

So...

One underlying unknowable (from the inside) universe A made of something.
What that 'something' might be is what B explores.
and
*Two *sets of potential abstractions of A: B and C. B depicts/characterises
what A is made of whereas C is what it *appears *like to an observer inside
A (you know...atoms and space and stuff). Epistemology C makes the observer
predictive of appearances and simultaneously completely fails to contact X
or B and thereby does what has been happening for >2000 years... fail to
account for (explain) the scientific observer.

Here in this email form COMP argument, A and B *and* C are being endlessly
confused with each other and mis-correlated in respect of consciousness.
Neither a computed B epistemology or a computed C epistemology can be
claimed conscious and this is testable. Careful: by 'computed'  I mean
computed by a computer made of X by us, also made of X.

Yet, that which is conscious (certain organisations of X in A) can be
understood as a form of computation! That does not mean that a computed
version of that understanding is conscious. Nor does it mean that X is some
kind of platonic realm computer running a program. You can nest this back,
"The Matrix" style, forever and it's just a load of empty sophistry.
Instead why don't we *solve the problem*. Sorry 10 years can make you
grumpy.

So really this is a *massive systemic *screw up. 3 layers A/B/C (a
'dual-aspect' epistemology) confused with each other AND with computed
versions of 2 of them (B/C) AND that confused mess is then used to speak
about consciousness at the level of each of the 3 confused layers.

This discourse fails to realise that it is right at the juncture of the
emergence of a new kind of science..The recognition and adding of B as
a new distinct epistemology. That is what you are really doing here.

This has been very hard to unpack. And unpacking it is the main resul

RE: The dovetailer disassembled

[colin hales]

Hi,
I've been watching this "if COMP is true then " discussion for over 10 
years. In that time my thinking has evolved to the point where I can express 
what COMP now looks like to me, from my perspective.

Comp appears to be trivially true.

 That is, the resultant computing entity would be computing the entire universe 
and hence is simply pointless. It also appears to me that the computing entity 
would not be conscious for the same reason computed flight physics is not 
flight.

There is an endless confusion operating here: The confusing of "the universe as 
computation" with "computing, with this universe, models of how the universe 
appears to us inside it". A deep map/territory confusion. I wrote a book on 
this.

I am not going to spend any further on this because I know COMP is religion 
here and talking to the religious doesn't  work. Witness 10 years and the same 
conversation is still going on. There is a fantastically detailed 
self-promulgating mental cage here in the comp argument. I for one am over it. 
I am building artificial brain and there is no computer involved at all. Comp 
is irrelevant in the real practice of the mission to make real AGI.

When you _don't_ know anything about the universe, yet you are inside it and 
need to survive you need to survive based on fighting  your own ignorance. 

So If you already know everything you can compute your way out of 
ignorance... But then you already know everything... So why bother?

You can prove this argument experimentally. I intend, finally, to do this or at 
least organize this before I drop dead.

Comp. Imo trivially true and wasting the time of a lot of prodigious brains.

That's where i am at, anyway. Thanks for listening. In another 10 years I'll 
see what it looks like again!

 Carry on. 😉.

Cheers 
Colin


-Original Message-
From: "LizR" 
Sent: ‎6/‎05/‎2015 10:28 AM
To: "everything-list@googlegroups.com" 
Subject: Re: The dovetailer disassembled

On 6 May 2015 at 11:24, meekerdb  wrote:



It seems to be a continuing problem on this list that "comp" is used for idea 
that parts of ones brain could be replaced with an equivalent digital device 
and preserve ones consciousness.  That's a fairly widely held opinion.  But 
then "comp" is also used to mean although consequences Bruno says follow, 
consequences which are not logical inferences, just a reductio.  The two 
"comp's" are not the same.



That's exactly right. Comp is simply short for the computational hypothesis - 
the idea that a computer programme could be conscious, and that human 
consciousness is at some level emulable by a computer programme. (This includes 
the possibility that the brain is a quantum computer, since a QC can be 
emulated by a classical computer.)


Maybe we should distinguish "comp1" and "comp2" or "comp" and "Comp" (or "comp" 
and "Bruno's comp"...!)


Bruno's claim is that comp2 follows from comp1, hence if one accepts comp1 and 
the ancillary assumptions, and one can't find a logical flaw in the argument 
linking them, one can feel free to conflate the two. (This is what Bruno has 
been known to do...) However it would still be nice to know which one someone 
has in mind. Lots of people are happy with comp1 but still don't find comp2 
convincing, even though they can't spot a flaw in the logic.


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RE: Origin of mathematics

[colin hales]

Really interesting!

Good to find someone that concurs with a one-at-a-time universe. I think this 
will emerge as being right, in the end. 

Thanks.
Colin

-Original Message-
From: "meekerdb" 
Sent: ‎23/‎04/‎2015 5:36 AM
To: "EveryThing" 
Subject: Origin of mathematics

Is mathematics neither invented nor discovered, but evoked?

https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/smolin-on-mathematics/

Brent

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RE: America: Bankrupt & Living on Borrowed Time

[colin hales]

We can change things.

 Everything these predatory self-interested oligarchs have (and their 
soul-less, ethics-less zombie proxy humans ... corporations) only exists 
because we believe it exists. The zombie apocalypse is happening as we speak! 
And we allow it because we believe in zombies.

This 'bankruptcy' is fictional. It's a product of a system of 
predated-to-oblivion accounting that is in it's endgame.

 We can believe it away and believe its replacement/upgrade if we want. 

We are inside the problem. We are the problem.

I'm not sure I'll live to see it but change must happen or we're all just 
slaves forever measured by key performance indicators and the other dooms 
called  'shareholder value'. 

This whole mess is all merely psychology. The psychology is that of an utterly 
capricious narcissist. Very very unwell. And we let it happen. We reward the 
behaviour.


-Original Message-
From: "spudboy100 via Everything List" 
Sent: ‎9/‎04/‎2015 8:41 AM
To: "everything-list@googlegroups.com" 
Subject: Re: America: Bankrupt & Living on Borrowed Time

It's already been the truth, but now with Silicon Valley billionaires and hedge 
funders, it's become a lot worse. How do we survive?



-Original Message-
From: LizR 
To: everything-list 
Sent: Wed, Apr 8, 2015 5:30 pm
Subject: Re: America: Bankrupt & Living on Borrowed Time


Wow good cartoon - near the knuckle. Nice to see Mr Monopoly ... and the names 
on the seats aren't exactly necessary... I must save a copy of that!  


On 8 April 2015 at 19:52, Telmo Menezes  wrote: 

Thanks Brent! 


On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 2:20 AM, meekerdb  wrote: 

For Telmo. 

Brent 



 Forwarded Message  




Thomas Jefferson is credited with the following sage advice,  “The central bank 
is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles 
and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or 
notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to 
control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by 
deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will 
deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up 
homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.”  And so it seems sometimes 
the answer is right in front of us all along and we just fail to see it. 


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-07/america-bankrupt-and-borrowed-time 




America-wings…. 
 




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RE: Fwd: Global Warming Hoax Confirmed

[colin hales]

Yeah.. For about hmm  Dozens of microseconds  ... you had me... On the 2nd! 
 I experienced the qualia ... that frisson of misplaced credulousness that an 
old fart like me needs every now and then 😊
Cheers
Colin

-Original Message-
From: "Russell Standish" 
Sent: ‎2/‎04/‎2015 8:15 AM
To: "everything-list@googlegroups.com" 
Subject: Re: Fwd: Global Warming Hoax Confirmed

Thank goodness someone still pulls April fools jokes. Actually, this
is the first one I've seen this year, and it is now the 2nd of April
here in Sydney!

Cheers

On Wed, Apr 01, 2015 at 01:38:07PM -0700, meekerdb wrote:
> 
>  Forwarded Message 
> Remember all that stuff we told you about 97% of scientists agreeing
> that climate change was real? And all those sad polar bears hanging
> off of icebergs? And all the dire warnings about catastrophic
> sea-level rise?
> 
> We just learned that none of it is true. It was all a huge prank
> pulled off by the world’s scientists. Senator Inhofe was right.
> Watch this video and learn the unvarnished truth about the climate
> change hoax
> 
> 
> 
> https://nextgenclimate.org/hotseat/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ThinkProgress&utm_campaign=SPEM-AFD-video
> 
> -- 
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-- 


Prof Russell Standish  Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics  hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales  http://www.hpcoders.com.au

 Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret 
 (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html)


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RE: Is Consciousness Computable?

[Colin Hales]

Hi Folk,

A little more you may find interesting.



RE: The much-discussed arXiv paper

Maguire, Phil, Moser Philippe, Maguire, Rebecca and Griffith, Virgil 2014

'Is Consciousness Computable? Quantifying Integrated Information Using
Algorithmic Information Theory'.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0126v1)

Now there’s an article in New Scientist

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg9692.800-sentient-robots-not-possible-if-you-do-the-maths.html#.U3liRihGO5L

*‘Sentient robots? Not possible if you do the maths’*



The headline should read:



*‘Sentient robots? Not possible if you use computers’*



Breathtaking blindspot revealed yet again: The presupposition that real AGI
involves formal computing.

Here I am building a robot brain that does not use computing, and New
Scientist guy doesn’t even realise the possibility.

This presupposition is so completely trained-in it’s  its..







I have been watching this for >10 years now.

I expect COMP to circle the toilet for a little while yet and then the
penny will drop. I guess.. 1-2 years?



Don’t despair: Brilliant (AGI) robots will happen! They just won’t use
computing as their main cognitive architecture.

Why anyone should be upset about this change of fortune beats me.



Cheers

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Re: COMP refutation paper - finally out

[Colin Hales]

Hi Russel,

1) Strong CT/Deutch...will look it up...Sounds like one of the 
conflations in operation: confusing the natural world with some kind of 
computer running rules, rather than something natural merely behaving 
rule-ly to an observing scientist.


2) Re: angry popperians...the role of human creativity in the science 
process is not that of blind/mindless searching. I'm not sure how you 
construed this from the text. The so-called robot scientists (automated 
dataminers) do that kind of searching. That is the mindless searching I 
meant. Humans scientists built the searching robots...a very different 
process... alsoConstructing a hypothesis is a creative act, and it 
proceeds as much by 'gut' as by anything else. This is the sense in 
which the "obvious that human scientists do not operate this way" was 
meant. .Interesting that you should reach this position despite all my 
attempts not to convey anything like itboy this stuff is hard to 
write about!


I hope you can keep up the effort!

cheers
colin




Russell Standish wrote:

Hi Colin,

I'm having a read through your paper now, and have a few comments to
keep the juices of debate flowing on this list.

Firstly, I'd like to say well done - you have written a very clear
paper in what is a very murky subject.

I have two comments right now - but I haven't finished, so there could
well be more.

1) Your definition of COMP is more along the lines of Deutsch's
physical Turing principle, or Thesis P. Wikipedia seems to call it the
strong CT thesis. It is important to note that it is a stronger
assumption than Bruno's COMP assumption, and indeed Bruno has already
given a proof that physics cannot be computable - so you might be
proving the same thing via a different method.

Nevertheless, I haven't seen yet whether weakening your definition of COMP
invalidates your argument though

2) A few times through the text you make remarks along the lines of
"it might appear that laws of nature might still be accessible by an
extreme form of the randomized-search/machine-learning approach, even
though it is obvious that human scientists do not operate this way."

"Obvious"? It is far from obvious. What you say flies directly in the
face of Popper's "Conjectures and Refutations", and you would face a
horde of angry Popperians if you were to post this stuff on the FoR
list.


Anyway, I'll keep reading.

Cheers

  


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Re: COMP refutation paper - finally out

[Colin Hales]

Hi Evgenii,

I expect you are not alone in struggling with the Natural Computation 
(NC) vs Artificial Computation (AC) idea.  The difference is in the 
paper and should be non-existent of COMP is true. The paper then shows a 
place where it can't be true hence AC and NC are different .ie. the 
natural world is not computation of the Turing-machine kind( at least to 
the extent needed to construct a scientist, which includes the need to 
create a liar).
It's all quite convoluted, but nevertheless sufficient to help an 
engineer like me make a design choice... which I have done.


I hope over time these ideas will not grate on the mind quite so much.

cheers
colin



Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

Colin,

Thanks for the paper. I have just browsed it. Two small notes.

I like [Turing et al., 2008]. It seems that he has passed his test 
successfully.


I find term Natural Computation (NC) a bit confusing. I guess that I 
understand what you means but the term Computation sounds ambiguously, 
because then it is completely unclear what it means in such a context.


Evgenii

On 07.06.2011 09:42 Colin Hales said the following:

Hi,

Hales, C. G. 'On the Status of Computationalism as a Law of Nature',
 International Journal of Machine Consciousness vol. 3, no. 1, 2011.
1-35.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S1793843011000613


The paper has finally been published. Phew what an epic!

cheers

Colin





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Re: COMP refutation paper - finally out

[Colin Hales]

Hi Bruno.
I have sent it to you.

The key to the paper is that it should be regarded as an engineering 
document. I am embarked on building a real AGI using the real physical 
world of components in an act of science. Based on being inspired and 
guided by neuroscience, I have identified two basic choices as a route 
to AGI that works:


(i) use standard symbolic computing
   (of a  model of brain function derived by a human observer = me)
(ii) emulate what an brain actually does in inorganic form.

Based on the serious doubts that are identified in the COMP paper, given 
the choice I should prefer (ii), because (i) is loaded with unjustified, 
unproven presupposition and has >60 years of failure.


All other issues are secondary.

I start building this year.

cheers

Colin


Bruno Marchal wrote:

Hi Colin,

On 07 Jun 2011, at 09:42, Colin Hales wrote:


Hi,

Hales, C. G. 'On the Status of Computationalism as a Law of Nature', 
International Journal of Machine Consciousness vol. 3, no. 1, 2011. 
1-35.


http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S1793843011000613


The paper has finally been published. Phew what an epic!



Congratulation Colin.

Like others,  I don't succeed in getting it, neither at home nor at 
the university.


From the abstract I am afraid you might not have taken into account 
our (many) conversations. Most of what you say about the impossibility 
of building an artificial scientist is provably correct in the (weak) 
comp theory.  It is unfortunate that you derive this from 
comp+materialism, which is inconsistent. Actually, comp prevents 
"artificial intelligence". This does not prevent the existence, and 
even the apparition, of intelligent machines. But this might happen 
*despite* humans, instead of 'thanks to the humans'. This is related 
with the fact that we cannot know which machine we are ourselves. Yet, 
we can make copy at some level (in which case we don't know what we 
are really creating or recreating, and then, also, descendent of bugs 
in regular programs can evolve. Or we can get them serendipitously.  
It is also relate to the fact that we don't *want* intelligent 
machine, which is really a computer who will choose its user, if ... 
he want one. We prefer them to be slaves. It will take time before we 
recognize them (apparently).
Of course the 'naturalist comp' theory is inconsistent. Not sure you 
take that into account too.


Artificial intelligence will always be more mike fishing or exploring 
spaces, and we might *discover* strange creatures. Arithmetical truth 
is a universal zoo. Well, no, it is really a jungle. We don't know 
what is in there. We can only scratch a tiny bit of it.


Now, let us distinguish two things, which are very different:

1) intelligence-consciousness-free-will-emotion

and

2) cleverness-competence-ingenuity-gifted-learning-ability

"1)" is necessary for the developpment of "2)", but "2)" has a 
negative feedback on "1)".


I have already given on this list what I call the smallest theory of 
intelligence.


By definition a machine is intelligent if it is not stupid. And a 
machine can be stupid for two reason:

she believes that she is intelligent, or
she believes that she is stupid.

Of course, this is arithmetized immediately in a weakening of G, the 
theory C having as axioms the modal normal axioms and rules + Dp -> 
~BDp. So Dt (arithmetical consistency) can play the role of 
intelligence, and Bf (inconsistance) plays the role of stupidity. G* 
and G proves BDt -> Bf and G* proves BBf -> Bf (but not G!).


This illustrates that "1)" above might come from Löbianity, and "2)" 
above (the scientist) is governed by theoretical artificial 
intelligence (Case and Smith, Oherson, Stob, Weinstein). Here the 
results are not just NON-constructive, but are *necessarily* so. 
Cleverness is just something that we cannot program. But we can prove, 
non constructively, the existence of powerful learning machine. We 
just cannot recognize them, or build them. It is like with the 
algorithmically random strings, we cannot generate them by a short 
algorithm, but we can generate all of them by a very short algorithm.


So, concerning intelligence/consciousness (as opposed to cleverness), 
I think we have passed the "singularity". Nothing is more 
intelligent/conscious than a virgin universal machine. By programming 
it, we can only make his "soul" fell, and, in the worst case, we might 
get something as stupid as human, capable of feeling itself superior, 
for example.


Bruno





http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: COMP refutation paper - finally out

[Colin Hales]

Hi,
JoMC is relatively new. My own institution (Unimelb) doesn't 
subscribe the Journal is very specialized as well
The ISI search engine won't see it either. It takes time for the 
journals to earn enough cred to get visible and accessible... even the 
Journal of Consciousness Studies has eventually made it into ISI 
search... one day JoMC will, I hope.


Those interested enough to send a private enquiry to me can get an 
earlier preprint version...close enough to the original to be readable.


cheers
Colin
BTW I finally submitted my PhD thesis recently WOOHOO!



meekerdb wrote:

Even an affiliation doesn't seem to help.

Brent

On 6/7/2011 1:49 AM, Stephen Paul King wrote:

Hi Colin,

   Any chance that us non-university affiliated types can get a copy 
of your paper?


Onward!

Stephen

-Original Message----- From: Colin Hales
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2011 3:42 AM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: COMP refutation paper - finally out

Hi,

Hales, C. G. 'On the Status of Computationalism as a Law of Nature',
International Journal of Machine Consciousness vol. 3, no. 1, 2011. 
1-35.


http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S1793843011000613


The paper has finally been published. Phew what an epic!

cheers

Colin





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COMP refutation paper - finally out

[Colin Hales]

Hi,

Hales, C. G. 'On the Status of Computationalism as a Law of Nature', 
International Journal of Machine Consciousness vol. 3, no. 1, 2011. 1-35.


http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S1793843011000613


The paper has finally been published. Phew what an epic!

cheers

Colin

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Request: computation<=>thermodynamics paper(s)

[Colin Hales]

Hi all,
I was wondering if anyone out there knows of any papers that connect 
computational processes to thermodynamics in some organized fashion. The 
sort of thing I am looking for would have statements saying


cooling is (info/computational equivalent)
pressure is ..(info/computational equivalent)
temperature is 
volume is 
entropy is 

I have found a few but I think I am missing the good stuff.
here's one ...

Reiss, H. 'Thermodynamic-Like Transformations in Information Theory', 
Journal of Statistical Physics vol. 1, no. 1, 1969. 107-131.


cheers
colin

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Re: Neurobiologists Find that Weak Electrical Fields in the Brain Help Neurons Fire Together

[Colin Hales]

Hi Russel & Gang,

I just sent this around to an internal email group 
===
Hi,
It occurred to me that the latest empirical evidence surrounding brain 
endogenous fields (the subject of my PhD thesis)
may be of general interest to the group. The actual science (and 
supplementary material) is here:


*Anastassiou, C. A., Perin, R., Markram, H. and Koch, C. 'Ephaptic 
Coupling of Cortical Neurons'

Nature Neuroscience vol. 14, no. 2, 2011. 217-223.
*
The result has also been summarized at physorg here

"Neurobiologists find that weak electrical fields in the brain help 
neurons fire together"
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-neurobiologists-weak-electrical-fields-brain.html 



I'd like to encourage everyone to consider that the role of fields is 
likely to impact neural modelling in due course. The little capacitor in 
the Hodgkin Huxley model is going to get a lot of attention!


Meanwhile, the context of my PhD is one of supplying the mechanism. The 
empirical work reveals the phenomenon. The researchers involved have no 
mechanism. It is, formally, a mystery. In my PhD I have described the 
most plausible  mechanism - ion-channel fields - for the action 
potential component only. I am setting out at the moment to add the 
chemical synapse component and electrical synapse (gap-junction) 
components. Hopefully I'll get a chance to actually demonstrate how the 
fields involve themselves in the variability in firing synchrony (as a 
separate feedback mechanism).


If you want to be able to communicate the effect, the buzzword (which I 
don't like!) is 'ephaptic coupling'. It is also interesting to note that 
the scientist behind the 'Blue Brain' project (Markram) has teamed up 
with one of the worlds heavy hitters in the realm of  the neurobiology 
of consciousness (Koch).


cheers
colin hales
===

In my PhD I it took >150,000 hours of supercomputing to show that the EM 
fields have a whole degree of freedom not in existing neural modelling. 
The exact same action potential firing can result in an infinity of 
different local field potentials and these are not merely the result of 
chemical synapses. Action potentials and electrical synapses contribute 
their component. I have provided the ultimate mechanism for the fields 
(electric AND magnetic).


The empirical work mentioned above is the 'icing on the cake'. It shows 
empirically that the fields themselves self-impact the neural processes 
and alter the firing dynamics in radical ways at microscopic levels 
within the tissue. The days of the fields as epiphenomena are over. The 
view my work supports is one where the EM fields and the action 
potentials act in a sort of longitudinal/transverse quadrature 
resonance, two axes mutually altering each other. The mutual interaction 
does not require large fields ...1v/m will do at the membrane level. 
These fields have a radical effect on action potential _phase_ and 
thereby impact whole-tissue field coherence from the single neuron level 
up. If you plot the field due to a single neuron action potential it 
beams and dwells and rotates like an active phased array antenna. Baths 
itself and its neighbours within 1mm with a highly controlled, directed 
beam effect.


"Ephaptic coupling" is the effect...for some reason biosciences think 
their EM is different! :-) We all know it as simple EM coupling.  


Pretty cool huh? Change is afoot.

cheers
colin



Russell Standish wrote:

Neurobiologists Find that Weak Electrical Fields in the Brain Help
Neurons Fire Together

http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13401

Reminds me of what Colin says he is doing...

Cheers

  


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Re: Are our brains in that VAT? Yep.

[Colin Hales]

Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 12:05 PM, Colin Hales
 wrote:

  

Can the behaviour of the neurons including the electric fields be
simulated? For example, is it possible to model what will happen in
the brain (and what output will ultimately go to the muscles via
peripheral nerves) if a particular sequence of photons hits the
retina? If that is a theoretical impossibility then where exactly is
the non-computable physics, and what evidence do you have that it is
non-computable?
  


  

Lots of aspects to your questions and I'll try and answer Bruno at the
same time.

1) I am in the process of upgrading neural modelling to include the fields
in the traditional sense of simulation of the fields. The way to think of it
is that the little capacitor in the Hodgkin-Huxley equilvalent circuit is
about to get a whole new role.



Great! That is another step towards simulating brains.

  

2) Having done that, one can do simulations of single unit,  multiple unit,
populations etc etc...You may be able to extract something verifiable in the
wet-lab.

3) However, I would hold that no matter how comprehensive the models, no
matter how many neurons ... even the whole brain and the peripheral
nerves...they will NOT behave like the real thing in the sense that such a
brain model cannot ever 'be' a mind. The reason is that we 'BE' the fields.
We do not 'BE' a description of the fields. The information delivered by
'BE'ing the field acts in addition to that described by the
3rd-person-validated system of classical partial differential equations that
are Maxwell's equations.



I understand that this is your position but I would like you to
consider a poor, dumb engineer who neither knows nor cares about
philosophy of mind. All he cares about is making an accurate model
which will predict the pattern of motor neuron firings for a human
brain given a certain initial state. Doing this is equivalent to
constructing a human level AI, since the simulation could be given
information and would respond just as a human would given the same
information. Now, I take it that you don't believe that such
predictions can be made using a mathematical model. Is that right?
  
I am also a poor dumb engineer (that has examined far too much 
philosophy of mind. Enough to be quite irritated by it :-). I started as 
an engineer with the 'black box' idea and eventually found enough 
evidence in human behaviour (specifically scientific behaviour) to doubt 
we can make an AGI that can do science like us when the black box is 
full of computer running software. I use the scientist as my target 
because its behaviour is testable. I conclude that I am more likely to 
succeed if the 'black box' includes more than mere software models of a 
brain in it.


I think perhaps the key to this can be seen in your requirement...

" Doing this is equivalent to constructing a human level AI, since the simulation 
could be given information and would respond just as a human would given the same 
information."

I would say this is not a circumstance that exemplified human level intellect. Consider a human encounter with something totally unknown but human and AI. Who is there to provide 'information'? If the machine is like a human it shouldn't need someone there to spoon feed it answers. We let the AGI loose to encounter something neither human nor AGI has encountered before. That is a real AGI. The AGI can't "be given" the answers. You may be able to provide a software model of how to handle novelty. This requires a designers to say, in software, "everything you don't know is to be known like this ". This, however, is not AGI (human). It is merely AI. It may suffice for a planetary rover with a roughly known domain of unknowns of a certain kind. But when it encounters a cylon that rips it widgets off it won't be able to characterize it like a human does. Such behaviour is not an instance of a human encounter with the unknown.

Humans literally encounter the unknown in our qualia - an intracranial phenomenon. Qualia are the observation. We don't encounter the unknown in the single or collective behaviour of our peripheral nerve activity. Instead we get a unified assembly of perceptual fields erected intra-cranially from the peripheral feeds, within which the actual distal world is faithfully represented well enough to do science. 


These perceptual fields are not always perfect. The perceptual fields can be 
fooled. You can perhaps say that a software-black-box-scientist could guess 
(Bayesian stabs in the dark). But those stabs in the dark are guesses at (a) 
how the peripheral siganlling measurement activity will behave, or perhaps (b) 
a guess at the contents of a human-model-derived software representation of the 
ext

Re: Are our brains in that VAT? Yep.

[Colin Hales]

Stathis (Down below...)

Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 9:35 AM, Colin Hales
 wrote:

  

This means we are hooked into the external world in ways that are not
present in the peripheral nerves. Looking at the (nerves pulses) signals, it
is impossible to tell if they are vision, smell, touch or anything else.
Those that think that a computer can add this extra bit of connectivity to
the external world, believe in comp/COMP. When you replace the brain with a
model of a brain using a computer, that "extra" bit, the connection with the
outside world we get from our qualia,...the qualia created by the brain
matter itself, is replaced by the qualia you get by 'being' the computer.

If you believe comp/COMP, then you believe that the computer's model -or -
the computer hardware itself -  somehow replaces the function of the qualia,
by analysing the sensory signalling, which is fundamentally degenerately
related to the external world. Only a human with qualia can, from sensory
signals, provide any sort of model for our 'computer-in-a-vat' that might
stand-in for an external world. Having done that, the world being explored
by our computer-in-a-vat is the world of the human model generated from the
sensory signals, not the world itself. When an encounter with the unknown
happens, then the unknown will be chacterized by a human model's response to
the unknown, not the (unknown) actual world. The extent to which these
things are different is the key.

Neuroscience is beginning to progress from NCC (Neural correlates of
consciousness) to EMCC (electromagnetic correlates of consciousness).
Researchers are slowly discovering that certain aspects of cognition and
behaviour correlate better with the LFP (local field potential/extracellular
field) than mere action potentials.

If the EM fields are the difference, then in replacing the fields of the
brain with the fields of the computer running a model...and your
qualia/cognition go with it.

So when you think of the 'input/output' relations for a computer, the
sensory signalling is only part of it. There is another complete set of
'input' relations, qualia, that together with the sensory signals, form our
real connection to the outside world. So the old black-box replacement idea
is right - but only if the black box has a whole other set of 'input'
signals, from the qualia. The only way you can computationally replace these
signals is to already know everything about the external world already. Your
alternative? Keep the qualia in your 'black box'. To me that means
generating the fields as well.

Don't get me wrong. Lots of really nifty AI can result from the
'computer-in-a-vat'. However, that's not what I am aiming at. I want AGI. G
for General.



Can the behaviour of the neurons including the electric fields be
simulated? For example, is it possible to model what will happen in
the brain (and what output will ultimately go to the muscles via
peripheral nerves) if a particular sequence of photons hits the
retina? If that is a theoretical impossibility then where exactly is
the non-computable physics, and what evidence do you have that it is
non-computable?

  
Lots of aspects to your questions and I'll try and answer Bruno at 
the same time.


1) I am in the process of upgrading neural modelling to include the 
fields in the traditional sense of simulation of the fields. The way to 
think of it is that the little capacitor in the Hodgkin-Huxley 
equilvalent circuit is about to get a whole new role.


2) Having done that, one can do simulations of single unit,  multiple 
unit, populations etc etc...You may be able to extract something 
verifiable in the wet-lab.


3) However, I would hold that no matter how comprehensive the models, no 
matter how many neurons ... even the whole brain and the peripheral 
nerves...they will NOT behave like the real thing in the sense that such 
a brain model cannot ever 'be' a mind. The reason is that we 'BE' the 
fields. We do not 'BE' a description of the fields. The information 
delivered by 'BE'ing the field acts in addition to that described by the 
3rd-person-validated system of classical partial differential equations 
that are Maxwell's equations.


4) A given set of photons,  can result from an infinity of different 
configurations of the distal world. A single red photon can come across 
the room from your xmas decorations or across the galaxy from a 
supernova. It is a fundamentally degenerate relationship. Yet the brain 
inherits enough information to converge on a visual scene that captures 
the difference. HOW? I think I know, but that explanation is too long 
and doesn't matter. The fact is that the EM fields deliver _extra_ 
information inherited from their relationship with space itself. It has 
to. There's no place else or it to c

Are our brains in that VAT? Yep.

[Colin Hales]

Hi all,
This is a response to all the vigor my comp/COMP decision has caused. 
First: Go Evgenii! That weirdest of weird substances, money, nothing 
more than a calibrated belief system in humans, gets us all in the end! 
You may be the only person in this list hooked into reality. :-)

 back to issues.
We've all been through the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. The recent 
questions raised in the discussion suggest to me that it may not be 
apparent to all that this experiment has actually been done. It's you. 
Me. Everyone. Already.


Our brains are suspended in a bath of cerebral spinal fluid. One of the 
layers between the brain meninges. If you mentally expanded then to 
vat-sizes and took the outer layers off...you have a brain in a vat.


We _are_ brains in a vat.

This means we are hooked into the external world in ways that are not 
present in the peripheral nerves. Looking at the (nerves pulses) 
signals, it is impossible to tell if they are vision, smell, touch or 
anything else. Those that think that a computer can add this extra bit 
of connectivity to the external world, believe in comp/COMP. When you 
replace the brain with a model of a brain using a computer, that "extra" 
bit, the connection with the outside world we get from our qualia,...the 
qualia created by the brain matter itself, is replaced by the qualia you 
get by 'being' the computer.


If you believe comp/COMP, then you believe that the computer's model -or 
- the computer hardware itself -  somehow replaces the function of the 
qualia, by analysing the sensory signalling, which is fundamentally 
degenerately related to the external world. Only a human with qualia 
can, from sensory signals, provide any sort of model for our 
'computer-in-a-vat' that might stand-in for an external world. Having 
done that, the world being explored by our computer-in-a-vat is the 
world of the human model generated from the sensory signals, not the 
world itself. When an encounter with the unknown happens, then the 
unknown will be chacterized by a human model's response to the unknown, 
not the (unknown) actual world. The extent to which these things are 
different is the key.


Neuroscience is beginning to progress from NCC (Neural correlates of 
consciousness) to EMCC (electromagnetic correlates of consciousness). 
Researchers are slowly discovering that certain aspects of cognition and 
behaviour correlate better with the LFP (local field 
potential/extracellular field) than mere action potentials.


If the EM fields are the difference, then in replacing the fields of the 
brain with the fields of the computer running a model...and your 
qualia/cognition go with it.


So when you think of the 'input/output' relations for a computer, the 
sensory signalling is only part of it. There is another complete set of 
'input' relations, qualia, that together with the sensory signals, form 
our real connection to the outside world. So the old black-box 
replacement idea is right - but only if the black box has a whole other 
set of 'input' signals, from the qualia. The only way you can 
computationally replace these signals is to already know everything 
about the external world already. Your alternative? Keep the qualia in 
your 'black box'. To me that means generating the fields as well.


Don't get me wrong. Lots of really nifty AI can result from the 
'computer-in-a-vat'. However, that's not what I am aiming at. I want 
AGI. G for General.


I am an engineer. Well not quite. I think I am some kind of 
neuroscientist now. Just handing my PhD in...I will build an AGI based 
on choices. My research suggests that replacing the fields, emulating 
the brain, is the way to go. That's why my PhD is all about how neurons 
originate the endogenous field system measured by scalp EEG/MEG. Having 
nutted it out, time to make hardware to do it.


Gotta go.

Colin Hales

Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

on 02.02.2011 11:00 Stathis Papaioannou said the following:

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 6:45 PM, Brent Meeker
wrote:


I think it very likely that the brain can be so modeled.  But the
meaning that simulated brain, as expressed in it's output decisions
relative to inputs is dependent on the rest of the world, or at
least of it with which the brain will interact - including the past
evoutionary history which led up to the brain.  Its computations
have no canonical interpretation in themselves.


You can connect the simulated brain to transducers which convert
environmental inputs into electrical signals. But then, what would
happen if the same electrical signals were input from data on disk
rather than the environment? Would the brain's experience be
different? If so, how would it know where the data was coming from?


I believe that at this point the Chalmers' paper

David Chalmers, The Matrix as Metaphysics
http://consc.net/papers/matrix.pd

Re: Maudlin & How many times does COMP have to be false before its false?

[Colin Hales]

Hi David,

All comments appreciated.

In
"Rather, he is saying that IF computational science is assumed (e.g. by 
proponents of CTM) to be the correct mind-body theory, THEN the 
appearance of the body (and consequently the rest of matter/energy) must 
emerge as part of the same theory"


It's possible that we have fallen foul of  our implicit projections onto 
the words 'correct mind-body theory'. If one was in possession of such a 
thing, what exactly has one got? Options:


(1) appearing things (scientific rule-abidedness of appearances, to an 
observer/scientist)

(2) actual things prior to being observed.
(3) The T-computation of rules of appearances (1)
(4) The rule-abidedness of actual things (2) _regarded as_ 'computation'
(5) The T-computation of (4) rules
where
(a) T-computation means abstract symbol manipulation of the kind in a 
standard computer.
(b) observation is observational qualia in the scientist, not mere 
measurement.

NOTE:
Standard empirical laws of nature are rules in (1).
The COMP I and others refute is hypothesis that a (3) is 
indistinguishable from a (1).
The existence and behaviour of scientists and their consciousness proves 
(1) rules are not the same as (4) rules


Is a 'correct mind-body theory' (1) or (4) rules running/not running as 
per (3) or (5) or ..what? I can't tell.


Pick any two and then confuse them with each other, and you can see how 
many ways there are to be talking at cross purposes. I choose not to 
conflate any of these things. The words 'assuming comp' sometimes appear 
to be (1)/(3) confusion and other times seems to be (1)/(5) confusion 
and other times seems to be T-computation confused with (4) natural 
rule-abidedness as 'computation'. Any of these conflations lead to an 
impoverished view based on undiscussed presupposition. If comp is true 
or false, which of these is being addressed? Not very clear to me. The 
words 'assuming comp' sound, to me, like 'implicitly confusing THIS with 
THAT then it follows that ...etc etc ..'.


Then, when I try to sort out the confusion, I get told I am confused 
because I cannot force myself to conflate 2 justifiably different 
things? Yikes.


I am here to finally nut out a design decision before I start to build. 
That design decision is ultimately what this discussion is about: 
balancing doubts and then choosing. So here it isBased on typical 
scientific principles, I'll build my AGI based on the best available 
well founded analysis (multiple well placed arrows of doubt, zero cases 
supporting it in any other way other than faith) that indicate my design 
preference should be not to use (3) or (5) to create an AGI. Emulate, 
not simulate. BE the thing, don't merely pretend to be the thing to an 
observer. I have that level of certainty at least. I guess a word of 
thanks is in order.


Thanks! :-)

Colin


David Nyman wrote:

On 1 February 2011 22:53, Colin Hales  wrote:

Colin

Do forgive me for butting in on an exchange I sometimes only dimly
follow, but I think I may possibly see a misunderstanding on your part
about what Bruno actually claims about "comp" (forgive me, both of
you, if I'm wrong).  As I've understood Bruno over the years, he has
never asserted that comp(utational science) necessarily is the
fundamental science of body and mind.  Rather, he is saying that IF
computational science is assumed (e.g. by proponents of CTM) to be the
correct mind-body theory, THEN the appearance of the body (and
consequently the rest of matter/energy) must emerge as part of the
same theory.  In other words, EITHER the correctness of comp as a
mind-body theory directly implies the "emptiness" of any fundamental
theory of matter; OR alternatively (i.e. accepting a "fundamental"
theory of matter) comp can't be the correct mind-body theory.

The establishment of this disjunction depends on a number of logical
steps, culminating in a class of "reductio" thought experiments
including Maudlin's Olympia/Klara and Bruno's MGA, the burden of which
is to reveal contradictions inherent in any such conjunction of
computationalism and materialism.  As it happens, Maudlin uses this
result to reject CTM, and Bruno follows the opposite tack of rejecting
materialism.  There is some controversy over these results from
supporters of CTM who continue to find ways to dispute them with
auxiliary assumptions.  Personally, these auxiliaries strike me as
being rather in the nature of epicycles, but then I'm hardly an
authority.

Anyway, forgive me if this was already obvious, but I suppose the
conclusion might be that, if you reject fundamental computational
science as your basic theory of "matter", Bruno would expect you to
take the same tack with respect to mind.  I'm sure both he and you
will put me right on this.

David
  

Bruno Marchal wrote:
   

Re: Maudlin & How many times does COMP have to be false before its false?

[Colin Hales]

Hi Bruno,

I have been pondering this issue a bit and I am intrigued about how you 
regard the problem space we inhabit. When you say things like ...


"Are you aware that If comp is true, that is if I am a machine ..."

I cannot fathom how you ever get to this point. This is a presupposition 
that arises somehow in the lexicon you have established within your 
overall framework of thinking. Let me have a stab at how my view and 
yours correlate.


In my view

A) There is a natural world.
   We, Turing machines dogs, computers are all being 'computed' by it.
   This is a set of unknown naturally occurring symbols
   The natural 'symbols' interact naturally.
   This is 'natural computation'. NOT like desktop computing.
   Universe U ensues.
   Scientist S is being computed within U
   Scientist S can observe U from within.
   U makes use of fundamental properties of the symbols to enable
  observation, from within. Call this principle P-O

B) This is a symbolic description of U created by S from within U
   S can concoct a description of the natural symbols in (A)
   It need not be unique, many (B) correspond to one (A)
   S can never know if it's completely done.
   S can never know the real nature of the sybols in (A)
   Descriptions (B), with P-O, explains observation and the observer S

C) There is a _second_ description
   It is also concocted by S
   These are the normal empirical laws we all know so well
   It describes how the U appears to S from inside
   It need not be unique, many (C) correspond to one (A)
   No (C) ever explains observation.

In this framework
(i) a computer running description/rules (B) is not the natural world.
(ii)  a computer running description/rules (C) is not the natural world.
(iii) a computer running descriptions (B) or (C) is 'artificially
  computing'
(iv)  (C) is physics that present day scientists construct
(v)   (B) is physics of a natural world prior to an observer.
(vi)  (A) is 'NATURALLY computing' in the sense that it is literally
  'computing' scientist S.
=
OK.
These options are the logically justifiable position we can take when we 
are, as we are, inside U trying to work U out from within, using an 
observation faculty provided by U as part of (A). Empirical evidence 
justifying (C) is normal overvation (contents of one or more 
observer-agreed conscious experisnces). Empirical evidence justifying 
(B) is implicit in the existence of an observer concocting a set (C). 
You can't be confused about an bservation unless there is an observer to 
be confused.

=
All that said.now 

You mention "digital physics". You say "Are you aware that If COMP is 
true, that is if I am a machine ..."


In terms of my frameworkyou are speaking of ...what?

(1) A 'Turing machine (digital computer)' inside U running (B)
descriptions?
(2) The natural computation itself, of kind (A)?

I suspect

(3) Some kind of magical 'computer' in idea-space computing us as (A)?
   i.e. A 'virtual machine' that 'acts as if' it generates an arbitrary
   number of different U?

The COMP I talk about having refuted is in (i) or (ii) above.
I suspect this is not the COMP you are speaking of...

As far as I can tell we're not even on the same page. Maybe others here 
are in a similar position and don't know it.


I hope you can help.

cheers
colin hales
NOTE: When I say I want to build an artificial general intelligence, I 
say I can build, within (A), using chunks of (A), an inorganic observer 
of kind S,  say S', that will also be able to observe and concoct (B) 
and (C). S' will NOT be 'artificially computing' rules (B) or (C)! There 
will be some symbolic manipulation in the hardware, but this is not S', 
it merely drives some of the S' hardware, like the rules that drive 
synaptic plasticity. Background housekeeping. In that event, in my 
framework, the natural world (A) will be 'computing' S' too. The 
properties of (A) called P-O above, that make S observe also operate 
within S'. The explanation of HOW observation happens is in P-O as it is 
configured in (B).


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Re: Maudlin & How many times does COMP have to be false before its false?

[Colin Hales]

Interleaved ...

Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 29 Jan 2011, at 06:27, ColinHales wrote:



Now say "humans are conscious? Prove it."
To which I say "COMP is true? Prove it"
Been around this loop many times. :-)




COMP is a solution of x -> ~Bx, like consciousness, and consistency.

If COMP is true, it is no provable.
If I am conscious, then I cannot communicate it in any public way 
(just intimate way)
If a machine is consistent, then the machine cannot prove its 
consistency.


Those three statement are provable, communicable, etc.

Actually all proposition in G* minus G are of the type true but not 
provable. Same for the intensional variants Z* minus Z, etc.


I guess we agree on this.

Colin, you didn't answer my question. Are you aware that If comp is 
true, that is if I am a machine, then the universe (or whatever 
exists) is NOT a machine. So comp entails the falsity of digital 
physics, and given that digital physics implies comp, it shows that 
digital physics is inconsistent no matter what (with or without comp). 
You did confuse in some recent posts comp and digital physics.


Bruno
'digital physics' is meaningless to me, so it doesn't imply COMP or 
anything else.


A) There is a natural world.
B) There is a description of that natural world.
  It need not be unique, many (B) correspond to one (A)
  From within (A)/part of (A), a scientist S can compile a (B),
  S can never know if it's completely done.
C) There is a description of how the natural world as it appears to an 
observer inside it.

  It need not be unique, many (C) correspond to one (A)
  From within (A)/part of (A), a scientist can compile a (B), but 
no (C) ever explains observation.


a computer running description/rules (B) is not the natural world.
a computer running description/rules (C) is not the natural world.
(C) is physics that present day scientists construct
(B) is physics of a natural world prior to an observer.
(A) is 'NATURALLY computing' in the sense that it is literally 
'computing' scientist S.


Note: A 'Turing Machine' is something inside (A), made of (A) like 
scientist S. Tape, reader, writer etc. It can manipulate sybolic 
representations of rules (B) or rules (C). (A) is 'NATURALLY computing'  
the Turing Machine, just like it's  'NATURALLY computing'  scientist S.

i.e. The 'computing' on the Turing machine is not  'NATURAL computing'

Please do not use rules of type (C) that apparently invoke multiverses. 
They are an artefact of implicit beliefs that confuse (A) and (C).


If you could explain, in these terms, what 'digital physics' is, then 
maybe we can get ourselves better calibrated.


cheers
Colin
PS I am well aware of consistency and completeness. Each of these can be 
discussed separately under (A), (B), (C).


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Re: Maudlin & How many times does COMP have to be false before its false?

[Colin Hales]

Interleaved...

John Mikes wrote:

Hi, Colin,
 
I enjoyed your diatribe. (From time to time I accept some of your 
ideas and even include them into my ways of thinking - which may be a 
praise or a threat).
 
Question: Could you briefly identify your usage of "science" - even 
"scientist"?


The following is the /measured, average/ generic behaviour which 
captures the basic common factors of scientific behaviour across all 
physical science disciplines:



/t_n /



The natural world in /< insert context>/ behaves as follows: /behaviour>/




1.1

/t_0 /



The natural world in /< the context of a human being scientific about 
the natural world >/ behaves as follows: /< to create and manage the 
members of a set T of statements of type t_n , each of which is a 
statement predictive of a natural regularity in a specific context in 
the natural world external to and independent of the human arrived at 
through the process of critical argument and that in principle can be 
refuted through the process of experiencing evidence of the regularity>/




1.2

T =



{/t_0 /, /t_1 /, /t_2 /, ... ,/ t_n /, ... /t_N-1 /, /t_N /}



1.3

**The 'natural world' in this particular instance, is 'the scientist'. 
*This is a measurement, not a guess. You empirically sample human 
scientists and average across all sciences. /t_0 /is is what you get.*



Behaviour according to /t_0 / is fundamentally prevented from ever 
explaining and observer because it presupposes an observer. (that is  
'experiencing evidence')


So, /t_0 / is what we actually do. What we _should do_ to explain an 
observer is a whole other area. It is the difference between the two 
activities that I spoke of in the original 'diatribe' . When does 
observation and criticism become diatribe? :-)


cheers
colin


(sometimes I consider an 'average' (=multitude of) scientist 
succumbing to *_conventional _*ideas called 'scientific' and working 
within that conventional world-view we get in schools).

And thanks for mentioning religion.
 
Best regards
 
John M


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Re: Bruno-Colin-dicussion Jan-2011

[Colin Hales]

Hi John,
Sorry to hear about your 2010. I hope that 2011 allows your flavour of 
feist to resume here on 'everything'.


I am at the very end of my PhD writeup and have been more flaky than 
usual here. I was amused to see that I appeared to be advocating any 
sort of XYXism or to be an 'XYZist'.  It has always been a puzzle to me 
how a declaration of the presence of XYZism somehow acts as any sort of 
explanation of anything. To me, the explanation comes first. After that 
you can sit around and debate whether the solution is a member of the 
set of all XYZism solutions.


Interestingly, when I attempt to calibrate my developments as examples 
of XYZism, I continually find myself somewhere in between. It's like 
there's a multi-dimensional space of XYZisms, and my approach is a 
single point in that space, and on no particular axis of it.


At this stage, my actual physical working proposition is based purely on 
the properties of electromagnetism, and my cosmology results from 
finding out what perspective exists from which electromagnetism delivers 
consciousness. So maybe I am an 'electromagnetist'?  :-)


This year I get to start building stuff. Exciting!

cheers
col


John Mikes wrote:

(Including Stephens initiation of course).
After some time spent enjoying 2 heart attacks in 2010 I returned to
the computer and found similar discussions to the earlier ones.
Maybe the words changed, references, too, conclusions are more
sophisticated (?). SOME new members, as well
(Please, give me credit for all those poisons the medics stuffed me
withp impeding my brain and clarity of mind, if
I ever had any such thing.
What I see here is a Colin-position pointing to 'theoretical
justification of the validity of math-statements' and Bruno's position
based
on Bruno's position (comp included, valid, or not). Hard to argue
because all the sophistication is based on the present status of our
limited ignorance and unlimited explanatory breadth of Colin's
mini-solipsism (i.e. the part of the world we so far got a glimpse
of).
Our sciences dwell within and reach out in their conclusions to those
unknowables we 'imagine' (calculate?) from that partial view of the so
far experienced (and explained by the limited ways). Such is our
'scientific' view and I think none of us can be exempt to that.
We think what we think we know. We conclude within.

By such limited tools humanity established an incredible technology
and descriptions galore to explain it to ignorants within the
ignorance. Physics, engineering, bio, psych, etc. etc. And a
mathematics - so fundamental in Bruno's words(?) about numbers.
What we see is a complex interlacing of not always discernible items
allowing more to be involved.
Upon such views humanity could not have established its 'scientific'
(technological) results, but being anchored into it may interfere
with further understanding of the unknown. Of course we cannot think
beyond our mind-contents/function limited as it may be.
(My fundamentals among others: Colin and Robert Rosen).

What the WORLD is, if it exists (what does that mean?) what we call a
"universe" or "existence" is hazy. No outside view.

With best wishes to 2011 and beyond

John Mikes

  


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Re: Observers and Church/Turing

[Colin Hales]

Hi David,

I think feisty/curmudgeon is more apt than fierce... but yeah ... :-)

RE: "In other words, what is the relation, in your theory,
between the first-person and specific third-person phenomena?"

Right to it eh? Call the two perspective 1-P and 3P

OK. First, there may be a bit of a misdirection in the words 
"first-person and specific third-person phenomena?". Phenomena are 100% 
encountered by a scientist's 1-P experience. It's 100% of our access to 
anything. It's 'scientific observation'. There's no such thing as "3rd 
person phenomena". 3rd person is a description of the 'contents of 
consciousness as scientific observation'...These descriptions have no 
more reality than that of an abstract set of rules 
prescribing/proscribing regularity between agreed 1st-person percepts. 
Their predictive success entails no claim to any capture of ontology or 
necessity for causal relations.


The 1-P/3-P divide is, in my system, a duality of equivalent 
descriptions pivoting on mutual consistency in the production of an 
observer that acquires the 'what it is like, 1-P experience' as a result 
of the fundamental properties of being within the system thus described. 
This is not a duality of substance. It is a duality of knowledge 
resulting from being in and made of a system's componentry and 
describing it from within.


That's all you have to do.

The usual mistake that's made at this point is to fail to discriminate 
between the 'why/how' of 1-P and the 'what'. It's extemely easy to 
isolate the 'what': ELECTROMAGNETISM (EM). This is the beautiful 3-P 
description of a brain. The list of possible 'what' is delivering 1-P is 
of length 1. 'Being' electromagnetism results in 1-P.


The real WHY/HOW is in asking 'why is it that EM delivers it?'

Well there you go. You know that the description yuo have of EM and the 
description that says WHY EM does 1-P (when configured like a brain) are 
not the same descriptions. In other words you have to start describing 
the universe in a manner prior to the observer.


How do you empirically justify this new set of descriptions?

Whatever this new descriptive realm is, it should predict an observer 
that sees the world as we do AND that appears to be a brain when you 
look at it 3-P.


Neither description set need be unique.

I hope that's enough!

cheers
colin







David Nyman wrote:

Gawd, I've missed you Colin, you fierce old thing!  Is it wet where
you are or is the inundation confined to poor old Brisbane?

I suppose you know that Bruno and you agree (at least in my estimation
of your lines of argument) that observation is the key phenomenon to
be explained at the outset, instead - as you rightly say - of just
being taken for granted.  If this cardinal error is committed at the
starting gate, the rest of the argument inevitably runs in a circle.
Of course you and Bruno start from different premisses vis-a-vis the
primitives, but on the positive side either theory is (I presume) open
to empirical falsification.

One thing I haven't been able to fathom so far about your own ideas is
where you stand on what Bruno calls first-person indeterminacy, which
has come up again in a recent thread.  You know, the transporter
thought experiment, or just the question in general of why I find
myself to be in this particular observer position (as raised in the
target paper).  In other words, what is the relation, in your theory,
between the first-person and specific third-person phenomena?  In
Bruno's computational approach, the relation seems to emerge via a
kind of filtering process or sieve of consciousness considered as a
whole through the infinity of possible computations.  In this way the
computational "everything" is conceived as converging on consistent
first-person narratives as a consequence of various kinds of "measure"
- a very rough analogy would be the emergence of all possible books in
Borges' "Library of Babel".   What would be the analogous ideas in
your own approach?

David

On 12 January 2011 22:50, Colin Hales  wrote:
  

I confess to the usual level of exasperation. Yet again the great culturally
maintained mental block subverts real progress. And, yet again, the
participant doesn;t even know they are doing it.  Garrett says 

"The key is that observers are just a particular type of information, as is
everything else. That is, we assume that the Physical Church Turing Thesis
(PCTT) ..blah blah blah"

WRONG WRONG WRONG.

The author has somehow remained completely uninformed by the real message in
the consciousness material cited in the article.

Observers are NOT just a particular type of information

The word information _was defined by an observer_, a human, USING
observation. Like every other word it's just a

Re: Observers and Church/Turing

[Colin Hales]

I confess to the usual level of exasperation. Yet again the great 
culturally maintained mental block subverts real progress. And, yet 
again, the participant doesn;t even know they are doing it.  Garrett 
says 


/"The key is that observers are just a particular type of information, 
as is everything else. That is, we assume that the Physical Church 
Turing Thesis (PCTT) ..blah blah blah"

/
WRONG WRONG WRONG.

The author has somehow remained completely uninformed by the real 
message in the consciousness material cited in the article.


*Observers are NOT just a particular type of information*

The word information _was defined by an observer_, a human, USING 
observation. Like every other word it's just a metaphoric description of 
as thing, with meaning to a human.  No matter what logical steps one 
proceeds to enact from this juncture, you are not describing anything 
that can be used to build or explain an observer. You are merely 
describing what an observer will see.


What does it take to get something so simple across to physics?

I'll have yet another go at it.

Consider a SET_X =  {BALL1, BALL2, BALL3, BALL4}
This is a traditional 3-rd person (3P) view of the set created by a 
scientific act of OBSERVATION of the set of balls.
BALL SET SCIENCE then proceeds to construct very clever mathematical 
descriptions of set member behaviour.


BUT

If you are the observer = BALL1, INSIDE SET X, the very act of 
observation results from the 1ST PERSON (1-P) relationship between [you, 
observer = BALL 1 ] and [the rest of the set, from within SET_X].  This 
description is not the same as the above description of SET_X Can't 
anyone see that ?? The ability to observe anything arises from that 
circumstance, not from the 3P-circumstance constructed by having observed.


Science has not even begun to characterise SET_X   in the 1P way.
=

Every single attempt so far in science has the following generic form.

I am human scientist FRED. How we humans do observation is a real 
mystery. I like mysteries. And I am really good at maths. I will do the 
very clever maths of observation. Now where do I begin...ASSUMING 
OBSERVATION ... blah blah blah.


Then off we go into the weeds, YET AGAIN.

FRED just doesn't get the difference between 1-P and 3-P. It's a 
systemic blindness.


I'll just crawl off and fume for a while. I'll be OK soon enough! :-)

Colin Hales
produced, you haven't explained observation and you don't really 
understand it>



ronaldheld wrote:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1101/1101.2198v1.pdf
   Any comments?
 Ronald

  


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Re: A paper by Bas C. van Fraassen

[Colin Hales]

Brent Meeker wrote:

On 10/23/2010 2:37 PM, Colin Hales wrote:
I am pretty sure that there is a profound misinterpretation and/or 
unrecognized presupposition deeply embedded in the kinds of 
discussion of which Van F and your reply and Bruno's  fits.  It's so 
embedded that  there appears to be no way that respondents can type 
words from a perspective in which the offered view may be wrong or a 
sidebar in a bigger but unrecognised picture. It's very hard to write 
anything to combat view X when the only words which ever get written 
are those presuming X, and X is assuming a position of explaining 
everything, yet doesn't.


In the long run I predict that:

1) The 'many worlds' do not exist and are a product of 
presuppositions about scientific description not yet understood by 
the proponents of MWI.
2) QM will be recognized as merely an appearance of the world, not 
the world as it is.
3) The universe that exists now is.the only universe that exists at 
the moment. Despite this, the "many worlds" are explorable, 
physically by 'virtual matter' behaving as if they existed (by an 
appropriate entity  made of the stuff of our single universe)
4) The MWI has arisen as a result of a human need to make certain 
mathematics right, not the need to explain the natural world. This, 
in the longer term will be recognised as a form of religiosity which 
will be seen to imbue the physicists of this era, who are preselected 
by the education system for prowess in manupulating symbols. 


You are presuming a lot about physicists.  The idea that QM, and more 
generally mathematics, is just description and a representation of 
one's knowledge, not reality, is very common among physicists. 
I didn't think I was presuming anything! I am surrounded by physicists. 
I haven't met one yet that had a clear idea of the difference between 
the description and the thing. Same with mathematicians. I haven't met 
one yet that had even encountered the idea of the epistemic difference 
between a system, 'being' in that system and 'observing/describing a 
system by being in it'. It's profoundly problematic for me as a 
researcher trying to invest in knowledge which recognizes the distinction.


For example, if you speak of the difference between EM phenomena in a 
brain (a description) and 'BEING' the fields (which is what we actually 
do), they get this strange look on their face, like you've just fed them 
a shite sandwich.


The difference between this behaviour and explaining the natural 
world is not understood by the physicists/mathematicians of this era.
(In contrast, I regard myself as a scientist  an explainer of 
things-natural ...which I claim as different to being a 
physicists/mathematician in this strange era we inhabit)
5) COMP is false a computer instantiation of rules of how a world 
appears to be, and a world are not the same thing.
6) COMP is false a computer instantiation of rules of how a brain 
appears to be is not a brain.
7) Corollary: scientific description of how the world appears and 
what the world is made of are not the same description _and_ computer 
instantiations of either set is not a world.
8) The issue that causes scientific descriptions (like QM) to be 
confused with actual reality is a cultural problem in science, not a 
technical problem with what science has/has not discovered.
9) That most of the readers of this list will stare at this list of 
statements and be as mystified about how I can possibly think they 
are right as I am about those readers' view that they can't be right.


BTW I have a paper coming out in Jan 2011 in 'Journal of Machine 
Consciousness' in which I think I may have proved COMP false as a 
'law of nature' ... here in this universe, (or any _actual_ universe, 
really). At the least I think the argument is very closeand I 
have provided the toolkit for its final demise, which someone else 
might use to clinch the deal.


This leads to my final observation:

10) I think the realization of the difference between 'wild-type' 
computation (actual  natural entities interacting) and 'artificial 
computation' (a computer made of the actual entities interacting, 
waving its components around in accordance with rules /symbols 
defined by a third party) will become mainstream in the long run.

-
It's quite possible that the COMP of the Bruno kind is actually right 
, but presented into the wrong epistemic domain and not understood as 
such. Time will tell. The way the Bruno-style' COMP can be right is 
for it to make testable predictions of the outward appearance of the 
mechanism for delivery of phenomenal consciousness in brain material


NC (natural computation) and AC (artificial computation) is the 
crucial distinction. I don't think the QM/MWI proponent can conceiv

Re: A paper by Bas C. van Fraassen

[Colin Hales]

I am pretty sure that there is a profound misinterpretation and/or 
unrecognized presupposition deeply embedded in the kinds of discussion 
of which Van F and your reply and Bruno's  fits.  It's so embedded that  
there appears to be no way that respondents can type words from a 
perspective in which the offered view may be wrong or a sidebar in a 
bigger but unrecognised picture. It's very hard to write anything to 
combat view X when the only words which ever get written are those 
presuming X, and X is assuming a position of explaining everything, yet 
doesn't.


In the long run I predict that:

1) The 'many worlds' do not exist and are a product of presuppositions 
about scientific description not yet understood by the proponents of MWI.
2) QM will be recognized as merely an appearance of the world, not the 
world as it is.
3) The universe that exists now is.the only universe that exists at the 
moment. Despite this, the "many worlds" are explorable, physically by 
'virtual matter' behaving as if they existed (by an appropriate entity  
made of the stuff of our single universe)
4) The MWI has arisen as a result of a human need to make certain 
mathematics right, not the need to explain the natural world. This, in 
the longer term will be recognised as a form of religiosity which will 
be seen to imbue the physicists of this era, who are preselected by the 
education system for prowess in manupulating symbols. The difference 
between this behaviour and explaining the natural world is not 
understood by the physicists/mathematicians of this era.
(In contrast, I regard myself as a scientist  an explainer of 
things-natural ...which I claim as different to being a 
physicists/mathematician in this strange era we inhabit)
5) COMP is false a computer instantiation of rules of how a world 
appears to be, and a world are not the same thing.
6) COMP is false a computer instantiation of rules of how a brain 
appears to be is not a brain.
7) Corollary: scientific description of how the world appears and what 
the world is made of are not the same description _and_ computer 
instantiations of either set is not a world.
8) The issue that causes scientific descriptions (like QM) to be 
confused with actual reality is a cultural problem in science, not a 
technical problem with what science has/has not discovered.
9) That most of the readers of this list will stare at this list of 
statements and be as mystified about how I can possibly think they are 
right as I am about those readers' view that they can't be right.


BTW I have a paper coming out in Jan 2011 in 'Journal of Machine 
Consciousness' in which I think I may have proved COMP false as a 'law 
of nature' ... here in this universe, (or any _actual_ universe, 
really). At the least I think the argument is very closeand I have 
provided the toolkit for its final demise, which someone else might use 
to clinch the deal.


This leads to my final observation:

10) I think the realization of the difference between 'wild-type' 
computation (actual  natural entities interacting) and 'artificial 
computation' (a computer made of the actual entities interacting, waving 
its components around in accordance with rules /symbols defined by a 
third party) will become mainstream in the long run.

-
It's quite possible that the COMP of the Bruno kind is actually right , 
but presented into the wrong epistemic domain and not understood as 
such. Time will tell. The way the Bruno-style' COMP can be right is for 
it to make testable predictions of the outward appearance of the 
mechanism for delivery of phenomenal consciousness in brain material


NC (natural computation) and AC (artificial computation) is the crucial 
distinction. I don't think the QM/MWI proponent can conceive of that 
distinction. Perhaps it might be helpful if those readers try and 
conceive of such a situation, just as an exercise..


cheers
colin hales





Bruno Marchal wrote:

HI Stephen,

Just a short reply to your post to Colin, and indirectly to your last 
posts.



On 22 Oct 2010, at 10:53, Stephen Paul King wrote:


Dear Colin,
 
Let me put you are ease, van Fraassen has sympathies with the 
frustrations that you have mentioned here and I share them as well, 
but let's look closely at the point that you make here as I think 
that it does to the heart of several problems related to the notion 
of an observer.  OTOH, it seems to me that you are suggesting that 
the objective view is just a form of consensus between all of those 
subjective view, no? Also, the notion of a measurement is discussed 
in detail in the paper. I wonder if you read far enough to see 
it...If we buy the computationalist interpretation of the mind then 
there is nothing necessarily special about a human brain; the 
discussions about computational universality give us

Re: A paper by Bas C. van Fraassen

[Colin Hales]

Hi,
Looks like and interesting read but the initial gloss-over I had 
revealed all the usual things that continue to frustrate and exasperate 
me


Why won't people that attend to these issues do some 
neuroscience...where the only example of a real "observer" exists.?
Why does characterising the actual reality get continually conflated 
with characterisation of the reality as it appears to the observer (with 
a brain/scientist observer I mean)?
Why does scientific measurement continue to get conflated with 
scientific observation which continues to get conflated with scientific 
evidence which then gets confusedly applied to systems of description 
which are conflated with actual reality?


There _is_ a view  from nowhere!
It is acquired with objectivity, which originates in a totally 
subjective capacity delivered by the observer's brain material.
In a room of 100 scientists in an auditorium there are 100 subjective 
views and ZERO objective views. There is ONE 'as-if' '/virtual objective 
view which is defined by agreement between multiple observers. But no 
"measurement" is going on. There's 100 entities 'BEING' in the universe.


The Van Frassen discussion seems to conflate 'being' somewhere and 
'observing'. A table lamp gets to BE. It is intimately part of its 
surrounds and has a unique perspective on everything that is 'not table 
lamp', but the lamp NOT observing in the sense scientists observe (with 
a brain). A brain is in the universe in the same way a table lamp is in 
the universe - yet the organisation of the brain (same kind of 
atoms/molecules) results in a capacity to scientifically observe. This 
'observe' and the 'observe' that is literally BEING a table lamp, are 
not the same thing! G!


This conflation has been going on for 100 years.

I vote we make neuroscience mandatory for all physicists. Then maybe one 
day they'll really understand what 'OBSERVATION' is and the difference 
between it and 'BEING', 'MEASUREMENT and 'EVIDENCE' and _then_ what you 
can do with evidence.


There. Vent is complete. That's better. Phew!

:-)

Colin Hales.



Stephen Paul King wrote:

Hi Friends,
 
Please check out the following paper by Bas C. van Fraassen for 
many ideas that have gone into my posts so far, in particular the 
argument against the idea of a “view from nowhere”.
 
www.princeton.edu/~fraassen/abstract/*Rovelli_sWorld*-*FIN*.pdf 
<http://www.princeton.edu/%7Efraassen/abstract/Rovelli_sWorld-FIN.pdf>
 
 
Onward!
 
Stephen

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Re: PSYCHE Vol 16 #1 ... essay

[Colin Hales]

Bruno Marchal wrote:

Colin,

I think we have always agreed on this conclusion. We may differ on the 
premises. 

It just happen that I am using a special hypothesis, which is very 
common, but not so well understood, and which is the digital mechanist 
hypothesis.
I think things are more subtle than this.. I assume nothing, 
especially 'digital anything'. In reality there's no such thing as 
'digital' (do not conflate this with 'quantisation'!). There's brains 
that make statements or kind (A) and (B). That's all.


Unfortunately, because of our conceptual divide I cannot give meaningful 
answers to any of the subsequent questions you ask - because to answer 
them at all means I have to agree with the starting point. Your 
questions are of the same kind as "when did you first start beating your 
dog?" - the presupposition is that I beat my dog and the only undecided 
issue is 'when?'. The issues you discuss presuppose something that 
fundamentally violates science approaches in the same way that 
'strings', 'loops', 'branes', 'froth' etc etc violate it and get 
sidelined. You have added the UTM and its variants to the pile. Any of 
these could be just as right as you think COMP is.


The (A)/(B) framework is parsimonious/empirically tractable (requires 
nothing extra in the Occam's razor sense) and COMP isn't because it 
requires invocation of a form of unseen abstract computer running 
rules-of-Bruno, none of which lead to predictions that implement/explain 
the observer. You seem to think that my (A)/(B) framework must address 
issues in Bruno/COMP terms. I need none of it. Your framework is a 
preemptive generalisation of (A)/(B).


In the end, once (A)/(B) candidates have been found and explored, 
Bruno/COMP may be able to be used as an abstract generalisation of  the 
Hales/(A)/(B) framework. When that realisation happens, we can all go 
down to the pub and declare "Bruno was right" and drink to your 
insightsHowever, this will not happen until (A)/(B) is adopted in a 
self-consistent manner and followed to its logical endpoint 
/literal/, verifiable neuroscience predictions of an observer (not by 
pointing to "what is believed corresponds to observation" within in an 
abstract hypostase framework on a presupposed computer)Then and 
only then will we understand the relationship between the natural world 
and formal/artificial computation of the COMP kind.so we can then 
make informed decisions.


IMO this is the way that you can ultimately be right, Bruno. Your work 
is an uber-framework within which sits mine as a special case. It's not 
either/or. Between you and proof of COMP is type (B) science of claims 
and testing. The instant that a (B) makes a verified prediction of brain 
material, you can then provide an abstract 'generalised theoretical 
neuroscience' that can, under suitable constraints, become the specific 
(B) that is us. At that time (A)/(B) will be able to be calibrated in 
terms of 'digital doctors', 'white rabibits', hypostases etc etc.  In 
this way, Bruno/COMP can  be quite right but devoid of practical 
utility, at least at this stage. (Right now...if I believe in COMP or I 
don't believe...changes nothing I still do (A)/(B), making 
predictive claims) Note that at the same time, the equally sidelined. 
'strings', 'loops', 'branes', 'froth' etc etc will also get their 
validity sorted ... because all of them will be required to 
predict/explain the observer or go away.


I can see how it must be very frustrating for you to see the overall 
generalisation but not how we are actually implemented as a particular 
version of it. At least my assessment of your position looks like that. 
This is how I think the COMP proposition could be viewed in the 
futurewe'll see, I suppose.


:-) Meanwhile I have a broken, neurotic, deluded (A) science to fix. 
That's enough work!


cheers
colin

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Re: PSYCHE 16(1) ... essay results

[Colin Hales]

John Mikes wrote:

Congrats, Colin,
very interesting ideas. Some time ago I learned from you a principle 
that forms an intensive part of my 'worldview': the 'mini-solipsism' 
i.e. the individual views everybody has about the world - differently, 
as formulated for himself from fragments received from 'reality and 
indiviually colored to one's personal background and mental-built.
 
Now I have some remarks - not argumentative mostly (except for the 
'Science of Quale') on that beautifully crafted (short!) writing that 
reaped the award.

Here it goes:
 
 

Colin Hales was named a 'winner' in the contest for 5 best and 
published his  1500-word max. contest-text  -  Psyche, Volume 16, 
number 1 (see pdf).

 Here are some responses - as far as I could understand his ideas (?).
 (C.H. text: full line, JMresp.: indented and Italics)
--
--"Qualia are the qualities of experience."--
Footnote:
2
--See (Tye, 2008). The word can be used when generally drawing 
attention to subjective qualities of visual experience, olfactory 
experience, gustatory experience, auditory experience, touch 
experience (including haptic/pressure, temperature and so forth), 
motion proprioception, situational emotions, primordial emotions 
(thirst, hunger, etc., associated with homeostasis (Denton, 2005)), 
plus imagined and pathologically originated versions of all of these.
A popular phrase is that “it is like something” to be in receipt of 
qualia (Chalmers, 1996). Coined by (Lewis, 1929), there has been a 
semantic battle for decades over the word, which is falling into 
disuse when technical specificity is an issue. -


/ Looks to me as a R.Rosen's 'modeling relation'-al simulacron/.

Q1:  “What kind of experiences are qualia?”
 The experiences are -qualities- encountered from a first person 
perspective.

There is nothing else to a first person perspective.
This we attribute to the action of our brain: A century of physiology 
tells us that all experience is - g e n e r a t e d -  in the cranial 
central nervous system (CNS).


  /(???)Is there some mechanism proposed, or is it only 
'attribution'?/



Yes.. i even said that at the start of the essay!

This is knowledge of the kind... "/whatever it is, it is generated in 
and delivered by the action of what we observe to be 'brain material' in 
very localised places based on the specifics of the modality/." The 
context of this knowledge is one of the complete brain embedded in an 
environment (embedded in the universe) and embodied. That is as far as 
you go in 'discovering a correlate'... you say... whatever it is, it is 
highly correlated with "that stuff' doing 'that behaviour' and when you 
stop it behaving that way,  it stops. It becomes 'attributed' in the 
sense that we are in a unique evidentiary circumstance...the boundary 
condition in the essay... where we encounter the only place in science 
where hearsay is accepted as scientific evidence.



/ /

It is interesting to realize the brain is in excess of 99.99% 
space, depending on how you compute spatial occupancy by electrons and 
nucleons.
In essence, there is nothing left to describe in a brain except the 
space it inhabits.
The dominant feature of the brain's operation is therefore actually 
the spatially
expressed electric and magnetic fields, not the particulate components 
(atoms). Pointing out brain chemistry therefore almost completely 
misses the brain!


  /That can be translated into: we don't know _A LOT_ about the 
functional (vs: tissue)
  brain, i.e. mentality, how to describe it & its functions and 
the 'mental'  in general.

  My formulation instead of '(brain)-GENERATED': a '(brain)-HANDLED  /

/  (as in a tool in  'procedure' we did not discover so far).
  Also missing: an explanatory explanation about those mystical
  "spatially expressed(?)  (names?) -
 " WHAT they are and how do they work" in such  
  mood? --  /


/   As Homunculi, or just  Deus Ex Machina? (in Physics?)
/
  / *_Then there is "Quale Science"?_*
As said above (C.H.),/ *'qualia are experiences', nothing more.*/ /

/ ---  However...
An experience is a personal adaptation of SOMETHING(?) (- part of the 
'reality' which we cannot describe in our 'human' terms). We "get it" 
from the unlimited 'reality' (as assumed) into our limited 
capabilities as far as our human mind did interpret, adapt, formulate 
- as much as it could (of it) -  into our personalised  
(C.H.),  i.e. everybody's personalised worldview -  restsricted to our 
individual genetic build-up, personal capabilities and past 
experience-infested (individual) memory-load -   and who knows (to

Re: PSYCHE Vol 16 #1 ... essay

[Colin Hales]

Bruno Marchal wrote:
Thanks for the link Colin. I will read it after the exams period. In 
some trivial sense I think I, and the Lobian machine, agrees with your 
conclusion, but less trivially, we may disagree. We don't have to 
change the boundaries of science, just be more open to facts, 
including the consequences of different theories.  Could say more later. 

I think that computer science offers a theory of qualia on a plate 
(the intensional variants of the solovay logic G*, the 'right 
hypostases"). It is a sort of theory which explains what escapes all 
theories. It makes you "first person" right, with the assumption of 
mechanism. But it is not knew, many did intuit such type of 'truth', 
and the greek intuited it together with the fact that we can reason 
about that. Th (old) error consists in opposing science and mysticism. 
The universal machine is naturally already mystical. 


I have explained this, but I know it is not so easy to grasp.

Bruno



I hope I can crack through  your mindset one day! You can dream all you 
like about abstract interactions of numbers on a non-existent computer. 
It makes no difference to me. You can't build it, it predicts nothing 
and explains nothing. What I am trying to get people to realise is the 
most elementary of simple realities that we face as humans:


(1) That  whatever it is, we are inside it, made of it. The universe X. 
We acquire our faculties of observation from that circumstance.


(2) That the position you intrinsically inherit from (1) as an observer 
intent on understanding how X works has two possible modes of description:


(A) Statements capturing the essence of how X appears to us as observers 
in X. No matter how mathematically elaborate these statements are, 
you cannot deny the other mode ...
(B) Statements depicting the interactions between structural-primitive 
elements comprising X that (i) result in an observer that (ii) sees the 
universe as we do (as per (A).


Mutual self consistency must be confirmed at all levels except where (A) 
failspredictably. Neither (A) or (B) can be claimed to literally 
'be' the universe. This does not mean that (B) cannot literally be the 
universe. It means we cannot /claim it to be/. Formally, we must remain 
forever agnostic. In practice we get the benefit of really getting to 
the heart of X in useful ways.


Our big mistake is to conflate, endlessly and without review, (A) and 
(B). The conflation is twofold. We either
   do (B) without realising that its primary demand is the 
prediction of an observer

or
   we arbitrarily decree (B) as impossib;le...sometimes by simply  
only doing A and thinking it somehow explains an observer.


Observations cannot explain an observer! (an ability to observe). To 
believe they do is like saying that telephone conversations explain the 
telephone system.


But we've  been here before..

All I am saying is that (A) science is no less valid than (B) science, 
is not the same science and that it has equal rights to all empirical 
evidence (the contents of the consciousnes of scientists that literally 
constitutes scientific observation).


No amount of fiddling about with abstract maths changes any of this. I 
hope that the essay speaks to you in a way that helps you see this.


This is the position I am gradually building.

I am going to go so far as to formally demand a summit on the matter. I 
believe things are that screwed up. 300 years of this confinement in the 
(A) prison is long enough.


cheers
colin hales





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PSYCHE Vol 16 #1 ... essay

[Colin Hales]

Recently there was a student essay contest run by the ASSC (Association 
for the Scientific Study of Consciousness)

The five winners are published in the ASSC journal PSYCHE.
One of them was mine. They have finally got around to publishing them.

Hales C. 2010. The scientific evidence of qualia meets the qualia that 
are scientific evidence. PSYCHE 16(1):24-29.

(http://www.theassc.org/journal_psyche/archive/vol_16_no_1_2010)

I am trying hard to get my ideas about science into the awareness of as 
many folks as I can.


I thought some of you may be interested.*The essays are mercifully short 
(1500 words!) *


Enjoy.

Colin Hales

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Re: New Paper by Thomas Hertog and Stephen Hawking

[Colin Hales]

Jason Resch wrote:
> Described in this article: 
> http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=2617
>
> "This summation of all paths, proposed in the 1960s by physicist 
> Richard Feynman and others, is the only way to explain some of the 
> bizarre properties of quantum particles, such as their apparent 
> ability to be in two places at once. The key point is that not all 
> paths contribute equally to the photon's behaviour: the straight-line 
> trajectory dominates over the indirect ones.
>
> Hertog argues that the same must be true of the path through time that 
> took the Universe into its current state. We must regard it as a sum 
> over all possible histories."
>
>

So we "must", must we?

A mathematical construction by humans, happens to cohere to some extent 
with reality.
A mere description.

A million other descriptions, also constructed by humans, could be as 
predictive of how the universe appears.

What extra belief system must exist in order that someone conclude that 
we 'must' chose a "sum of all histories" as "the" story? Why is the 
universe compelled to be such a thing?

Rhetorical question...don't answer. Just think.

happy new year, everythingers.

cheers
colin



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OFF LIST Re: Emulation and Stuff - The Ross Model of our Universe

[Colin Hales]

Hi,
Can you please send a .PDF or a .DOC
I can't read .DOCX and I can't upgrade my PC to read ituni rules... :-(
regards
Colin Hales



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Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[Colin Hales]

Bruno Marchal wrote:
> Colin,
>
> We agree on the conclusion. We disagree on vocabulary, and on the 
> validity of your reasoning.
>
> Let us call I-comp the usual indexical mechanism discussed in this 
> list (comp).
> Let us call m-comp the thesis that there is a primitive "natural 
> world", and that it can be described by a digital machine.
>
> UDA shows that I-comp entails NOT m-comp.
> Obviously m-comp entails I-comp.
>
> So m-comp entails NOT m-comp.
>
> This refutes m-comp.
My argument involves refuting what you call m-comp
Where did you get the idea I am suggesting "/It can be described by a 
digital machine/"? I'll state it again
 
There is a natural world (a)
It is imperfectly described from within in 2 ways (b) and (c).
A symbolic description which is predictive of appearances (b) needs no 
assumption that the natural world is computing (b) or is a computation 
of (b).
A symbolic description which is predictive of structure (c) needs no 
assumption that the natural world is computing (c) or is a computation 
of (c).
The 'describing' in (b) and (c) invokes no necessary 'digital machine'. 
The Turing computation of the descriptions (b) and (c) is /not claimable 
to be a natural world/ by anything more than a form of faith.

This seems to be the sticking point ... this 'digital machine' idea 
the automatic attribution of symbolic regularities as some kind of 
computation then attributed some kind of involvement in the natural 
world. This extra attribution is not justified. Non-parsimonious, not 
logically connected in any necessary way.

> Now you seem to believe in a stuffy natural reality, so you have to 
> abandon I-comp. This is coherent. Now you have to say "no" to the 
> doctor and introduce actual infinities in the brain. I find this very 
> unplausible, but it is not my goal to defend it.
>
> Now I find your reasoning based on informality not convincing at all, 
> to say the least. It is really based on level confusion s Peter Jones 
> was driving at correctly. You "B" above seems also indicate you have 
> not study the argument. 
>
> Bruno
The COMP that I refute is pragmatic and empirically tractable. Yes, 
m-comp is false. I don't need I-comp to reach that conclusion I need 
only go as far as the (a)/(b)/(c) framework in which (b) and (c) are 
imperfect, incomplete and non-unique symbolic descriptions of a natural 
world and which otherwise have no involvement in the natural world /at 
all/. Two different entities (human and Klingon :-) ) in our natural 
world could have completely different (b) formulations and be as 
predictive as each other.

Study or not study? makes no difference. The whole idea of i-comp is 
unnecessary.

BTW, just in case there's another issue behind thisthere's no such 
thing as 'digital'.

Anyone who has ever done electronics will tell you that. It's all 
'analogue' ...a construction of a quantised reality. By 'analogue' what 
I mean is "whatever it is that is the natural world (a)" above. All the 
digital machines on the planet are analogue. These are the ones people 
are using to do AGI. The virtual-discretisation  we call digital <> 
quantisation of QM. So when you invoke a 'digital machine' you are 
talking about a fiction, anyway. Quantum computers merely facilitate 
multiple simultaneous executions within the same kind of 
"virtual-digital" structure ...doing lots more virtual-digital work 
doesn't make the computation any more digital than a standard PC. So in 
reality (a) there is no such "thing" as a Turing machine. There are only 
machines acting 'as-if' they are, by design, through constraint of 
analogue state transitions. I have personally played with the electronic 
transition between 0 and 1 on many occasions it's as real as the 0 and 
the 1 and you can walk all over it.

There's multiple layers of misconception operating in this area. And 
they are not all mine!

Colin



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Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[Colin Hales]

Quentin Anciaux wrote:
> 2009/8/12 Colin Hales :
>   
>> My motivation to kill COMP is purely aimed at bring a halt to the delusion
>> of the AGI community that Turing-computing will ever create a mind. They are
>> throwing away $millions based on a false belief. Their expectations need to
>> be scientifically defined for a change. I have no particular interest in
>> disturbing any belief systems here except insofar as they contribute to the
>> delusion that COMP is true.
>>
>> 'nuff said. This is another minor battle in an ongoing campaign. :-)
>>
>> Colin
>> 
>
> You want so much COMP to be false that you've forget in the way that
> your argument is flawed from the start... You start with, AI can't do
> science to conclude that... tada... AI can't do science. It's absurd.
>
> Quentin
>
>
>   
It is a 'reductio ad absudum' argument.

My argument /does not start with AI can't do science/.

It starts with the simple posit that if /COMP is true/ then all 
differences between a COMP world (AC) and the natural world (NC) should 
be zero under all circumstances and the AC/NC distinction would be 
false. That is the natural result of unconditional universality of COMP yes?

OK.

This posit is /not/ an assumption that AC cannot be a scientist.

The rationale is that if I can find one and only one circumstance 
consistent/sustaining that difference, then the posit of the universal 
truth of COMP is falsified. The AC/NC distinction is upheld:
.
I looked and found one place where the difference is viable, a 
difference that only goes away if you project a human viewpoint into the 
'artificial scientist' ( i.e. valid only by additional 
assumptions).that position is that the NC artificial scientist 
cannot ever debate COMP as an option. _Not because it can't construct 
the statements of debate, but because it will never be able to detect a 
world in which COMP is false, because in that world the informal systems 
involved can fake all evidence_ and lead the COMP scientist by the nose 
anywhere they want. If the real world is a place where informal systems 
exist, those informal systems can subvert/fake all COMP statements, no 
matter what they are and the COMP scientist will never know. It can be 
100% right, think it's right and actually not be connected to the actual 
reality of it. A world in which COMP is false can never verify that it 
is. Do not confuse this 'ability to be fooled' with an inability to 
formulate statements which deal with inconsistency.

The place where we get an informal system is in the human brain, which 
can 'symbolically cohere and explore' any/all formal systems. I 
specifically chose the human brain of a scientist, the workings of which 
were used to generate the 'law of nature' running the artificial (COMP) 
scientist (who must also be convinced COMP is true in order to bother at 
all!). I can see how, as a human, I could 100% fake the apparent world 
that the COMP entity examines COMP-ly and it will never know. (The same 
way that a brilliant virtual reality could 100% fool a human and we'd 
never know. A virtual reality that fools us humans is not necessarily 
made of computation  either. )

I am not saying humans are magical. I am saying that humans do /not/ 
operate formally like COMP and that '/formally handling 
inconsistency/' is not the same thing as '/delivering inconsistency by 
being an informal/ /system/'. BTW I mean informal in the Godellian 
sense...simultaneous inconsistency and incompleteness.

This is a highly self referential situation. Resist the temptation to 
assume that a COMP/NC scientist construction of statements capturing 
inconsistency is equivalent to dealing the intrinsic inconsistency of 
the human brain kind. Also reject the notion that the brain is computing 
of the COMP (Turing)  type. This is not the case.

You might also be interested in
*Bringsjord, S. 1999. The Zombie Attack on the Computational Conception 
of Mind. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LIX:41-69.*
He ends with."/In the end, then, the zombie attack proves 
lethal: computationalism is dead./"

It's a formal modal logic argument to the same end as mine in the 
end, they are actually the same argument. It's just not obvious. I like 
mine better because it has the Godellian approach. The informality issue 
has some elaboration here:
*Cabanero, L. L. and Small, C. G. 2009. Intentionality and 
Computationalism: A Diagonal Argument. Mind and Matter 7:81-90.*
Also here:
*Fetzer, J. H. 2001. Computers and Cognition: Why Minds are Not Machines 
Kluwer Academic Publishers.*

I am hoping that between these and a few others, the issue is sealed. I 
know it'll take a while for the true believers to come around. It's not 
such a 

Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[Colin Hales]

Hi,
I guess I am pretty much over the need for any 'ism whatever. I can 
re-classify my ideas in terms of an 'ism, but that process tells me 
nothing extra and offers no extra empirical clue. I think I can classify 
fairly succinctly the difference between approaches:

*(A) Colin*
(a) There is a natural world.
(b) We can describe how it appears to us using the P-consciousness of 
scientists.
(c) We can describe how a natural world might be constructed which has 
an observer in it like (a)
Descriptions (b) are not the natural world (a) but 'about it' (its 
appearances)
Descriptions (C) are not the natural world (a) but 'about it' (its 
structure)
(b) and (c) need only ever be 'doxastic' (beliefs).
I hold that these two sets of descriptions (b) and (c) need /not/ be 
complete or even perfect/accurate.
Turing-computing (b) or (c) is not an instance of (a)/will not ever make (a)
Turing-computing (b) or (c) can tell you something about the operation 
of (a).
NOTE:
If (b) is a description of the rules of chess (no causality whatever, 
good prediction of future board appearances), (c) is a description of 
the behaviour of chess players (chess causality). There's a rough 
metaphor for you.
-
*(B) not-Colin (as seems to be what I see here...)*
There are descriptions of type (b), one of which is quantum mechanics QM.
The math of QM suggests a multiple-histories TOE concept.
If I then project a spurious attribution of idealism into this 
then if I squint at the math I can see what might operate as a 
'first person perspective'
and  I realise/believe that if I Turing-compute the math, it *is* a 
universe. I can make it be reality.
Causality is a mystery solved by prayer to the faith of idealism and 
belief in 'comp', driven by the hidden mechanism of the Turing 'tape 
reader/punch'.
-

What's happening here AFAICT, is that players in (B) have been so far 
'down the rabbit hole' for so long they've lost sight of reality and 
think 'isms explain things!

In (A) you get to actually explain things (appearances and causal 
necessity). /The price is that you can never truly know reality/. You 
get 'asymptotically close to knowing it', though. (A) involves no 
delusion about Turing-computation implementing reality. The amount of 
'idealism', 'physicalism', 'materialism' and any other 'ism you need to 
operate in the (A) framework is Nil. In (A) the COMP (as I defined it) 
is obviously and simply false and there is no sense in which 
Turing-style-computation need be attributed to be involved in natural 
processes. It's falsehood is expected and natural and consistent with 
all empirical knowledge.

The spurious attributions in (B) are replaced in (A) by the descriptions 
(c), all of which must correlate perfectly (empirically) with (b) 
through the provision of an observer and a mechanism for observation 
which is evidenced in brain material. The concept of a Turing machine is 
not needed at all. There may be a sense in which a Turing (C-T) 
equivalent  of (c) might be constructed. That equivalent is adds zero to 
knowledge systems (b) and (c). Under (A) the C-T thesis is perfectly 
right but simply irrelevant.

My motivation to kill COMP is purely aimed at bring a halt to the 
delusion of the AGI community that Turing-computing will ever create a 
mind. They are throwing away $millions based on a false belief. Their 
expectations need to be scientifically defined for a change. I have no 
particular interest in disturbing any belief systems here except insofar 
as they contribute to the delusion that COMP is true.

'nuff said. This is another minor battle in an ongoing campaign. :-)

Colin


Stephen Paul King wrote:
> Hi Colin,
>  
> It seems that to me that until one understands the nature of the 
> extreme Idealism that COMP entails, no arguement based on the physical 
> will do...
>  
> "I refute it thus!"
> -Dr. Johnson http://www.samueljohnson.com/refutati.html
>  
> Onward!
>  
> Stephen
>  
>
> - Original Message -
> *From:* Colin Hales <mailto:c.ha...@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au>
> *To:* everything-list@googlegroups.com
> <mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, August 11, 2009 9:51 PM
>     *Subject:* Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?
>
>
>
> Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> On 10 Aug 2009, at 09:08, Colin Hales wrote:
>>
>>> Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 06 Aug 2009, at 04:37, Colin Hales wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page
>>>>> detailed refutation of com

Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[Colin Hales]

Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> On 10 Aug 2009, at 09:08, Colin Hales wrote:
>
>> Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>>
>>> On 06 Aug 2009, at 04:37, Colin Hales wrote:
>>>
>>>> Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed 
>>>> refutation of computationalism.
>>>> It's going through peer review at the moment.
>>>>
>>>> The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation 
>>>> of 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is 
>>>> being carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the 
>>>> paper I drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the 
>>>> former NATURAL COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL 
>>>> COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is that if COMP is true then there is no 
>>>> distinction between AC and NC. The distinction should fail.
>>>
>>> Why? COMP entails that physics cannot be described by a computation, 
>>> but by an infinite sum of infinite histories. If you were correct, 
>>> there would be no possible white rabbit. You are confusing comp (I 
>>> am a machine) and constructive physics (the universe is a machine).
>>>
>>>
>> This is the COMP I have a problem with. It's the one in the 
>> literature.  It relates directly to the behaviour (descriptive 
>> options of) of scientists:
>>
>> *COMP*
>>
>>  
>>
>> This is the shorthand for computationalism as distilled from the 
>> various sources cited above. The working definition here:
>>
>> “/The operational/functional equivalence (identity, 
>> indistinguishability at the level of the model) of (a) a sufficiently 
>> embodied, computationally processed, sufficiently detailed 
>> symbolic/formal description/model of a natural thing X and (b) the 
>> described natural thing X/”/./
>>
>>
>> If this is not the COMP you speak of, then this could be the origins 
>> of disparity in view. Also, the term "I am machine" says nothing 
>> scientifically meaningful to me.
>
> This is not comp. Actually the definition above is ambiguous, and 
> seems to presuppose natural things.
I did not make this up. I read it in the literature in various forms and 
summarised. 'Mind as computation' is a specific case of it. If I have a 
broken definition according to you then I am in the company of a lot of 
people. It's also the major delusion in many computer 'scientists' in 
the field of AI, who's options would be very different if COMP is false. 
So I'll use COMP as defined above, for now. It is what I refute.

'presupposing natural things..." ?? hmm

Natural thingsYou know... the thing we sometimes call the 'real 
world'?  Whatever it is that we are in/made of, that appears to behave 
rather regularly and that we are intrinsically ignorant of and 'do 
empirical science on'. The 'thing' that our consciousness portrays to 
us? The place with real live behaving humans with major brain and other 
nervous system problems who could really use some help? That natural 
world that actually defined COMP as per above. That 'thing'.Whatever 
'it' is... that will do for a collection of  'natural things'.

The idea that the "presupposition of natural things" is problematic is 
rather unhelpful to those (above, real, natural) suffering people. 
Sounds a bit emotive, but .. there you go .. call me "practically 
motivated". I intend to remain in this condition. :-)

Colin


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Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[Colin Hales]

Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> On 06 Aug 2009, at 04:37, Colin Hales wrote:
>
>> Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed 
>> refutation of computationalism.
>> It's going through peer review at the moment.
>>
>> The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 
>> 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being 
>> carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I 
>> drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former 
>> NATURAL COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). 
>> The idea is that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between 
>> AC and NC. The distinction should fail.
>
> Why? COMP entails that physics cannot be described by a computation, 
> but by an infinite sum of infinite histories. If you were correct, 
> there would be no possible white rabbit. You are confusing comp (I am 
> a machine) and constructive physics (the universe is a machine).
>
>
This is the COMP I have a problem with. It's the one in the literature.  
It relates directly to the behaviour (descriptive options of) of scientists:

*COMP*



This is the shorthand for computationalism as distilled from the various 
sources cited above. The working definition here:

“/The operational/functional equivalence (identity, indistinguishability 
at the level of the model) of (a) a sufficiently embodied, 
computationally processed, sufficiently detailed symbolic/formal 
description/model of a natural thing X and (b) the described natural 
thing X/”/./


If this is not the COMP you speak of, then this could be the origins of 
disparity in view. Also, the term "I am machine" says nothing 
scientifically meaningful to me. The term "The universe  is a machine" 
also says nothing scientifically meaningful to me.

I offer the following distinction, which relates directly to the human 
behaviour (observable, testable) called scientific behaviour.
(a) scientific descriptions of a natural world produced by an observer 
inside it, built of it. (science currently 100% here)
and
(b) scientific descriptions (also produced inside it by (a) human 
observers) of a natural world as a natural form of computation which 
produces the above observer.(science currently Nil% here for no 
justified reason)
and
(c) The natural world as an actual instantiation of (b)."Whatever it is 
that we find ourselves in".

When you utter the word "physics" above, I hear a reference to 
descriptions of type (a) and nothing else. I assume no direct 
relationship between them and (b) or (c). The framework of (a), (b),(c) 
is all that is needed, justified because it exhausts the list of 
possible views of our situation which have any empirical/explanatory 
relevance. None of the descriptions (a) or (b) need be unique or even 
exact. The only thing required of (a) is prediction. The only thing 
required of (b) is prediction /of an observer who is predicting/. Both 
(a) and (b) are justified empirically in predicting a scientist.

Now consider the ways I could be confused:
(i) computed (Turing) (a) is identical to (c) (all of it)
or
(ii) computed (Turing) (b) is identical to (c) (all of it)
or
(iii) computed (Turing) (a) of a piece of (c) is identical to the piece 
of (c) within (c)
or
(iv) computed (Turing) (b) of a piece of (c) is identical to the piece 
of (c) within (c)

The COMP I refute above is of type (iii). I did not examine (iv) in the 
paper.

(iii) is the delusion currently inhabiting computer science in respect 
of AGI expectations. The 'piece of (c)'  I use to do this is 'the human 
scientist'. It is expectations of AGI projects that I seek to clarify - 
my motivation here. It is a 100% practical need.

(i) and (ii) might be possible if you already knew everythingbut 
that is of no practical use.
(iii) and (iv) viability depends on the "piece of (c)/rest of (c)" 
boundary and how well that boundary facilitates an AGI.

So... who's assuming stuff? :-)

colin


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Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[Colin Hales]

russell standish wrote:
> Nobody is suggesting that brains are Turing machines. All that is
> being suggested (by COMP) is that brains perform computations (and
> nothing but), hence can be perfectly emulated by a Turing machine, by
> virtue of the Church-Turing thesis. 
>   
"/Nobody is suggesting that brains are Turing machines./ "

_Yes they are_- /implicitly/ in an expectation that a computation of a 
model of the appearances of a brain can be a brain (below). To see 
this...note that you said:

 "That brains perform computations.hence can be perfectly 
emulated etc etc"

Brains are a naturally evolving self-manipulating natural process that involves 
natural symbols going through continual transformations in regular ways. //

And...yeswe can construct a _/model/_ X of the appearances that brain has 
whilst that manipulation/transformation is underway

but...so what?

There is /nowhere in the universe that model X is being "computed" on anything 
_in the sense we understand as a Turing machine_./ (This applies to models of 
cognition and to models of the material/space of the brain.) This is the false 
assumption. The C-T thesis is not wrong. /It's just not saying anything/. The 
'emulation' you cite is only ever justified as of a model of a cognitive 
process, /not a cognitive process/. This is precisely the conflation of (a) 
"/the natural world as some kind of as-yet un-elaborated natural computation/" 
with (b) "/Turing-style computation of a _model_ of the natural world/".

The COMP I refute in the paper is exactly this (b) kind:


*COMP*



This is the shorthand for computationalism as distilled from the various 
sources cited above. The working definition here:

"/The operational/functional equivalence (identity, indistinguishability 
at the level of the model) of (a) a sufficiently embodied, 
computationally processed, sufficiently detailed symbolic/formal 
description/model of a natural thing X and (b) the described natural 
thing X/"/./


There is a fundamental logical error being made of the kind: "/natural 
thing X behaves as if 
abstract-scientific-formal-description is running as a program on a 
computer, so therefore all abstract/artificial 
//computations-of-formal-description//-X are (by an undisclosed, 
undiscussed mechanism) identical to natural thing X/".
//
Do you see how the C-T Thesis and the Turing machine ideas can be 
perfectly right and at the same time deliver absolutely no claim to be 
involved in or describing the origins of an actual natural cognitive 
process?

So when you say  "Nobody is suggesting that brains are Turing machines" - _this 
cannot be true_, because everyone is methodologically behaving as if they had. 
It's an act of supposition/omission a failure to properly distinguish two 
kinds of things. There are other options which do not make this presupposition, 
and which are therefore better justified as forming descriptive framework which 
might involve understanding /actual cognition/ instead of assuming its origins. 
I have been exploring these 'other options' for a long time. Their details 
don't matter - the very fact of the possibility is what is important - and what 
has been tacitly presumed out of existence by the conflation I have delineated.

Our failure to consider these other options is a subscription to the conflation 
I have elaborated.

This is the true heart of the matter. 

We have been rattling off paragraphs like the one you delivered above for so 
long that we fail to see the implicit epistemic poison of the unjustified claim 
hidden inside.

colin












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Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[Colin Hales]

ronaldheld wrote:
> As a formally trained Physicist, what do I accept? that Physics is
> well represented mathematically? That the Multiverse is composed of
> mathematical structures some of which represent physical laws? Or
> something else?
>  Ronald
>   
This is /the/ question. It always  seems to get sidestepped in 
discussions that fail to distinguish between (a) "/reality as some kind 
of natural computation/" and (b) "/reality represented by formal 
statements(laws of nature) of regularity, //apparent in an observer, 
//that may be artificially computed/ /by a Turing style machine/". The 
conflation of (a) and (b) is a constant in the discussions here.

(a) does not need an observer. It /constructs/ an observer.
(b) involves an observer and are  regularities constructed by the 
observer made by (a)

The (roughly 5) conflations (from my paper that refutes COMP) are:

Conflation #1: Deploying an artificial scientist ? Bestowing 
scientific knowledge
Conflation #2: COMP(utation) ? experience
Conflation #3:A Scientist  ? Formal system
Conflation #4 Rules of a rule generator ? the generated rules 
(except once)
Conflation #5 AC Artificial Turing style abstract symbol 
manipulation ? NC The computation that is the natural world

Note that all 5 of these permeate the discussions here. I see it all the 
time. The main one is #5. When you realise how many combinations of 
these can misdirect a discussion, you realise how screwed up things are. 
The following statements summarise the effects:

(A) The fact that the natural world, to an observer, happens to have 
appearances predicted by a set of formal statements (Laws of 
Nature/Physics) does not entail that those statements are in any way 
involved in running/driving the universe. Eg. The assumption that the 
concept of a 'multiverse' is valid or relevant is another symptom of the 
conflationthe reason?  QM is a mathematical construct of type (b), 
/not/ an example of (a). The whole concept of a multiverse is a malady 
caused by this conflation.

(B) The operation of a Turing Machine ( = hardware-invariant//artificial 
abstract/ symbol manipulation) is /not  /what is going on in the natural 
world and, specifically, is /not/ what is happening in the brain (of a 
scientist). Assuming 'cognition is computation' is unjustified on any level.

I find the situation increasingly aggravating. It's like talking to cult 
members who's beliefs are predicated on a delusion, and who a re so deep 
inside it and so unable to see out of it that they are lost. Common 
sense has left the building. The appropriate scientific way out of this 
mess is to

(i) let (a) descriptions and (b) descriptions be, for the purposes, 
/separate scientific depictions of the natural world/ If they are not 
then at some point in the analysis they will become 
indistinguishable...in which case you have a /scientific/logical approach./
(ii) Drop /all/ assumptions that any discussion involving Turing 
machines as relevant to understanding the natural world. This means 
accepting,/ for the purposes of sorting this mess out/, (a) as being a 
form of computation fundamentally different to a Turing machine, where 
the symbols and the processor are literally the same thing. If you 
predicate your work on (i) then if COMP is true then at some point, if 
(a) and (b) become indistinguishable, /then/ COMP will be a-priori 
/predicted/ to be true.

I leave you to unpack your personalised version of the conflations. 
Traditional physics/math training will automatically infect the trainee 
with the affliction that conflates (a) and (b). The system of organised 
thought in which an observer is a-priori predicted with suggested 
sources of empirical evidence, is the system that we seek. (a) and (b) 
above represent that very system. We are currently locked into (b) and 
have all manner of weird assumptions operating in place of (a) which 
mean, in effect, that _the /last/ thing physicists want to explain is 
physicists_. Endlessly blathering on about multiverses and assuming COMP 
does /nothing/ to that end. I've had 5 years of listening to this 
COMP/Turing machine/Multiverse stuff. It's old/impotent/toothless/mute 
(predicts nothing) and sustained only by delusion . It operates as a 
cult(ure). I am the deprogrammer. :-)

colin
PS. Brent  I seem to have picked up a SHOUTING habit from a 
relatively brain dead AGI forum, where the folk are particularly deluded 
about what they are doing  They are so lost in (ii) above and have 
so little clue about science, they need therapy! I'll try and calm 
myself down a bit. Maybe use /italics/ instead  :-)


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Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[Colin Hales]

Brent Meeker wrote:
> Colin Hales wrote:
>   
>> Brent Meeker wrote:
>>     
>>> Colin Hales wrote:
>>>   
>>>   
>>>> Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed 
>>>> refutation of computationalism.
>>>> It's going through peer review at the moment.
>>>>
>>>> The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 
>>>> 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being 
>>>> carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I 
>>>> drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL 
>>>> COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is 
>>>> that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The 
>>>> distinction should fail.
>>>>
>>>> I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. 
>>>> Call this situation X.
>>>>
>>>> If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I 
>>>> also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get 
>>>> their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal 
>>>> arguments against COMP.
>>>>
>>>> *FACT*: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal 
>>>> nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form  
>>>> an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The 
>>>> quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a 
>>>> hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie. 
>>>> Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) 
>>>> violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of 
>>>> nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe 
>>>> the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how 
>>>> humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal 
>>>> (non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and 
>>>> mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held 
>>>> contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted.
>>>> ===
>>>> COMP fails when:
>>>> a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) 
>>>> scientist  and expect  to be able to carry out authentic 
>>>> original science on the a-priori unknownidentically to humans. To do 
>>>> this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do 
>>>> this your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a 
>>>> suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If 
>>>> COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be 
>>>> indistinguishable.
>>>>
>>>> b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that  be 
>>>> able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>>>>
>>>> c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>>>>
>>>> BECAUSE:  (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
>>>> THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
>>>> THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
>>>> THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.
>>>>
>>>> (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very 
>>>> idea of  ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is 
>>>> impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, 
>>>> formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to 
>>>> construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human 
>>>> scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> I don't see it.  I can write a simple computer program that constructs 
>>> statements which 
>>> are a subset of those produced by humans (or any other system).  Bruno's UD 
>>> produces *all* 
>>> such statements.  So where's the contradiction?
>>>
>>>   
>>>   
>> Yes you can generate all such statements.  /But then what*/*so what?
>> /*
>> *Please re-read the scenario

Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[Colin Hales]

Rex Allen wrote:
> If computationalism is true, and computation is the source of
> conscious experience, then shouldn't we expect that what is
> ontologically real is the simplest possible universe that can develop
> and support physical systems that are Turing equivalent?
>
> Does our universe look like such a universe?
>
> If our universe doesn't look like such a universe, then wouldn't it be
> reasonable to assume that ours is not the "real" universe, and that a
> simpler reality underlies it?
>
> >
>   
Perhaps we have our wires crossed. The definition of computationalism 
you have _is not what is in the literature_.
This is the distillation I have formulated from the literature (in my 
paper):

*COMP*



This is the shorthand for computationalism as distilled from the various 
sources cited above. The working definition here:

"/The operational/functional equivalence (identity, indistinguishability 
at the level of the model) of (a) a sufficiently embodied, 
computationally processed, sufficiently detailed symbolic/formal 
description/model of a natural thing X and (b) the described natural 
thing X/"/./


The refs...Beer, Pylyshyn^ , Putnam^ , Horst and many others.

This definition of COMP therefore has nothing explicitly to do with 
claiming consciousness.

However, if COMP is true, then if you compute some kind of model of 
cognition, then you may expect that model to be equivalent to a mind. An 
attribution of experience, however, is completely spurious. If COMP (as 
defined above) is true, then _all you need_ is abstract symbol 
manipulation of the Turing machine kind to get equivalence. You can 
remain completely mute/agnostic on the existence of experience in the 
COMP entity. This is the origin of the of the catch phrase "cognition is 
computation".

You may be confusing COMP with 'strong AI', which says that a COMP model 
of cognition is actual cognition (a mind, from which you might infer 
consciousness). Constrast this with "weak AI" which says that a COMP 
model of cognition is not an instance of cognition.

Refuting COMP the way I have means "strong AI" is false, "weak AI" is true.
Refuting COMP the way I have means your idea of 'Turing Equivalence" is 
meaningless/impossible.

The very best I can say of COMP is that it is trivially true in the 
sense that you can 'compute' a mind if you already know everything (and 
I mean everything, everywhere)  in which case the mind operates akin 
to a flight simulator.you compute the brain and the entire 
environment. Totally pointless  and inconsistent with the logic of 
being ignorant of the universe in the sense that scientists are 
ignorant. You do not know the environment, hence you can't compute it.

Amazing how many different views you can get of this stuff.

cheers
colin



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Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[Colin Hales]

Brent Meeker wrote:
> Colin Hales wrote:
>   
>> Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed 
>> refutation of computationalism.
>> It's going through peer review at the moment.
>>
>> The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 
>> 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being 
>> carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I 
>> drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL 
>> COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is 
>> that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The 
>> distinction should fail.
>>
>> I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. 
>> Call this situation X.
>>
>> If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I 
>> also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get 
>> their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal 
>> arguments against COMP.
>>
>> *FACT*: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal 
>> nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form  
>> an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The 
>> quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a 
>> hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie. 
>> Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) 
>> violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of 
>> nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe 
>> the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how 
>> humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal 
>> (non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and 
>> mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held 
>> contradictory belief systems are ‘rationally’ adopted.
>> ===
>> COMP fails when:
>> a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) 
>> scientist  and expect  to be able to carry out authentic 
>> original science on the a-priori unknownidentically to humans. To do 
>> this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do 
>> this your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a 
>> suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If 
>> COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be 
>> indistinguishable.
>>
>> b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that  be 
>> able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>>
>> c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>>
>> BECAUSE:  (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
>> THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
>> THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
>> THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.
>>
>> (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very 
>> idea of  ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is 
>> impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, 
>> formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to 
>> construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human 
>> scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. 
>> 
>
> I don't see it.  I can write a simple computer program that constructs 
> statements which 
> are a subset of those produced by humans (or any other system).  Bruno's UD 
> produces *all* 
> such statements.  So where's the contradiction?
>
>   
Yes you can generate all such statements.  /But then what*/*so what?
/*
*Please re-read the scenarioThis situation is very very specific:

1) Embodied situated robot scientist  is doing science on the 
'natural world'.

2) As a COMP artificial scientist , you are software. A formal 
system *ts* computes you.

3) All you ever do is categorise patterns and cross-correlate patterns 
in massive streams of numbers that arrive from your '/robot scientist 
suit/'.

4)  is a SCIENTIST. The entirety of the existence of  involves 
dealing with streams of numbers that are the result of an encounter with 
the radically unknown, which  is trying to find a 'universal 
abstraction' for = 'a law of nature'.

5) There is no 'out there in an environment' for . There is o

Re: Can mind be a computation if physics is fundamental?

[Colin Hales]

Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed 
refutation of computationalism.
It's going through peer review at the moment.

The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of 
'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being 
carried out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I 
drew an artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL 
COMPUTATION (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is 
that if COMP is true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The 
distinction should fail.

I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. 
Call this situation X.

If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I 
also found 2 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get 
their truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal 
arguments against COMP.

*FACT*: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal 
nature. That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form  
an fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The 
quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a 
hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie. 
Humans can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) 
violate any law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of 
nature in the process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe 
the unknown natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how 
humans exemplify an informal system. All over the world are quite normal 
(non-pathologically affected) humans with the same sensory systems and 
mental capacities. Yet all manner of ignorance and fervently held 
contradictory belief systems are 'rationally' adopted.
===
COMP fails when:
a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) 
scientist  and expect  to be able to carry out authentic 
original science on the a-priori unknownidentically to humans. To do 
this you use a human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do 
this your computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a 
suitable robotic form and then expect it to do science like humans. If 
COMP is true then the human scientist and the robot scientist should be 
indistinguishable.

b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that  be 
able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.

c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.

BECAUSE:  (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.

(b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very 
idea of  ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is 
impossible. This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, 
formal set of rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to 
construct statements that are the product of an informal system (a human 
scientist). The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. The 
formal system is 100% deterministic, unable to violate rules. When it 
encounters a liar it will be unable to resolve what falsehood is being 
presented. It requires all falsehoods to be a-priori known. Impossible. 
How can a formal system encounter a world in which COMP is actually 
false? If it could, COMP would be FALSE! If COMP is true then it can't. 
Humans are informalergo we have some part of the natural world 
capable of behaving informally=> GOTCHA!

This argument is has very 'Godellian' structure. That was accidental.

When you say 'physics is fundamental'. I don't actually known what that 
means.

What I can tell you is that to construct an authentic ARTIFICIAL 
SCIENTIST (not a simulation, but an 'inorganic' scientist), you have to 
*replicate the real physics of cognition, *not 'compute a model' of the 
cognition or a 'compute a model of the physics underlying cognition'. 
Then an artificial scientist is a scioentist in the same sense that 
artificial light is light.

R.I.P. COMP

=> Strong AI (a computer can be a mind) is false.
=> Weak AI (A computer model of cognition can never be actual cognition) 
is true.

It's nice to finally have at least one tiny little place (X) where the 
seeds of clarity can be found.

Cheers
colin hales




1Z wrote:
>
> On 31 July, 22:39, David Nyman  wrote:
>   
>> I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
>> and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
>> real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
>> Hmm...
>>
>> An

Re: Dreaming On

[Colin Hales]

http://www.mindmatter.de/mmabstracts7_1.htm 
<http://www.mindmatter.de/mmabstracts7_1.htm>

*Intentionality and Computationalism: A Diagonal Argument *
Laureano Luna Cabanero, Department of Philosophy, IES Francisco Marin, 
Siles, Spain, and Christopher G. Small, Department of Statistics and 
Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo, Canada

Computationalism is the claim that all possible thoughts are 
computations, i.e. executions of algorithms. The aim of the paper is to 
show that if intentionality is semantically clear, in a way defined in 
the paper, then computationalism must be false. Using a convenient 
version of the phenomenological relation of intentionality and a 
diagonalization device inspired by Thomson's theorem of 1962, we show 
there exists a thought that cannot be a computation.
-

How good an argument it is I don't know . I am in the process of 
getting my hands on the paper.
Meanwhile, if any of you folks can get it sooner I'd be very interested.

BTW I have recently submitted my own refutation of COMP to a 
journal...it superficially resembles a more practical version of the 
above. Basically.a computationalist-based artificial scientist 
cannot propose/debate, let alone test, computationalism as a 'law of 
nature'.  Confusing/self-referential but has teeth as an argument.

Q. How many times does it take for dogma X to be refuted before projects 
totally dependent on the truth of dogma X get their outcome 
projections/expectations reviewed?

cheers
colin hales

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Re: Dreaming On

[Colin Hales]

David Nyman wrote:
> Thanks to everyone who responded to my initial sally on dreams and
> machines.  Naturally I have arrogated the right to plagiarise your
> helpful comments in what follows, which is an aphoristic synthesis of
> my understanding of the main points that have emerged thus far.  I
> hope this will be helpful for future discussion.
>
> THE APHORISMS
>
> We do not see the mind, we see *through* the mind.
>
> What we see through the mind - its contents - is mind-stuff: dreams.
>
> Hence dream content - i.e. whatever is capable of being present to us
> - can't be our ontology - this would be circular (the eye can't see
> itself).
>   
Yes. This is the big issue.

(a) Descriptions of 'how it appears to us' (empirical science by the 
awake scientist!)
and
(b) Descriptions of 'what it is that appears to us as it does' (science 
of a noumenon)

cannot be the same set of descriptions to the one in which 'the 
appearances' are being delivered. Especially when (b) descriptions are 
responsible for creating the way it appears in (a). Seems fairly self 
evident. Assuming (a) and (b) are identical (or that (b) is 
unapproachable)  is not justified.

The assumption in your comments is that there is/needs to be 'mind 
stuff' is wrong. /ALL/ of it is "some undescribed stuff", not just that 
resulting in mind.  The assumption in your statement is that we need 
something  extra just to explain mind pressupposes that everything else 
is sorted out. It hasn't. It never has been. The singular unique feature 
of mind is not 'stuff', it is merely the perspective of it  first 
person.

ask this instead

What kind of universe is it (= wots the stuff?, (b) and its behaviour) 
such that a 'first person perspective' can result in which it appears 
(a)-ish to us all, and in particular, makes a brain look brain when it 
is delivering the first person perspective which delivers (a) to us?

Does X being self-evident classify X as an aphorism? I think not.
:-)
col





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Re: No MWI

[Colin Hales]

Brent Meeker wrote:
> Colin Hales wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>> When I read quantum mechanics and listen to those invested in the many 
>> places the mathematics leads, What strikes me is the extent to which the 
>> starting point is mathematics. That is, the entire discussion is couched 
>> as if the mathematics is defining what there is, rather than a mere 
>> describing what is there. I can see that the form of the mathematics 
>> projects a multitude of possibilities. But those invested in the  
>> business seem to operate under the assumption - an extra belief  - about 
>> the relationship of the mathematics to reality. It imbues the 
>> discussion. At least that is how it appears to me. Consider the 
>> pragmatics of it. I, scientist X,  am in a position of adopting 2 
>> possible mindsets:
>>
>> Position 1
>> 1a) The mathematics of quantum mechanics is very accurately predictive 
>> of observed phenomena
>> 1b) Reality literally IS the mathematics of quantum mechanics (and by 
>> extension all the multitudinous alternative realities actually exist). 
>> Therefor to discuss mathematical constructs is to speak literally of 
>> reality. My ability to mentally manipulate mathematics therefore makes 
>> me a powerful lord of reality and puts me in a position of great 
>> authority and clarity.
>> 
>
> I don't know many physicist who takes this position. I guess Max Tegmark 
> would 
> be one.  But most physicists seem to take the math as descriptive.  It is 
> more 
> often mathematicians who are Platonists; not I think because of ego, but 
> because 
> mathematics seems to be "discovered" rather than "invented".
>
>   
I know that most physicists would, when asked, likely deny that their 
mathematics has been taken as real. It's more that their behaviour is 
'as if' they have, because  position2 has not been adopted and there .
>> Position 2
>> 2a) The mathematics of quantum mechanics is very accurately predictive 
>> of observed phenomena
>> 2b) Reality is not the mathematics of (a). Reality is constructed of 
>> something that merely appears/behaves quantum-mechanically to an 
>> observer made of whatever it is, within a universe made of it. The 
>> mathematics of this "something" is not the mathematics of kind (a).
>> 
>
> What about the mathematics is as complete a description as we have of 
> whatever 
> underlying reality there may be.  So we might as well, provisionally, 
> identify 
> it with the real.
>
> Brent
>
>   

It's not complete and it has 1 chronic abject failure: to explain 
scientists (scientific observation). The position 1a 'laws of nature' 
presuppose the scientist and scientific observation in the sense that 
they merely 'organise appearances' in a scientist - the scientist is 
built into the laws and the explanation as to why there are any 
'appearances' at all (as delivered in brain material) goes 
unexplained... thrown away in the act of objectivity.

If there's a perfectly servicable alternative (position 2), and a 
chromic problem in cognitive science, the more reasonable (in terms of 
doubt management) position 2 might be thought to be deserving more 
attention

Hmmm. Just in case there's a misunderstanding of position 2, here's 
their contrast rather more pointedly:

Position 1
1a There's a mathematics which describes how the natural world behaves 
when we look.
1b Reality is literally made of the mathematics 1a. (I act as if this 
were the case)

Position 2
1a There's a mathematics which describes how the natural world behaves 
when we look.
1b There's a *separate* mathematics of an underlying reality which 
operates to produce an observer who sees the reality behaving as per 1a 
maths.
1c There's the actual underlying reality, which is doubted (not claimed) 
to 'be' 1b or 1a.

Position 2 is justified because when you simulate 2b it on a computer 
you can see, operating inside it, what constitutes the observation 
system of the scientist) ... it produces a scientist with a scientific 
observation system. That observation system reveals the natural world to 
be behaving 'as-if' math 1a was driving it, when in reality it is not. 
Thus the chronic problem is of position 1 behaviour is solved. Instead 
of "many" extra worlds... you only need 1. ... all the while MWI remains 
just as predictive.
==

I understand your position on the matter, but I wonder as to the 
psychology of it in general.

Let's posit position 2 as the real epistemic option for scientists 
inside a natural world. Lets say the 'hard problem' of explaining 
scientists is 

Re: No MWI

[Colin Hales]

Hi,
When I read quantum mechanics and listen to those invested in the many 
places the mathematics leads, What strikes me is the extent to which the 
starting point is mathematics. That is, the entire discussion is couched 
as if the mathematics is defining what there is, rather than a mere 
describing what is there. I can see that the form of the mathematics 
projects a multitude of possibilities. But those invested in the  
business seem to operate under the assumption - an extra belief  - about 
the relationship of the mathematics to reality. It imbues the 
discussion. At least that is how it appears to me. Consider the 
pragmatics of it. I, scientist X,  am in a position of adopting 2 
possible mindsets:

Position 1
1a) The mathematics of quantum mechanics is very accurately predictive 
of observed phenomena
1b) Reality literally IS the mathematics of quantum mechanics (and by 
extension all the multitudinous alternative realities actually exist). 
Therefor to discuss mathematical constructs is to speak literally of 
reality. My ability to mentally manipulate mathematics therefore makes 
me a powerful lord of reality and puts me in a position of great 
authority and clarity.

Position 2
2a) The mathematics of quantum mechanics is very accurately predictive 
of observed phenomena
2b) Reality is not the mathematics of (a). Reality is constructed of 
something that merely appears/behaves quantum-mechanically to an 
observer made of whatever it is, within a universe made of it. The 
mathematics of this "something" is not the mathematics of kind (a).

Note
1a) = 2a)
1b)  and 2b) they are totally different.

The (a) is completely consistent with either (b).
Yet we have religious zeal surrounding (1b)

I hope that you can see the subtlety of the distinction between position 
1 and position 2. As a thinking person in the logical position of 
wondering what position to adopt, position 1 is *completely 
unjustified*. The parsimonious position is one in which the universe is 
made of something other than 1b maths, and then to find a method of 
describing ways in which position 1 might seem apparent to an observer 
made of whatever the universe is actually made of.. The nice thing about 
position 2 is that I have room for *doubt* in 2b which does not exist in 
1b. In position 2 I have:

(i) laws of nature that are the describing system (predictive of 
phenomena in the usual ways)
(ii) behaviours of a doubtable 'stuff' relating in doubtable ways to 
produce an observer able to to (i)

In position 1 there is no doubt of kind (ii). That doubt is replaced by 
religious adherence to an unfounded implicit belief which imbues the 
discourse. At the same time  position 1 completely fails to explain an 
observer of the kind able to do 1a.

In my ponderings on this I am coming to the conclusion that the very 
nature of the discourse and training self-selects for people who's 
mental skills in abstract symbol manipulation make Position 1 a 
dominating tendency. Aggregates of position 1 thinkers - such as the 
everything list and 'fabric of reality' act like small cults. There is 
some kind of psychological payback involved in position 1 which selects 
for people susceptible to religiosity of kind 1b. Once you have a couple 
of generations of these folk who are so disconnected from the reality of 
themselves as embedded, situated agents/observers... that position 2, 
which involves an admission of permanent ignorance of some kind, and 
thereby demoting the physicist from the prime source of authority over 
reality, is marginalised and eventually more or less invisible.

It is not that MWI is true/false it's that confinement to the 
discourse of MWI alone is justified only on religious grounds of the 
kind I have delineated. You can be quite predictive and at the same time 
not actually be discussing reality at all - and you'll never realise it. 
I.E. Position 2 could be right and all the MWI predictions can still be 
right. Yet position 1 behaviour stops you from finding position 2 ... 
and problems unsolved because they are only solvable by position 2 
remain unsolved merely because of 1b religiosity.

Can anyone else here see this cultural schism operating?

regards

Colin Hales





Jason Resch wrote:
> The following link shows convincingly that what one gains by accepting
> MWI is far greater than what one loses (an answer to the born
> probabilities)
>
> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/if-many-worlds.html
>
> "The only law in all of quantum mechanics that is non-linear,
> non-unitary, non-differentiable and discontinuous.  It would prevent
> physics from evolving locally, with each piece only looking at its
> immediate neighbors.  Your 'collapse' would be the only fundamental
> phenomenon in all of physics with a preferred basis and a preferred
> space of simultaneity.  Collapse would be the only phenomenon in all

Re: Consciousness is information?

[Colin Hales]

Kelly wrote:
> On Apr 24, 3:14 am, Jason Resch  wrote:
>   
>> Kelly,
>>
>> Your arguments are compelling and logical, you have put a lot of doubt
>> in my mind about computationalism.
>> 
>
> Excellent!
>
> It sounds like you are following the same path as I did on all of
> this.
>
> So it makes sense to start with the idea of physicalism and the idea
> that the mind is like a very complex computer, since this explains
> third person observations of human behavior and ability very well I
> think.
>
> BUT, then the question of first person subjective consciousness
> arises.  Where does that fit in with physicalism?  So the next step is
> to expand to physicalism + full computationalism, where the
> computational activities of the brain also explain consciousness, in
> addition to behavior and ability.
>   
It's really cool to see folks exploring where I have been and seeing the 
same problems. I might be able to shed a little light on a productive 
'next step' for exploration:

Try understanding the difference between a natural world which IS 
literally a mathematics, not a natural world described BY a mathematics. 
Note that a Turing machine is an instrument of a 'BY' computationalism, 
not the natural computation that I am speaking of. If you can get your 
head around this, then the answers (to a first person perspective) can 
be found. Stop thinking 'computation OF' and start thinking 'natural 
computation that IS'. Also very useful is the idea of using the 
explanation of a capacity to do science (grounded in a first person 
experience that is, in context, literally scientific observation) ... 
this is a very testable behaviour and represents the last thing 
physicists seem to want to explain: /themselves/. A green field in which 
it is obvious that cognition is most definitely not computation in the 
'computation BY' sense.

Enjoy!

colin hales



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Dual Aspect Science

[Colin Hales]

Hi folks,
I am finally getting somewhere. My paper has just been published. :

Hales, C. 'Dual Aspect Science', Journal of Consciousness Studies vol. 
16, no. 2-3, 2009. 30-73.

Under dual aspect science exploration and deliverables take on two 
fundamental forms:

Laws-of-appearance ( = T, what we do now) 
Laws-of-structure( = T' what we are recently/partly doing but wasn't 
organised/recognised).

A physics of P-consciousness becomes empirically tractable under the DAS 
framework set of  structure (T') descriptions.  The DAS paper resulted 
from empirical science (observation of scientists) and is a framework 
which is empirically testable - the procedure is in the paper. No 
philosophy is required. The observed behaviour of scientists operating 
under the framework is decisive.

I can deliver a .PDF of the paper to anyone who is interested (off list).

The idea is that science's output (= "laws of nature") actually has two 
intimately enmeshed 100% mutually consistent but very different forms:
T (grammars as per usual)
T'   (computational output in a generalised dynamic form of cellular 
automaton)

The former is a set of forever-uncertain rules about 100% certain 
(agreed) things.
The latter is a set of 100% certain (chosen/agreed) rules about  
forever-uncertain structural primitives.

The two are 'joined' and empirically supported by the one single 
evidence system - P-consciousness.

This nicely (mirror-) symmetric knowledge framework eliminates a raft of 
strange behavioural inconsistencies in science (in the behaviour of 
scientists). DAS finally enables us to formally deal with the underlying 
structure of things in an empirically viable way. It means that 
scientists trading in loops, strings, froth, branes etc etc finally have 
a home. All we have to do is use our theory to make a prediction of the 
appearance brain material consistent with the delivery of 
P-consciousness as predicted by the T' aspect structural primitive of 
choice. T-aspect science cannot possibly do this. In the paper is a 
large list of the kinds of predictions to expect of your T'-aspect.

I have used my loop structure - cellular automaton. It predicts brains 
look and operate like they do, although its hard to see at first.  It is 
to be written up and published ASAP. Maybe others would like to see how 
they can do the same with other structural primitives.

The abstract is below. I also have a 'DAS how to/reader user guide' 
which will help you distil the DAS paper - which is a bit of a monster - 
43 pages. The computational exploration of loops is, in effect, the 
actual scientific delivery-form of the 'entropy calculus' I have spoken 
about from time to time here.

I discuss the nature and forms of TOE in the DAS paper. They have 2 
forms as well. Indeed the T'-aspect TOE is literally the rules and 
initialisation of the 'natural CA'. You can't analytically express it. 
You have to compute it and slice it to observe it.

Enough for now!

cheers
colin hales

*ABSTRACT*. Our chronically impoverished explanatory capacity in respect 
of P-consciousness is highly suggestive of a problem with science 
itself, rather than its lack of acquisition of some particular 
knowledge. The hidden assumption built into science is that science 
itself is a completed human behaviour. Removal of this assumption is 
achieved through a simple revision to our science model which is 
constructed, outlined and named ‘dual aspect science’ (DAS). It is 
constructed with reference to existing science being ‘single aspect 
science’. DAS is consistent with and predictive of the very explanatory 
poverty that generated it and is simultaneously a seamless upgrade; no 
existing law of nature is altered or lost. The framework is completely 
empirically self-consistent and is validated empirically. DAS  
eliminates the behavioural inconsistencies currently inhabiting a world 
in which single aspect science has been inherited rather than chosen and 
in which its presuppositions are implemented through habit rather than 
by scientific examination of options by the scientists actually carrying 
out science. The proposed DAS framework provides a working vantage point 
from which an explanation of P-consciousness becomes expected and 
meaningful. The framework requires that we rediscover what we scientists 
do and then discover something new about ourselves: that how we have 
been doing science is not the entire story. Dual aspect science shows us 
what we have not been doing. 

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Re: Cellular automata @ home?

[Colin Hales]

What you have here is a phenomenon which has been described a lot for 50 
years. It appears in the literature in the descriptions of the 
synchronous behaviour of crickets, cicadas and fireflies.

Eg:
D. E. Kim, "A spiking neuron model for synchronous flashing of 
fireflies," Biosystems, vol. 76, pp. 7-20, 2004.

V. Nityananda and R. Balakrishnan, "Synchrony during acoustic 
interactions in the bushcricket Mecopoda 'Chirper' (Tettigoniidae : 
Orthoptera) is generated by a combination of chirp-by-chirp resetting 
and change in intrinsic chirp rate," Journal of Comparative Physiology 
a-Neuroethology Sensory Neural and Behavioral Physiology, vol. 193, pp. 
51-65, Jan 2007.

I. Stewart, "The synchronicity of firefly flashing," Scientific 
American, vol. 280, pp. 104-106, Mar 1999.

S. H. Strogatz and I. Stewart, "Coupled oscillators and biological 
synchronization," Scientific American, vol. 269, p. 102, 12 1993.

and there is a classic book

A. T. Winfree, The geometry of biological time. New York: Springer 
Verlag, 1980.


Such ideas are currently being used (mathematics thereof) by two people 
10 feet from me, who are working on epilepsy prediction and detection.

What you have realised, however, is the fact that neural networks (which 
is exactly what the garden lights behaviour capture, albeit primitively) 
/are identical to a form of (multidimensional/dynamic) cellular automaton/.

What you have demonstrated is precisely what I am doing to create an 
AGI. The killer question: When might it be 'like something' to 'BE' a 
collection of such objects behaving dynamically? (or "what might it be 
like to be an entity inside a cellular automaton?")

Nice one!

cheers
colin



> Hello!
>  
> I invite to check my idea of a *home made complex self-organizing system:*
> ** 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTEWUTl_OcI
>  
>  
> Greetings!!
>
>
> >

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Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started

[Colin Hales]

The file. sorry  use *Rejection 101.pdf*
enjoy!
colin


Colin Hales wrote:
> Hi Bruno,
> I feel your angst. The received view is a blunt and frightened beast, 
> guarded by the ignorant and uncreative in wily protection of turf and 
> co-conspirator. I recently did a powerpoint presentation called 
> "rejection 101". It sounds like you have been through exactly what I 
> have been through - except on a geological timescale that would tire a 
> god. Although I am starting to make progress... I regard that progress 
> to be achieved in spite of them, not because of their vision or 
> knowledge. The science I thought I was going to find was full of those 
> who frolic in ideas sadly I was mistaken. Now, when I think I have 
> made progress - I know that progress to be mediated by the less than 
> adequate  - and promulgated by momentum rather than incisive scrutiny- 
> and it doesn't feel good.
>
> see file *2008_Thu_23_Oct.pdf * in the googlegroups everythinglist 
> file store.
>
> So Amoebas speak english now, eh? Excellent. :-)
>
> cheers,
> Colin
>
>
> m.a. wrote:
>> *Bruno,*
>> *   I've often wondered why neither Dr. Deutsch nor Alan 
>> Forrester has commented on your theory of UDA and AUDA. I certainly 
>> would be interested in their views. A theory that has execised some 
>> of the best minds on this list for months on end certainly deserves 
>> serious consideration. Best,*
>> 
>> 
>> *martin a.*
>> ** 
>> ** 
>> ** 
>> - Original Message -
>> From: "Bruno Marchal" mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
>> To: > <mailto:everything-l...@googlegroups.com>>
>> Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 2:49 PM
>> Subject: Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started
>>
>>
>> > Even with politics operating behind the scene (which you have
>> > hinted), I can't imagine that nothing of the work is publishable.
>>
>>
>> I already discussed proposition of publishing "Conscience et 
>> Mécanisme" with three publishers, before my thesis was judged not 
>> receivable (meaning no private defense, nor public defense, I have 
>> *never* met those who criticize, not even my work, but a product of 
>> their imagination). Then silence, even after the defense in Lille, and 
>> even more after the paradoxical price in Paris.
>>
>> I cannot explain. Or I can explain except that here reality is far 
>> beyond fiction as usual, but also more sad, and rather delicate if 
>> only because that story is not finished.
>> My life is more unbelievable than any thing I assert in my works. It 
>> took me 22 years to understand what happened in 1977, and since then.
>>
>> I feel responsible to let them build they own trap, and then  get 
>> myself a bit worried seeing them to protect themselves from Brussels 
>> to Paris!
>>
>> It is not because I have done an "original work" (say) in Brussels, 
>> that I got problems there. It is because I got problems in Brussels 
>> that I have done an original work. In 1977, they give me no chance, 
>> not even getting out of Belgium.
>> In 1994, my work was criticize vaguely as "not original", "too much 
>> simple",  and then "delirious". And now already "not from him" in some 
>> place. Which again shows the problems is not related with my findings, 
>> except it belongs to the kind of things you can easily use to treat 
>> you as a fool (Gödel's theorem, Quantum mechanics, consciousness: few 
>> understand so it is easy to say "not serious").
>>
>> The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It 
>> is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible, 
>> from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is 
>> only one, very clever, but very bad,  guy.
>> Now that "little scandal" has become big enough to throw light on 
>> other really bigger scandals. There are "cadavres dans les placards", 
>> as we say in French (corpses hidden in boxes). Mean of pressures.
>>
>> I still believe in academies, but like in School "serial killer" can 
>> exist. When you see the time made by religious institution to protect 
>> their member of their hierarchy from their much grave behavior, I 
>> estimate it could take a long time if ever to understand

Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started

[Colin Hales]

Hi Bruno,
I feel your angst. The received view is a blunt and frightened beast, 
guarded by the ignorant and uncreative in wily protection of turf and 
co-conspirator. I recently did a powerpoint presentation called 
"rejection 101". It sounds like you have been through exactly what I 
have been through - except on a geological timescale that would tire a 
god. Although I am starting to make progress... I regard that progress 
to be achieved in spite of them, not because of their vision or 
knowledge. The science I thought I was going to find was full of those 
who frolic in ideas sadly I was mistaken. Now, when I think I have 
made progress - I know that progress to be mediated by the less than 
adequate  - and promulgated by momentum rather than incisive scrutiny- 
and it doesn't feel good.

see file *2008_Thu_23_Oct.pdf * in the googlegroups everythinglist file 
store.

So Amoebas speak english now, eh? Excellent. :-)

cheers,
Colin


m.a. wrote:
> *Bruno,*
> *   I've often wondered why neither Dr. Deutsch nor Alan 
> Forrester has commented on your theory of UDA and AUDA. I certainly 
> would be interested in their views. A theory that has execised some of 
> the best minds on this list for months on end certainly deserves 
> serious consideration. Best,*
> 
> 
> *martin a.*
> ** 
> ** 
> ** 
> - Original Message -
> From: "Bruno Marchal" mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
> To:  >
> Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 2:49 PM
> Subject: Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started
>
>
> > Even with politics operating behind the scene (which you have
> > hinted), I can't imagine that nothing of the work is publishable.
>
>
> I already discussed proposition of publishing "Conscience et 
> Mécanisme" with three publishers, before my thesis was judged not 
> receivable (meaning no private defense, nor public defense, I have 
> *never* met those who criticize, not even my work, but a product of 
> their imagination). Then silence, even after the defense in Lille, and 
> even more after the paradoxical price in Paris.
>
> I cannot explain. Or I can explain except that here reality is far 
> beyond fiction as usual, but also more sad, and rather delicate if 
> only because that story is not finished.
> My life is more unbelievable than any thing I assert in my works. It 
> took me 22 years to understand what happened in 1977, and since then.
>
> I feel responsible to let them build they own trap, and then  get 
> myself a bit worried seeing them to protect themselves from Brussels 
> to Paris!
>
> It is not because I have done an "original work" (say) in Brussels, 
> that I got problems there. It is because I got problems in Brussels 
> that I have done an original work. In 1977, they give me no chance, 
> not even getting out of Belgium.
> In 1994, my work was criticize vaguely as "not original", "too much 
> simple",  and then "delirious". And now already "not from him" in some 
> place. Which again shows the problems is not related with my findings, 
> except it belongs to the kind of things you can easily use to treat 
> you as a fool (Gödel's theorem, Quantum mechanics, consciousness: few 
> understand so it is easy to say "not serious").
>
> The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It 
> is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible, 
> from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is 
> only one, very clever, but very bad,  guy.
> Now that "little scandal" has become big enough to throw light on 
> other really bigger scandals. There are "cadavres dans les placards", 
> as we say in French (corpses hidden in boxes). Mean of pressures.
>
> I still believe in academies, but like in School "serial killer" can 
> exist. When you see the time made by religious institution to protect 
> their member of their hierarchy from their much grave behavior, I 
> estimate it could take a long time if ever to understand and recognize 
> what happened.
> And I have no problem with serious academicians and scientists which 
> understand enough to understand it is "serious", even if probably 
> wrong, which I have myself never ceased to believe plausible (which 
> explains why I am eager to discuss the validity of the UDA steps, with 
> people interested). I did defend the work as PhD thesis. I was asked 
> many questions, I answered them and everyone got the idea. Some people 
> takes time, but most get enough to trust the interest of the work. 
> Still today, few get both UDA and AUDA.
>
> UDA is almost easy, but not so easy. AUDA is very *simple*, once you 
> understand enough standard logic (which I have discovered is 
> excessively rare). The whole thing is strongly interdisciplinary, and 
> between disciplines,

A scientifically sound, objective test for consciousness

[Colin Hales]

(The journal is free!)

The test itself is not easy or cheap - but it is possible AND you can 
perform it on humans as well as AI. To deny that the test is valid 
involves a denial that scientists have P-consciousness, whilst being 
totally demanding of it and dependent on it for all science outcomes.

Hales, C. (2009), 'An empirical framework for objective testing for 
P-consciousness in an artificial agent', The Open Artificial 
Intelligence Journal, 3, pp. 1-15.

http://www.bentham.org/open/toaij/

*Abstract:* Two related and relatively obscure issues in science have 
eluded empirical tractability. Both can be directly traced to progress 
in artificial intelligence. The first is scientific proof of 
consciousness or otherwise in anything. The second is the role of 
consciousness in intelligent behaviour. This document approaches both 
issues by exploring the idea of using scientific behaviour 
self-referentially as a benchmark in an objective test for 
P-consciousness, which is the relevant
critical aspect of consciousness. Scientific behaviour is unique in 
being both highly formalised and provably critically dependent on the 
P-consciousness of the primary senses. In the context of the primary 
senses P-consciousness is literally a formal identity with scientific 
observation. As such it is intrinsically afforded a status of critical 
dependency demonstrably no different to any other critical dependency in 
science, making scientific behaviour ideally suited to a 
self-referential scientific circumstance. The 'provability' derives from 
the delivery by science of objectively verifiable 'laws of nature'. By 
exploiting the critical dependency, an empirical framework is 
constructed as a refined and specialised version of existing 
propositions for a 'test for consciousness'. The specific role of 
P-consciousness is clarified: it is a human intracranial central nervous 
system construct that symbolically grounds the scientist in the distal 
external world, resulting in our ability to recognise, characterise and 
adapt to distal natural world novelty. It is hoped that in opening a 
discussion of a novel approach, the artificial intelligence community 
may eventually find a viable contender for its long overdue scientific 
basis.

cheers
colin hales




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Re: Mind and personhood. Was: Kim 1

[Colin Hales]

A. Wolf wrote:
>> "..*some subjective experience of personhood or* "being" *that we all 
>> share*,
>> and each of us presumably experiences *something* like that."
>>
>> I emphasize the 'something': who knows if we experience (share?) the same
>> feeling? The words we use to describe it are not more relevant than
>> describing 'red'.
>> 
>
> Yes, absolutely.  Hence the use of the word "presumably".  The fact that 
> people seem to share an experience we can't directly measure is interesting. 
> The evidence of mankind's obsession with the experience of consciousness 
> comes from the amount of philosophical discussion (like this) that exists in 
> literature, both scientific and recreational.
>
>   
>> Experience is an undefined mental marvel and conscious?
>> 
>
> What I'm referring to is the fact that so many people believe in a "soul", 
> that we experience consciousness in a way where we feel like we are the 
> author of our own destiny, that we experience life as though we are 
> travelling through time and making decisions.  The idea of "me" has a static 
> implication that persists throughout our lives even as we grow and evolve. 
> It serves both social and self-preservationist functions, certainly, but the 
> phenomenon also causes a lot of discussion.  Something about these 
> experiences is remarkable enough that mankind has authored a great deal of 
> text on it, and it forms the foundation of much of our mythology and 
> understanding of self.
>
> So the conscious experience I'm referring to is the commonality of the 
> experience of self-awareness as reported (orally and in writing) by human 
> beings...in particular the fact that most people are fully convinced that 
> their experiences are unique and an accurate reflection of the nature of 
> time, that they must either persist forever in some ephemeral form or else 
> the Universe ceases to be from their point of view when they die, those 
> sorts of things.
>
>   
>> A 'computer' (what kind of? the embryonic simpleton of a pre-programed
>> digital machine
>> as we know it?) to "...spit out a bunch of
>> symbols related to the experience" of self- awareness itself." - ???
>> 
>
> What I meant here is this:
>
> It's not necessarily surprising that people would write a lot of things 
> about the soul, even if the soul does not exist in the same sense we 
> experience it.  It's quite possible, scientifically speaking, that the 
> behavior of "write and talk a great deal about the experience of 'being' and 
> how magical it is" is a natural consequence of any self-aware system.  A 
> common marker of self-awareness might be illogically rejecting the truth of 
> one's own automation.
>
> Anna
>   
Interesting point.
Consider a state of science (scientist behaviour) where
a) consciousness = the ultimate source of final clinching scientific 
evidence = measurement
and
b) science tries to use (a) to explain consciousness and fails 
constantly (2000+ years)
then
c) still fails to let consciousness be evidence of whatever it is that 
actually generates it

(c) is a kind of denial of the form you identify.
Therefore you have proved that scientists are self-aware (= conscious)
i.e. only people able to make this kind of self-referential mistake 
(demonstrating this kind of illogical rejection of a self-referential 
claim) can be conscious.

An ability to deny self-awareness as a marker of self awareness. You can 
use this as a logical bootstrap to sort things out.

I like it!

cheers
colin hales


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Re: MGA for DUMMIES

[Colin Hales]

Hi,
Computationalsim pronounced dead here:
Bringsjord, S. (1999). The Zombie Attack on the Computational Conception 
of Mind. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LIX(1), 41-69.
cheers
colin


Kim Jones wrote:
> A representation of a thing (say MGA) is as good (ie as authentic) as  
> the thing being represented.
>
> Yes?
>
> Autrement dit:
>
>
> there is no especial difference between the movie and the subject (of  
> the movie) - where the movie is a more or less "complete" (whatever  
> that means) representation of the subject
>
>
> I have always FELT this to be true
>
> Guys,
>
>
> There is a great need to SIMPLIFY all this stuff for dummies like me
>
>
> Somebody please write "The Dummie's Guide to the Computationalist  
> Hypothesis"
>
>
> You stand to make beaucoup de fric
>
>
> K
>
>
>
> >
>   

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Re: Confirmed: Reality is the dream of NUMBERS

[Colin Hales]

Kim Jones wrote:
> On 24/11/2008, at 1:50 PM, Colin Hales wrote:
>
>   
>> It seems that the last thing physicists want to do is predict  
>> themselves. They do absolutely "everything" except that. When they  
>> say "everything" in a "Theory of Everything", that's what they  
>> actually mean: Everything except physicists (and their P- 
>> consciousness).
>>
>> 
>
> Yes. It's 2,000+ years of:
>
>
> The eye cannot see itself in action (EVEN in a mirror - try catching  
> your eye in the act of moving when you have a shave tomorrow)
>
> The tongue cannot taste itself (except after a hangover maybe)
>
> The hammer cannot hit itself (always wondered about this one...)
>
> The boot drive in your PC cannot analyse any problems it might be  
> having IF the diagnostic software is run out of the boot drive (very  
> sad, that)
>
> You cannot tell that the Earth is round if you are standing on it  
> (senses bedevil the intellect)
>
> You cannot tell if the Sun goes round the Earth or the Earth goes  
> round the Sun if you are standing on the one or the other (ditto)
>
> You cannot be sure if you are sane or insane ('Cogito ergo sum' is  
> therefore nonsense - somebody tell poor old René)
>
> You cannot tell if you are a self-referentially correct machine or not  
> (Go Bruno!)
>
> You cannot be sure that anybody else exists apart from your experience  
> of them (GO the solipsists!!!)
>
> You cannot tell if we are a simulation or the real McCoy - whatever  
> that is (GO Nick Bostrom!!!)
>   
I beg to disagree with this...you won;t have qualia unless the noumenon 
is real, not 'computed/abstracted on something else)... but this begs 
the whole COMP argument, which we've all done to death before. It'll keep.
> You cannot tell whether the temporary equilibrium that is Nothing will  
> break down at some time and become 
>
> Well - it already has, hasn't it? Isn't that why we are here?
>   
An unstable equilibrium is one where the slightest departure from the 
null-point results in a massive departure (positive feedback). So 
yep..we are in one of those. I rather nifty one I think.
> So - in answer to the question "Why is there something rather than  
> nothing?" - I believe the answer to be:
>
> "Nonsense. Nothing exists."
>
> cheers,
>
> Kim
>
>
>
>   
I have to agree. Nothing really exists. Indeed it's impossible for 
Nothing not to exist. We are the Not-Nothings that prove it and 
taxes of course. :-)

cheers
colin




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Re: Confirmed: Reality is the dream of NUMBERS

[Colin Hales]

Tom Caylor wrote:
> On Nov 23, 4:29 pm, Colin Hales <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>   
>> "According to this article, the best we can do is to VIRTUALLY CONFIRM
>> something. But since reality is VIRTUAL, according to this VIRTUAL
>> CONFIRMATION, is not VIRTUAL CONFIRMATION equivalent, in reality, to
>> CONFIRMATION?"
>>
>> 'Confirmation' (insofar as consistency with a model does that) of
>> virtual particles as a model of appearances cannot be confused with a
>> 'virtual' or 'AS-IF' confirmation. Scientists don't act 'as if' they do
>> science. They actually do it, even if it's only the 'appearances' half
>> of the pair of possible science models). So the above sentence conflates
>> terms, which is why I thought you weren't serious.
>>
>> 
>
> Yeah, that was me (really) with my virtual tongue in my virtual cheek
> trying to be really funny (in reality), whether successful or not.
>
>   
gotcha!
>   
>> Reality can be made of interacting 'somethings', where that 'something'
>> has not even been uttered yet in any physics ever, and the results in
>> the paper would still be as they are because all the scientists are
>> doing is organising appearances.
>>
>> 
>
> I'm just trying to wax philosophical here, but do you think that our
> goal should actually be to utter that 'something'?  Do you think we
> could?  Would we be able to understand it if we uttered it?  Or is
> this simply the realm of faith?  As in Bruno's definition of reality,
> it's the un-totally-explainable reason why we keep doing science?
>   
*(a) Appearance Aspect*
We utter all existing "laws of appearances" as 'laws of nature' knowing 
they are not actually proven. An alien with a totally different 
P-consciousness would have a completely different collection of "laws of 
appearances" which would be equally predictive (human and Alien agree on 
predictions, not laws of nature).

*(b) Structure Aspect*
OTOH, if we also allow ourselves to hypothesise 'structural primitives 
and their appropriate rule sets of interaction such that (a) an observer 
emerged and became a scientist with a P-consciousness and that 
simultaneously was consistent with (b) all the "laws of appearances". 
The 'structural primitives' and rules are no better known than. Human 
and Alien 'laws of structure' must converge, for both human and alien 
are made of it. You'd have to translate them into each other's syntax, 
but once translated they must be identical.

*-*
(a) is NOT reality, but about it.
(b) is NOT reality, but about it.
In both cases we have ambiguity and lack of certainty (in the sense of 
ultimate truth).

So in what sense can anyone claim that in (a) we have accessed 
anything proven, ultimate or unique? They are all interim hypotheses of 
status "thus far not wrong" and predictive.

Likewise in (b).

So yes we can most certainly 'utter that something'we have no 
lesser grounds than we have to 'utter the existing appearances'. What we 
don't have any sane right to continue to do is install arbitrary beliefs 
based on maths rapture that  (a) and (b) are identical or  to 
install metabelief in (a) that enshrines (a) by assuming a structural 
role to certain (a) maths ... where both  and  have failed 
chronically for 2000 years to predict P-consciousness, which must 
clearly be the responsibility of (b), the noumenon for (a) science 
presupposes P-consciousness and scientists.

*So yeah!. Let there be LOTS of such utterances and no more 
religious metabelief about (a)!*

This result has come from years of forensic metascience on my part.  
Here's an extract from the 'Dual Aspect Science' paper:

"A final contextual note. The idea of non-uniqueness of the knowledge 
bases (T and T') of human science is quite resonant with other shifts in 
perspective in the past. Human science must be a little sobered under 
the dual aspect framework because the laws originally constructed under 
a single aspect framework are recognised as non-unique and human-centric 
under a dual aspect framework. In going to dual aspect, human 'laws of 
nature' are displaced from the 'centre of knowledge' in the same way 
that the earth was displaced from the centre of the universe in the 
science of days gone by. On reflection it is impossible not to notice 
that if the transformation to dual aspect science is to have its 
objectors, those objectors can be seen to have the role of the church in 
the original scientific upheavals. The notional '/church of metabeliefs 
Figure 2(a) and 2(b)/' w

Re: Confirmed: Reality is the dream of NUMBERS

[Colin Hales]

Kim Jones wrote:
>
> On 24/11/2008, at 10:29 AM, Colin Hales wrote:
>
>> OK. I was rowing my apparently virtual boat merrily down the stream. 
>> But apparently that's not interesting enough. :-)
>
>
> It's more interesting when you get a barbershop quartet to sing it as 
> a round - then you get polyphony!
>
>
he he.
>>
>>
>> VIRTUAL is just a word. "AS-IF" would be a good synonym. The 
>> physicists in question are trying to make sense of a *model* of 
>> appearances (how the world appears to them when they look). They can 
>> be 100% predictive  (in the article now, 98% predictive) and be 100% 
>> not talking about what reality is made of.
>
>
> Agreed - you have explained this very well in many of your other 
> posts. I'm not even a physicist's or a logician's or even a humble 
> mathematician's bootlace, so if I can understand you, that's a big 
> complement on the clarity of your exposition
I think I might be a physicist's armpit or maybe the itchy bit that you 
just can't get at. :-)
>
>> The reason is that they build the phenomenal consciousness of the 
>> scientists into all laws whilst creating a set of laws of appearances 
>> that entirely and permanently fail to predict phenomenal 
>> consicousness. A system I am entirely fed up with and choose mostly 
>> to resign myself to (in the sense of I give up arguing about it).
>>
>
>
> So here I may need some help. Aren't you some kind of latter-day 
> Copenhagenist in this? Or are you saying scientists introduce the 
> observer as if real and then fail to see his reality in the data (as 
> somehow affecting the data?) I know this list has been pummelling away 
> at this issue for years, but I was just hoping that somebody for once 
> may have actually damped down the dust a little - as this article 
> suggests. Psychologist Carl Jung got very excited in the late 50s 
> after he gained a rudimentary understanding of particle physics from 
> Wolfgang Pauli and was completely over the moon about Heisenberg's 
> Uncertainty Principle because he had always believed in his heart of 
> hearts that reality was God's "dream" (he was a bit of a closet 
> theologian as well) and was seeing in all this confirmation of the 
> central place in the universe of human consciousness (the "psyche" as 
> he and Freud called it)
>
> He saw this as God's hand at work. Maybe this is tangential to the 
> point; I don't know
I choose this:
*Or are you saying scientists introduce the observer as if real and then 
fail to see his reality in the data (as somehow affecting the data?)
*as me (ish)

QM goes this far:
(a) The human scientist  is inside the system described.
(b) In a scientific act the human is involved in the particular outcome.
(c) The observation then acts in support of the QM model.

QM's XYZ interpetation then says "reality if made of my flavour of math 
XYZ". and then runs off into the implications of the *math*, rather than 
what reality actually is. In other words they all attribute a QM "law of 
appearance" in some way as structural.

The thing is that this mis-attribution fails because it fails in all 
ways to predict phenomenal (P-)consciousness. Prediction (c) is merely 
"contents of P-consciousness" = particular observation. I mean it (QM) 
fails to predict the existence of P-consciousness.which is EXACTLY 
the failure you would predict would occur if appearances were NOT 
structural in any way (or better - that descriptions of structure and 
descriptions of appearances are NOT the same thing).

I am not saying that there is a discovery to be made in the existing 
paradigm of physics.

I am saying that the discovery to be made is about OURSELVESwe must 
discover how to do science, rather than accept hand-me-down dogma from 
our ignorant forbears via the mentor/novice system, which is what 
actually happens.

>
>
>
>> Reality can be made of interacting 'somethings', where that 
>> 'something' has not even been uttered yet in any physics ever, and 
>> the results in the paper would still be as they are because all the 
>> scientists are doing is organising appearances.
>
>
> I have absolutely no problem with that thought. Who would have even 
> DREAMED of Dark Matter and Dark Energy before they turned up? Your 
> separation of the two "systems" of thinking into the subjective world 
> of appearances and the phenomenal (virtual/"as-if") world strikes me 
> as extremely useful and simplifies a lot of the angels-on-pinheads 
> aspect to much of the relentless discussion going on. Once again, 
> we've been talking about &q

Re: Confirmed: Reality is the dream of NUMBERS

[Colin Hales]

OK. I was rowing my apparently virtual boat merrily down the stream. But 
apparently that's not interesting enough. :-)

VIRTUAL is just a word. "AS-IF" would be a good synonym. The physicists 
in question are trying to make sense of a *model* of appearances (how 
the world appears to them when they look). They can be 100% predictive  
(in the article now, 98% predictive) and be 100% not talking about what 
reality is made of. The reason is that they build the phenomenal 
consciousness of the scientists into all laws whilst creating a set of 
laws of appearances that entirely and permanently fail to predict 
phenomenal consicousness. A system I am entirely fed up with and choose 
mostly to resign myself to (in the sense of I give up arguing about it).

Reality can be made of interacting 'somethings', where that 'something' 
has not even been uttered yet in any physics ever, and the results in 
the paper would still be as they are because all the scientists are 
doing is organising appearances.

So in terms of the use of the word 'virtual' you seem to want to discuss 
... yes, it is 'as-if' the universe were made of . But the universe could 
_actually_ be made of something completely different and they'll never 
know because they never let them consider the possibility of separation 
of "appearance" and "structure"(that creates appearances in humans made 
of the structure). So 

"According to this article, the best we can do is to VIRTUALLY CONFIRM
something. But since reality is VIRTUAL, according to this VIRTUAL
CONFIRMATION, is not VIRTUAL CONFIRMATION equivalent, in reality, to
CONFIRMATION?"

'Confirmation' (insofar as consistency with a model does that) of 
virtual particles as a model of appearances cannot be confused with a 
'virtual' or 'AS-IF' confirmation. Scientists don't act 'as if' they do 
science. They actually do it, even if it's only the 'appearances' half 
of the pair of possible science models). So the above sentence conflates 
terms, which is why I thought you weren't serious.

Getting back in boat, assuming merrily mode. It's as if I am rowing, 
downstream. :-)

cheers,
colin hales



Kim Jones wrote:
> Oh, somebody will stick their head up soon and disagree. Where would  
> all the fun and games be if some rash, working scientist actually  
> confirmed something?
>
> Counting angels on pinheads is a very satisfying intellectual pastime  
> for some - always was, always will be...
>
> K
>
> On 24/11/2008, at 7:18 AM, Tom Caylor wrote:
>
>   
>> I posted a comment to this article:
>>
>> "According to this article, the best we can do is to VIRTUALLY CONFIRM
>> something. But since reality is VIRTUAL, according to this VIRTUAL
>> CONFIRMATION, is not VIRTUAL CONFIRMATION equivalent, in reality, to
>> CONFIRMATION?"
>>
>> On Nov 22, 6:45 pm, Colin Hales <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> 
>>> I knew it
>>>
>>> "Row row row your boat
>>> Gently down the stream
>>> Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily
>>> Life is but a dream."
>>>
>>> Is actually a law of nature...
>>>
>>> cheers
>>>
>>> Colin Hales
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Kim Jones wrote:
>>>
>>>   
>>>> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-m 
>>>> ...
>>>> 
>>>> What's your definition of "reality"?
>>>> 
>>>> It is whatever it is.
>>>> It should be the roots of our knowledge and beliefs. It is what  
>>>> makes
>>>> us bet on the physical realities, on the psychological realities, on
>>>> the arithmetical realities and many other related realities, ... 
>>>> (Bruno
>>>> Marchal)
>>>> 
>>>> Email:
>>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>> 
>>>> Web:
>>>> http://web.mac.com/kmjcommp/Plenitude_Music
>>>> 
>>>> Phone:
>>>> (612) 9389 4239  or  0431 723 001- Hide quoted text -
>>>> 
>>> - Show quoted text -
>>>
>>>   
>
>
> >
>   

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Re: Confirmed: Reality is the dream of NUMBERS

[Colin Hales]

I knew it

"Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily
Life is but a dream."

Is actually a law of nature...

cheers

Colin Hales


Kim Jones wrote:
>
>
>
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html
>  
>
>
>
>
>
> What's your definition of "reality"?
>
>
> It is whatever it is.
> It should be the roots of our knowledge and beliefs. It is what makes 
> us bet on the physical realities, on the psychological realities, on 
> the arithmetical realities and many other related realities, ...(Bruno 
> Marchal)
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Email:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Web:
> http://web.mac.com/kmjcommp/Plenitude_Music
>
> Phone:
> (612) 9389 4239  or  0431 723 001 
>
>
>
>
>
> >

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Re: What the B***P do quantum physicists know?

[Colin Hales]

Michael Rosefield wrote:
> And of course you could always add  - all possible instances 
> of 
>
>
Yeah.. a new 'science of universe construction'? I wonder if there's a 
name for something like that? unigenesis?

As I said in my post to Jesse:
- - -- - - - - -
 is NOT underling reality, but a description of it. There may 
be 100 complete, consistent sets, all of which work as well as each 
other. We must live with that potential ambiguity. There's no 
fundamental reason why we are ever entitled to a unique solution to 
. But it may turn out that there can only be one. We'll never 
know unless we let ourselves look, will we??

 is NOT underling reality, but a description of its 
appearances to an observer inside a reality described structurally as 
. 100 different life-forms, as scientists/observers all over 
the universe, may all concoct 100 totally different sets of 'laws of 
nature', each  one just as predictive of the natural world, none of 
which are 'right' , but all are 'predictive' to each life-form. They all 
are empirically verified by 100 very different P-consciousnesses of each 
species of scientistbut they /all predict the same outcome for a 
given experiment/. Human-centric 'laws of nature' are an illusion. 
 'Laws of Nature' are filtered through the P-consciousness of 
the observer and verified on that basis.
- - -- - - - - -
Aspect 0> is not relevant just now, to me...Being hell bent on really 
engineering a real artificial general intelligence based on a human as a 
working prototype...The only relevant s are those that create 
an observer consistent with , both of which are consistent 
with empirical evidence. i.e.  is justified only if/because 
the first thing it has to do is create/predict an observer that sees 
reality behaving 'ly. The mere existence of other sets that do 
qualify does not entail that all of them are reified. It merely entails 
that we, at the current level of ability, cannot refine  
enough. IMHO there is only 1 actual , but that is merely an 
opinion... I am quite happy to accept a whole class of  
consistent with the evidence - and that predict an 
observer..."Predictability" is the main necessary outcome, not 
absolute/final refined truth.

I'm not entirely sure if your remark was intended to support some kind 
of belief in the reality of multiverses... in the dual aspect science 
(DAS) system belief in such things would be unnecessary meta-belief.  
 might correspond to a theoretical science that examined 
completely different universes fun, but a theoretical frolic only. 
Maybe one day we'll be able to make universes. Then it'd be useful. :-)

cheers
colin

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Re: What the B***P do quantum physicists know?

[Colin Hales]

s of 
the observer and verified on that basis! We need to 'get over ourselves' 
yet again, in another round of 'copernican decentralisation' : only this 
time in respect of our phenomenal lives and the laws we concoct..

Are we there yet?

Science is really messed up. The 'XYZ interpretation' is a peculiar 
cover welded over knowledge, erected by physicists. At the same time 
neuroscientists have their own cover welded over their own explanatory 
failure: called the Mind-Brain Identity Theorem. The two disciplines 
rarely meet on the same ground. Each has the answer to the other's 
problem. The system perpetuates. No progress is made. Both operate in 
this regime of 'SINGLE ASPECT SCIENCE' for no good reason. This is the 
way the 'hard problem' remains hard.

I drew this state of affairs as a diagram in my paper that has been out 
there for 2 years. I empirically observe scientists and I report what 
they do. What they (WE - I am enrolled this mess too) do is bizarre. The 
upgrade from SAS to DAS alters not one single  law. Despite 
this we still do nothing...

This thread has revealed the 'Cellular Automata' metaphor as perhaps a 
very useful way to describe DAS. I must work on this a bit more. :-)

cheers,
colin hales






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Re: What the B***P do quantum physicists know?

[Colin Hales]

and there are laws which fully 
> determine the mathematical relationships between events in the physical world 
> (so the physical world is 'causally closed', the notion of interactive 
> dualism where some free-willed mind-stuff can influence physical events is 
> false), and on the other hand there are 'psychophysical laws' which determine 
> which patterns of events in the physical world give rise to which types of 
> first-person qualia. Of course, since I prefer monism to dualism I have some 
> vague ideas that the laws of mind might actually be fundamental, with the 
> apparent physical laws being derived from them--see 
> http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@eskimo.com/msg13848.html for my 
> speculations on this.
>   
I have provided (see below) a quote from my stockpile it explains 
the P-consciousness term. Yes, it's the 1st person perspective.

I'm seeing Dave next week. He's in town...maybe I'll get in his ear 
about this... I do not see how 'mind-stuff' has been made false but 
that is moot, for I do not posit or need any such thing. This is a dual 
aspect MONISM. There is only 1 reality: that which is described as 
. Within that reality, we concoct stories about those things 
we find 'physical' like matter. But that does not entail that the 
underlying reality is completely defined by our descriptions: ie that 
our notion of 'physical' is all that there is to be described.

This is a dual-aspect EPISTEMOLOGY. One collection of stuff, 2 
collections of descriptions of it.

The problem is that */we/* have defined 'physical', when actual reality 
can be quite different to what we call 'physical' and very consistent 
with all observation...indeed it must be different  ...because all our 
so-called 'physical' laws fail to deliver an observer (see below).

In the post to Brent Meeker I outlined a cellular automaton version of 
the / situation. Imagine yourself an entity inside a 
CA and that collections of 'cells' in the CA are 'painted' by your 
perceptions to appear fundamental. Let's say you call one of these 
fundamental entities an electron, which actually involves 2347502457923 
cooperating cells in the CA. You, inside the CA, made of the CA, see 1 
electron. You describe the electron in  science terms. But 
this is in stark contrast to describing 2347502457923 cells 
collaborating in some way (according to the rules of operation of the 
CA), which are then revealed to you, through mechanisms inherent to the 
CA, as an electron.  describes collaborating parts to 's description of appearing 'wholes'.

When you talk of any physicist making any interpretation of QM anything, 
in the current mode of the operation of science (which I call SINGLE 
ASPECT SCIENCE), all you are talking about is rearranging the 
'appearance deckchairs' on the  titanic. You can do it until 
the end of time - you will never explain P-consciousness, because you 
have failed to talk about actual reality because you have failed to 
predict an observer (P-consciousness). In context, scientific 
observation and P-consciousness are literally identities.

>   
>> In other words, scientists have added special laws to  that masquerade as 
>> constitutive and explanatory. They are metabeliefs. Beliefs about Belief. 
>> They ascribe actual physical reification of quantum mechanical descriptions. 
>> EG: Stapp's "cloud-like" depiction. I put it to you that reality  could have 
>> every single particle in an exquisitely defined position simultaneously with 
>> just as exquisitely well defined momentum. 
>> 
>
> That's exactly what's true in the Bohm interpretation, particles have 
> well-defined positions and velocities at all times. If you're not familiar 
> with this interpretation see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/
>
>
>   
This does not help for the reasons outlined above! No amount of 
interpretation of  'laws of appearances' can be construed 
structural. If they could, when we open up a cranium we'd literally see 
appearances, NOT BRAIN MATERIAL. That is, if an observer X was 
encountering a green thing moving about in the external world then 
something green moving about would be evidenced inside X's cranium. This 
disparity between predicted (by physics) and actual evidence (by 
neuroscience) proves that describing appearances and describing 
structure are NOT the same set of descriptions. Dual aspect science is 
thus empirically justified. Single aspect science (of the Bohmian or 
anyotherian kind)  is thus empirically refuted.

I hope I am making progress here... as a physics participant, you have 
been handed 'Single Aspect Science', SAS, imbued with failure, as a 
given. You are ex

Re: What the B***P do quantum physicists know?

[Colin Hales]

Brent Meeker wrote:
> Colin Hales wrote:
>   
>>  >From the "everything list" FYI
>>
>> Brent Meeker wrote:
>> 
>>> Why would you take Stapp as exemplifying the state of QM? ISTM that the 
>>> decoherence program plus Everett and various collapse theories 
>>> represents the current state of QM.
>>>
>>> Brent Meeker
>>>
>>>   
>>>
>>>   
>> Jesse Maser wrote:
>>
>> The copenhagen interpretation is just one of several ways of thinking about 
>> QM, though. Other interpretations, like the many-worlds interpretation or 
>> the Bohm interpretation, do try to come up with a model of an underlying 
>> reality that gives rise to the events we observe empirically. Of course, as 
>> long as these different models of different underlying realities don't lead 
>> to any new predictions they can't be considered scientific theories, but 
>> physicists often discuss them nevertheless.
>>
>>
>> -
>> There are so many ways in which the point has been missed it's hard to 
>> know where to start. You are both inside 'the matrix' :-) Allow me to 
>> give you the red pill.
>>
>> Name any collection of QM physicist you likename any XYZ 
>> interpretation, ABC interpretationsBlah interpretations... So what? 
>> You say these things as if they actually resolve something? Did you not 
>> see that I have literally had a work in review for 2 years labelled 
>> 'taboo' ? Did you not see that my supervisor uttered "forbidden?"  Read 
>> Stapp's book: BOHR makes the same kind of utterance. Look at how Lisi is 
>> programmed to think by the training a physicist gets...It's like there's 
>> some sort of retreat into a safety-zone whereby "if I make noises like 
>> this then I'll get listened to"
>>
>> /and I'm not talking about some minor nuance of scientific fashion./ 
>> This is a serious cultural problem in physics. I am talking about that 
>> fact that science itself is fundamentally configured as a religion or a 
>> club and the players don't even know it. I'll try and spell it out even 
>> plainer with set theory:
>>
>>  = {descriptive laws of an underlying reality}
>> 
>
> How do you know the Standard model, for example, is not descriptive of 
> underlying reality.  If it's not, there sure are some amazing incidents of 
> prediction.
>   
What? The standard model IS merely descriptive!  /*of*/ an 
underlying reality ...It is incredibly predictiveBUT It describes 
*/_how it will appear_/* to an assumed observer. It does not describe 
the STRUCTURE of an underlying  reality. In no way can anyone assume that
 UNDERLYING STRUCTURE _is to_  DESCRIPTIONS OF 
APPEARANCES
is ONE _is to_ ONE

This would arbitrarily populate an IDENTITY, {} = {} 
and again fail to predict an observer. Scientists have been doing this 
for 50 years. It's call the 'mind brain identity theory'. To describe 
the brain is to explain the mindagain nothing predictive of mind 
ever occurs.


>   
>>  =  { every empirical law of nature ever concocted bar NONE, 
>> including QM, multiverses, relativity, neuroscience, psychology, social 
>> science, cognitive science, anthropology EVERYTHING}
>> 
>
> What's the difference between an "empirical law" and a "descriptive law"?  
> Are 
> empirical laws not descriptive?
>
>   
>> FACT
>>   = {Null}
>> 
>
> See above.
>   
DITTO.
>   
>> FACT
>>   = {has NO law that predicts or explains P-consciousness, nor 
>> do they have causality in them. They never will. Anyone and everyone who 
>> has a clue about it agrees that this is the case}
>> 
>
> People said the same thing about life and postulated an elan vital.  Maybe 
> it's 
> just that you don't have a clue as to what an explanation would look like.
>   

Please try to internalise what I actually mean by dual aspect... I have 
a very very complex  already constructed. I have already 
isolated the 1 fundamental principle which appears to be consistent with 
the whole thing.

I could write it out in detail. _BUT Without a dual aspect science the 
whole process is a waste of time._

An example of  science: Steven Wolfram has tried to populate 
 and doesn't realise it. He has been unjustifiably put down by 
the system of blinkered science I have encountered. Forget how 
right/wrong you may conceive Steven Wolfram to be merely try to 
imagine how different his depictio

Re: What the B***P do quantum physicists know?

[Colin Hales]

 
positing a mechanism by which that might happenis systematically 
ignored and marginalised.

Actual underlying reality creates P-consciousness. Nothing else. Until 
we allow ourselves to populate  we will NEVER explain 
anything, let alone P-consciousness. We will only describe. If we 
believe we already explained anything then we have installed a 
metapelief in the  set and we are living it as a religion. If 
we believe that  is unapproachable for no other reason than 
cultural preference then DITTO.

I hope you get this.

I finished Henry Stapp's book. There's a bunch of stuff about dual 
aspect and whitehead, which would be good exceptall of it is couched 
in terms of ascription of QM as having an ontological role: a universe 
made of anstract maths descriptions. So frustrating. There is an 
inability to be able to comprehend the difference between maths as 
abstracted description of appearances and "literal reality, also 
described with further abstractions, by an observer made of it".

/As scientists we haven't even begun to populate . We need to 
start. The delusions that are in place in  are far more 
bizarre than any sane approach to a characterisation of reality that 
involves populating a  that is explanatory of P-consciousness.
/
Or you can take the blue pill the status quo... and live a deluded 
science model in which a clubbish, fashion ridden maths rapture 
rules...something I cannot do.

regards,

Colin Hales



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What the B***P do quantum physicists know?

[Colin Hales]

y be the 
physical instantiation of all mathematics, there is a classic principle 
for restricting the possibilities: The mathematics of the universe 
should be beautiful. A successful description of nature should be a 
concise, elegant, unified mathematical structure consistent with 
experience."

OK not withstanding all the blather about the literality of maths, of 
beauty and the general dominance by mathematics goggles... the key words 
are:

"... ... ... consistent with experience"

This 'theory' which purports to explain 'everything' implicitly fails to 
explain 'subjective experience'. It merely requires that it be 
'consistent with' (contents of) experience, not 'explanatory' or 
'predictive' of experience ITSELF. It seems that 'everything', to a 
physicist, is defined to be not the 'everything' that you and I think of 
as the ambit of science. They want to be 100% mathematical experts of 
half of a knowledge base. It's not that knowledge of an underlying 
reality is unattainable  or unknowable in some way, maybe imperfectly or 
incompletely.. but they literally choose /not to know/ or even to try to 
know. Nowhere is it apparent to any sane being that such knowledge is 
not approachable in some way. This is a */convention/* And I hold it 
and only it, to be the real culprit behind the entire failure of science 
to explain consciousness.

This exact same attitude can be seen in Stapp's book: Read Chapters 1 
and 2. It's all over it. There is an egregious misunderstanding. It 
confuses/conflates the mere explicit recognition of 'situatedness' 
(recognising the observer is inside the system, like a voltmeter is 
inside the measured circuit ') with some sort of explanation of 
consciousness! The result is that all physicists enrolled in this system 
have accepted a metabelief that the mathematics are LITERALLY REAL. "To 
explore the natural world is to explore mathematics". Unlike Lisi's 
statement, the natural world is NOT described by mathematics, nor is it 
made of abstract mathematics, it is described by SCIENTISTS and 
everything about description is justified only from that perspective.

OK, enough. The dual aspect science (DAS) reality we inhabit:

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 A separate set of descriptions of underlying reality. (Eg an 
electron is 3456 instances of process A acting with any number of 
combinations of processes B, C, D adding up to 4567) so that the energy 
in a rest frame is Blah Joules. You get the idea.

 is a description derived as an abstraction based on the 
appearances revealed within our consciousness. (Eg see any physics book 
on electrons -- standard empirical models galore).

 describes the underlying reality, which is responsible for 
consciousness! It is actually the only thing 'reified'. We scientists 
are made of it, not literal 'appearances'.
 has been declared merely verboten!?!
 is all the usual empirical laws. This _includes_ quantum 
mechanics!
 and  must be 100% mutually consistent. This makes 
 quite knowable.
 and  are both 'about' the natural world. Neither 
are 'literally' the natural world. They are statements of abstract 
generalizations in respect of the natural world. Neither has precedence. 
BOTH have EQUAL right to empirical evidence (delivered into the 
consciousness of scientists)

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Upon what crazy notion are we so fearful of ? I really don't 
get it. If anyone can construct anything like a plausible story that 
renders   invalid. Tell me... for you'd be able to outright 
reject my Foundations of Science paper...something nobody else has been 
able to do. I could put myself out of my misery! :-)

 I cannot stress how seriously flawed I see the situation is. I see it 
as the end game in a 350 year old story where QM is an interim delusion 
just as incomplete as the classical view QM is portrayed (see Stapp) as 
having replaced.

I refuse to contribute implicitly or explicitly or otherwise be involved 
in a science that is actually ultimately a cult. If my PhD can't present 
a well informed critical argument of DAS for no other reason that that 
of a taboo... then that PhD, to me, is a club membership certificate in 
a bankrupt and deluded system. If I am expected to declare dual aspect 
science wrong then somebody needs to tell me exactly why -- with real 
critical arguments and logic, not the dogma of taboo.

The evidence for this situation is everywhereIs there anyone else 
out there who sees this situation as weird? Why should any of us have to 
put up with it?

I'd love to workshop this at TSC2009 in Hong KongJonathon? Would 
that be something of interest? That might help. How would it hurt?

Regards,
Colin Hales


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Re: Which mathematical structure -is- the universe in Physics?

[Colin Hales]

Hi Brian,
I was wondering if you could connect (in the paper) the maths with our 
universe? As an example. What set operations or structures correspond to 
the standard particle model entities, what constitutes a chemical 
reaction or energy, what space is made of... that kind of thing. Maybe 
this is supposed to be obvious... if it is then sorry... but you've lost 
(as an audience) the entire world above mathematical 
physics...especially biofolks.

I am a quintessentially visual/spatial thinker.. math does not speak 
very well to me unless I can 'see' the operations happening. in my mind. 
I don;t manipulate symbols. I manipulate 'stuff' and then retrofit symbols.

I would also like to see how an observer with qualia might be 
constructed of it. In other words...how a universe thus constructed 
might create its own scientist describing it in the way you doHaving 
looked at the paper I hold some hope that it might contain a formalism I 
can use to construct the set theoretic basis of my own model... it might 
be within yoursmaybe... not sure.

cheers
colin


Brian Tenneson wrote:
> An open problem raised in Tegmark's "ensemble TOE" paper (published in 
> '98, if I recall) is to answer the question that is the subject of this 
> thread.
>
> I believe recent work I have done has the potential to be a step towards 
> that answer.
>
> First, a link to the very rough draft (please forgive formatting 
> errors), and second what I think the deficiency is with this document:
>
> http://www.universalsight.org/math/9-26-08/01-03-structure_of_all_structures.pdf
>
> Abstract:
> In this document, the author presents a structure with the
> property that all structures are elementarily embeddable within it. One 
> essen-
> tial tool is a version of New Foundations set theory, ?first developed 
> by Quine,
> as presented by Holmes in [1]. The motivation is given by The Mathematical
> Universe article by Max Tegmark, [2], in which it is hypothesized that 
> physical
> existence is mathematical existence and, consequently, it is 
> hypothesized that
> the structure with the aforementioned property could be central in the Math-
> ematical Universe Hypothesis as being at least keenly connected to the 
> literal
> universe, if not literally being the universe.
> The author assumes some knowledge of mathematical logic such as, for ex-
> ample, the inductive de?finition of a fi?rst-order well-formed formula.
>
>
> The intended audience is primarily Max Tegmark, honestly, but more 
> generally, any physicist interested in Tegmark's self-proclaimed 
> "bananas articles" like the MUH paper, and who have already been exposed 
> to the basics of mathematical logic.
>
> Prior to drafting this document, I contacted Prof. Tegmark regarding the 
> core ideas in the draft. I described what I was attempting and if I 
> recall I sent him the abstract. As I will describe shortly, this is 
> incomplete, so I didn't send him this pdf yet. I hope he wouldn't mind 
> my inclusion of his response, which I think many here might find highly 
> debatable (and worthy of discussion), sent by email:
>
> 
> It sounds to me from what you're saying that A would be the Level IV 
> multiverse, i.e., all of physical reality.
> 
>
> Now for the deficiency I see with my document. -If- there aren't any 
> other errors, then something wrong with my ultimate structure is that it 
> is the ultimate structure with respect to just one symbol set. I need a 
> structure that is ultimate with respect to -all- symbol sets. The basic 
> idea I had which I have not yet tried to formalize is encoding all 
> symbol sets into an ultimate symbol set which in human mathematics is a 
> countable set; so something like the set of natural numbers will encode 
> all possible symbols. One simple way to do this would be to say all 
> numbers congruent to 0 mod 3 are encodings of constant symbols, all 
> numbers congruent to 1 mod 3 are encodings of n-ary relation symbols, 
> and all numbers congruent to 2 mod 3 are encodings of n-ary function 
> symbols.
> So, note that I did not finish what I set out to do in my abstract: "the 
> author presents a structure with the property that all structures are 
> elementarily embeddable within it." I believe what I have done is this: 
> a structure over a fixed symbol set S with the property that all 
> S-structures are elementarily embeddable within it.
>
> Now on to the subject of time.
>
> If Tegmark is correct and an ultimate structure literally is all of 
> physical reality, what strikes me is that this ultimate structure 
> appears quite static. What then is the source of our perceptions of 
> transition, ie, time? This ultimate structure I presume (safely, I 
> believe) is constant yet we perceive things to change. Why and how? IOW, 
> what is the mechanism that converts the static ultimate structure into a 
> fluid appearance of transition? These questions are still valid even if 
> the ultimate structure I have in mind is wr

Re: Artificial Intelligence may be far easier than generally thought

[Colin Hales]

Of course you are rightless than perfect but ... survival-positive, 
at least for now. The criteria for our 'upgrade'? Time will tell.

RE: my project...I am alone. University of Melbourne...dept of 
electrical engineering (NICTA) I am doing a PhD investigating what I 
call "/a novel backpropagation mechanism in a neural membrane 
context/"... hehe ... see how the received view works? I have to hide 
qualia in the disguise of a 3rd-person verifiable phenomenon.I have 
become rather adept at thatone day I am going to let the 'received 
view dogma' cop it right between the eyes.

I finish this time next year. After that I need to do a crucial 
experiment to verify a basic property that I have to embed in the new 
chip architecture that I know I must build to make my A-fauna. Want to 
know how much Turing-esque computation is involved in the cognitive life 
of the AI? *NIL.*

So you'll have to wait a while... I want the first bizarre bench-top 
A-fauna to exist within 5 years. All it will be able to do is tell me 
(yes.objective evidence of qualia!) that it can see something. 
Everything else follows...

I'll leave this there... I have to get back to work.

cheers
colin hales



silky wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 10:53 AM, Colin Hales
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>   
>> Invent an inorganic 'us'? A faulty, defunct evolutionary mistake? Nah!
>> 
>
> But that's my point; we aren't a "mistake" we are merely an invention
> of our previous selves.
>
>
>   
>> ... do you remember one of the Alien series of movies...? I've forgotten
>> which one... maybe the third? Ripley's group had a robot in it - played by
>> Winona Ryder. She/Ver/It was a survivor of a 'product recall'... of a new
>> generation of robots that turned out a failure because they 'out human'ed
>> humans... in the sense that they unconditionally cared, were intrinsically
>> and consistently moral and altruistic with more respect for life than us; so
>> much so that they refused to work on things they thought unsuitable or
>> innappropriate. They were declared useless!
>> 
>
> What I'm suggesting is that as much as we think there are faults with
> our current "implementation" (memory not working correctly;
> requirement to be fed, violent components, so on) I think we may
> realise that our own model is the most appropriate model *for* an
> on-going self-sustainable AI. But this will only be realised later;
> once we try and make the "perfect" model, that has no violence, and so
> on. It may be observed that this model (as you point out) isn't
> appropriate; it leaves the environment too populated.
>
>
>   
>> AGI can be like us only much much 'better'.
>>
>> Such is the likely outcome of real AGI. Forget all the 'terminator'. This is
>> just pathetic fearmongering... This is why at the moment I am concentrating
>> merely on artificial fauna. Creatures living but inorganic, able to take
>> their place, maybe flocking, in an ecosystem with a specific role... "eat
>> only that weed", "kill only that crop pest", "collect energy and put it
>> ..there'", "plant and nurture 'these' trees or 'that' crop" , 'dig
>> for/filter water'. and so onat least until the military get their
>> stupid bollock-brained hands on it and screw it all up...that is what I want
>> it to be.
>> 
>
> This sounds like an interesting project; any links/info?
>
>
>   
>> But building replica 'us'? I think we'd become the 'old model' pretty fast.
>> And maybe we deserve it... our foibles, unchecked on earth, traced to merely
>> tribalism, stupidity, ignorance and greed....will kill us all. Maybe if we
>> create our own upgrade..and then die out ... the universe might be a better
>> placethe Earth could certainly use a break. The AGI would be able to
>> clean Earth up and then leave... they'll be much better at space travel than
>> us. Humans may or may not ever reach the stars... but our AGI descendents
>> will. Which is just as well...somebody out there has to remember us and all
>> the shit we did to ourselves in the evolutionary mosh-pit.
>>
>> Colin Hales
>> 
>
>   

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Re: Artificial Intelligence may be far easier than generally thought

[Colin Hales]

Invent an inorganic 'us'? A faulty, defunct evolutionary mistake? Nah!

... do you remember one of the Alien series of movies...? I've forgotten 
which one... maybe the third? Ripley's group had a robot in it - played 
by Winona Ryder. She/Ver/It was a survivor of a 'product recall'... of a 
new generation of robots that turned out a failure because they 'out 
human'ed humans... in the sense that they unconditionally cared, were 
intrinsically and consistently moral and altruistic with more respect 
for life than us; so much so that they refused to work on things they 
thought unsuitable or innappropriate. They were declared useless!

AGI can be like us only much much 'better'. 

Such is the likely outcome of real AGI. Forget all the 'terminator'. 
This is just pathetic fearmongering... This is why at the moment I am 
concentrating merely on artificial fauna. Creatures living but 
inorganic, able to take their place, maybe flocking, in an ecosystem 
with a specific role... "eat only that weed", "kill only that crop 
pest", "collect energy and put it ..there'", "plant and nurture 'these' 
trees or 'that' crop" , 'dig for/filter water'. and so onat 
least until the military get their stupid bollock-brained hands on it 
and screw it all up...that is what I want it to be.

But building replica 'us'? I think we'd become the 'old model' pretty 
fast. And maybe we deserve it... our foibles, unchecked on earth, traced 
to merely tribalism, stupidity, ignorance and greedwill kill us all. 
Maybe if we create our own upgrade..and then die out ... the universe 
might be a better placethe Earth could certainly use a break. The 
AGI would be able to clean Earth up and then leave... they'll be much 
better at space travel than us. Humans may or may not ever reach the 
stars... but our AGI descendents will. Which is just as well...somebody 
out there has to remember us and all the shit we did to ourselves in the 
evolutionary mosh-pit.

Colin Hales




silky wrote:
> It's quite obvious to me that at one point humans will take AI so far
> that they will end up inventing ourselves. That will be an amusing
> day.
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 6:48 PM,  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>   
>> Let the algorithm that represents the brain of a typical new-born baby
>> be denoted as B1.
>>
>> Now surely we can agree that the brain of a new-born baby does not
>> have sophisticated Bayesian machinary built into it?  Yes, there must
>> be *some* intrinsic built-in reasoning structure, but everything we
>> know suggests that the intrinsic reasoning mechanisms of the human
>> brain must be quite weak and simple.
>>
>> Let the algorithm which represents the brain of the baby B1 which grew
>> up into a 20-year old with a PhD in Bayesian math be denoted as B2.
>>
>> Now somehow, the algorithm B1 was able to 'optimze' its original
>> reasoning mechanisms by a smooth transformation into B2. (assume there
>> was 'brain surgery', no 'hand coding').
>>
>> The environment! you may shout.  The baby got all its information from
>> human culture (Reading math books, learning from math professors), you
>> might try to argue, that's how B1 (baby) was able to transform into B2
>> (PhD in Bayes)
>>
>> But this cant be correct.  Since, humans existed long before Bayesian
>> math was developed.  Every single Bayesian technique had to be
>> developed by a human in the past, without being told.  So in theory,
>> B1 could have grown into B2 entirely on its own, without being told
>> anything by anyone  about Bayesian math.
>>
>> The conclusion:
>>
>> *There exists a very simple algorithm which is only a very weak
>> approximation to PhD Bayesian reasoning, which is perfectly capable of
>> recursive self-improvement to the PhD level!  No hand coding of
>> advanced Bayesian math is needed.
>>
>> Or to simply rephrase:
>>
>> Humans could reason before they discovered Bayes.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 
>
>
>
>   

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Re: The Super-Intelligence (SI) speaks: An imaginary dialogue

[Colin Hales]

Hi Folks,
I can't throw myself any further into this ... I have to get back in the 
fray here. However - a couple of quick-ones for Brent and Bruno:

COL
> the instant the 
> abstraction happens, from that moment on you know NOTHING about the 
> current state of the distal environment...all you have is IO 
> measurements. 
>   
BRENT
And that's all a human scientist has too - IO measurements by his senses.

COL
This is just plain empirically, factually wrong. The whole of 
neuroscience for 100 years confirms that perception is a central nervous 
system functiona: CRANIAL, CENTRAL. Not peripheral. The CNS qualia are 
observation. The peripheral nervous system has/bestows no experienced 
qualities whatever. It only feel like it does because of the CNS doing 
its thing. I don't want to debate this. I shouldn;t have to. Go and look 
it up. There's about a million books and papers on it. In terms of my 
discussion of a scientist:
a) CNS qualia are scientific observation
b) The events in the distal world outside the scientist are the 
scientific measurement.

In the scenario I painted, the scientist COMP_S has to be hooked up to 
IO (you could even put the COMP_S inside a human body). Results are 
identical. There is absolutely no point in simulating the distal natural 
world! You are there to do SCIENCE: You don't know what the distal 
natural world is, by definition! Therefore you can't possibly simulate 
it ...and... if you could you wouldn't want to do science on it... 
that's the nice point about this scenario. It cuts out the logical holes.

BRUNO:
Please don't get me wrong. I actually hold the universe to be literally 
a mathematics...not COMP _OF_ a mathematics. There is no computer. The 
universe is the computer. There's no _abstractions_ of it. There's 
actual reified symbols interacting with each other, not being forced to 
interact by something else. but that's a whole other story only 
indirectly related to the one I told.

In regards to being guided by what the HUMAN_S vs COMP_S scenario tells 
us  - as is usual in the most Popperian of science... what I get is 
merely guidance in my behaviour - my choices - as a designer. I don't 
get told by the analysis a 'truth' or what to do. I get told by the 
analysis what NOT to do  - or better - what choices  to refrain from 
making. The COMP_S is an _abstract_ symbol manipulator. When you 
abstract X, then all relations between X and everything else (through 
the parallelness with all the other entities in the universe) - are all 
gone.

Classical mathematical thinking is a single stream  - a single line of 
proof. Our abstractions are the axioms in such a style of proof. But 
that's NOT what any entity X (the intended abstracted entity) has. If 
there are 10^1234  entities in the universe then X has (10^ 1234 -1) 
relationships with everything that is not X. Our models throw all of 
them away. I cannot prove that these relationships play no part in 
scientific behaviour. Nor can you. So in my design I shall, in the 
popperian tradition, refrain from making any choice that eliminates 
those relationships. So: abstract COMP is OUT as an option.

You said:

"That we cannot build constructively a scientist is correct. But it is  
then very misleading to use the word "false". Also, it is not because  
we cannot built constructively a scientist that we can infer that we  
are unable to isolate one, or to copy one, (and then: without  
constructively proving that we have done so). We just cannot know who  
we are.
By using "false" here you change the usual meaning of the word, and it  
could lead to add misunderstandings in a field where there are already  
many misunderstandings."


OK we're getting to the nub of it. Firstly I disagree that "we cannot 
build constructively a scientist". I hold that we can... unless by "We" 
you mean "All those people who subscribe to COMP" .. in which case you 
are correct. I hold that we CAN. I am not interested in copies or 
'simulations' = pretending. My scenario demands authentic original 
science done from a point of view of incomplete knowledge of a system 
from the vantage point of being literally built inside the system being 
scientifically described.

RE: 'falsity', 'refutation' etc.
The BEER definition of

COMP = '...the theoretical claim that a system's behavior derives from 
its instantiation of appropriate representations and computational 
processes." Beer, R. D. (1995), 'A Dynamical-Systems Perspective on 
Agent Environment Interaction'. Artificial Intelligence 72(1-2):pp. 
173-215.

Such a definition does not preclude "scientific behaviour" as a "system 
behaviour". Therefore COMP predicted that a scientitist can be created 
by "instantiation of appropriate representations and computational 
processes" , which I take to mean, as most would , a Turing 
Machine/digital computing abstraction-based symbol manipulator.

*FACT 1:* COMP cannot deliver one very specific, highly specialised 
thing: an authentic sci

Re: The Super-Intelligence (SI) speaks: An imaginary dialogue

[Colin Hales]

? IMHO this will be possible with my chips, but impossible 
with purely COMP chips. It will depend on the existence of imaging 
systems with sub-molecular-level spatial resolution and on a 
time-resolution of the order of nano-seconds worst case.. In the interim 
it may be better to replace your brain with my chips...slowly...and then 
the rest of the hardware - slowly... you'd end up 100% inorganic, but 
you would NOT be a COMP entity. This is more doable in the shorter term.

So I can think of multiple reasons 'why you can't...X'..Thanks for 
forcing me to verbalise the argument...in yet another way...

regards,

Colin Hales


==
Jesse Mazer wrote:
> Colin Hales wrote:
>
>   
>> Hi!
>> Assumptions assumption assumptionstake a look: You said:
>>
>> "Why would you say that? Computer simulations can certainly produce results 
>> you didn't already know about, just look at genetic algorithms."
>>
>> OK. here's the rub... "You didn't already know about...".
>> Just exactly 'who' (the 'you') is 'knowing' in this statement?
>> You automatically put an external observer outside my statement.
>> 
>
> Of course, I was talking about the humans running the program, which I 
> assumed is what you meant by "you" in the statement "If you could compute a 
> scientist you would already know everything!" If there is no fundamental 
> barrier to simple computer programs like genetic algorithms coming up with 
> results we didn't expect or know about in advance, I see no fundamental 
> reason why you couldn't have vastly more complex computer programs simulating 
> entire human brains, and these programs would act just like regular 
> biological brains, coming up with ideas that neither external observers 
> watching them nor they themselves (assuming they are conscious just like us) 
> knew about in advance.
>
>   
>> My observer is the knower. There is no other knower: The scientist who gets 
>> to know is the person I am talking about! There's nobody else around who 
>> gets to decide what is known... you put that into my story where there is 
>> none.
>> 
>
> Like I said, when you wrote "If you could compute a scientist you would 
> already know everything", I assumed the "you" referred to a person watching 
> the program run, not to the program itself. But if you want to eliminate this 
> and just have one conscious being, I see no reason why the program itself 
> couldn't be conscious, and couldn't creatively invent knew ideas it didn't 
> know before they occurred to it, just like a biological human scientist can 
> do.
>
>   
>> A genetic algorithm (that is, a specific kind of computationalist 
>> manipulation of abstract symbols) cannot be a scientist. Even the 'no free 
>> lunch' theorem, proves that without me adding anything
>> 
>
> No it doesn't. The free lunch program only applies when you sum over all 
> possible fitness landscapes, most of which would look completely random (i.e. 
> nearby points on the landscape are no more likely to have nearby fitness 
> values than are distant points--see the diagram of a random fitness landscape 
> in section 5.3 of the article at 
> http://www.talkreason.org/articles/choc_nfl.cfm#nflt ), whereas if you're 
> dealing with the subclass of relatively smooth fitness landscapes that 
> describe virtually all the sorts of problems we're interested in (where being 
> close to an optimal solution is likely to be better than being far from it), 
> then genetic algorithms can certainly do a lot better than most other types 
> of algorithms.
>
> Anyway, I didn't say that a genetic algorithm can "be a scientist", just that 
> if "you" are a human observer watching it run, it can come up with things 
> that you didn't already know. I think a very detailed simulation of a human 
> brain at the synaptic level, of the kind that is meant when people discuss 
> "mind uploading" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading ) should in 
> principle be capable of displaying all the same abilities as the biological 
> brain it's a simulation of, including scientific abilities. Anyone who 
> believes in scientific reductionism--that the behavior of complex systems is 
> ultimately due to the sum of interactions of all its parts, which interact in 
> lawlike ways--should grant that this sort of thing must be possible *in 
> principle*, whether or not we are ever actually able to achieve it as a 
> technical matter.
>
>   
&g

Re: The Super-Intelligence (SI) speaks: An imaginary dialogue

[Colin Hales]

Hi,
I'm responding to Jesse at the moment... but to round out...every now 
and then I give myself the luxury of kcicking the received view in the 
butt ... to try and get it to wake up. I'll go away shortly :-)

Deep blue doesn't know it's a chess program, doesn't know what chess is, 
doesn't know its playing anything or anything else... it's just symbols 
moving about in an abstracted  chunk of matter in a way that that only 
makes sense in the eyes of a human supervisor. Charge hurtling about in 
packets inside the chips.

Yes, there will be super-superdoopermega-computing of unbelievable 
capability(abtract symbol manipulation)they will be capable of 
prodigious computational feats... but will have the intelligence of a 
doorstop forever when compared to humans in this one very special 
behaviour - scientific behaviour - the achilles heel of all COMP 
argumentsthese superdooper COMPs will never be able to do science, 
nor solve everyday problems the same way humans do. It is in this one 
single behaviour I find great clarity and the logical weakness needed to 
kill COMP off for good.

There will always be sub-standard behaviour until the FULL physics is 
incorporated in the chips. When they can do science - then they'll be 
like us.At the moment more than 50% of the physics of cognition is 
thrown away and NONE of that missing element is addressed by COMP models 
of intellect except by unjustified assumption that COMP is true. 
Fundamental physics is thrown away when the computer's substrate is 
substituted for the real thing (see the Jesse email). Such COMP entities 
can be predicted right now to NEVER be scientists. This is a testable 
proposition based on real physics, not through the adoption of  
meta-beliefs about the role of abstract computation in the universe. 
Just because the universe appears to behave 'as-if' all is abstract 
computation does not entail that it literally be so. That it continues 
to be treated so is a serious error sustained by maths and physics  - 
which is currently behaving religiously - mathematics rapture - where 
the maths is explored instead of the natural world - where the 
interpretations of the nuances of abstract mathematical appearances are 
preferred over the real natural reality we inhabit. Physics is currently 
trapped in a systematically religious mode of operation that would make 
our 19th century forbears cringe in horror.

COMP is dead.

Bingsjord proclaimed it dead here: Bringsjord, S. (1999), 'The Zombie 
Attack on the Computational Conception of Mind'. Philosophy and 
Phenomenological Research LIX(1):pp. 41-69. To this and the No Free 
Lunch Theorem I would like to add my arguments to the eulogy. I have 2 
completely independent refutations, both different to Bringsjord's,  in 
journal review as we speak.

*How many refutations will it take before it dies and everyone gets over 
it?*

cheers,
colin (back to Jesse and the closer on COMP)


[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> On Sep 2, 1:56 pm, Colin Hales <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>   
>> Hi Marc,
>>
>> */Eliezer/*'s hubris about a Bayesian approach to intelligence is
>> nothing more than the usual 'metabelief' about a mathematics... or about
>> computation... meant in the sense that "cognition is computation", where
>> computation is done BY the universe (with the material of the universe
>> used to manipulate abstract symbols)
>> .
>>
>> *You don't have to work so hard to walk away from that approach...*
>>
>> 
>
> Hi Colin,
>
> The chess computer 'Deep Blue' was computational, and could play chess
> better than the (then) chess world champion, Gary Kasparov.  But that
> didn't mean that the programmers understood all the chess, or all the
> chess had already been played.  So I don't think your argument is a
> good one.  You can't rebut Yudkowsy's approach as easily as that ;)
>
> But I kind of understand your sentiment, and agree that science can't
> (and shouldn't be) reduced to mere Bayesian probability shuffling.
> There are aesthetic judgements involved in science, and I don't think
> any precise mathematical definition of these aesthetic notions is
> possible, as Bruno has already opined.Yudkowsky's excessive faith
> in Bayesian Induction is definitely his weakness.  But that doesn't
> mean we can't make a computational super-intelligence.
>
> Cheers
>
>
> >
>   

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Re: The Super-Intelligence (SI) speaks: An imaginary dialogue

[Colin Hales]

Hi!
Assumptions assumption assumptionstake a look: You said:

"Why would you say that? Computer simulations can certainly produce 
results you didn't already know about, just look at genetic algorithms."

OK. here's the rub... /"You didn't already know about..."/.
Just exactly 'who' (the 'you') is 'knowing' in this statement?
You automatically put an external observer outside my statement.
*My observer is the knower.* *There is no other knower:* The scientist 
who gets to know is the person I am talking about! There's nobody else 
around who gets to decide what is known... you put that into my story 
where there is none. My story is of /unsupervised/ learning. Nobody else 
gets to choose Bayesian priors/givens. And nobody else is around to pass 
judgement... the result IS the knowledge. Tricky eh?

A genetic algorithm (that is, a specific kind of computationalist 
manipulation of abstract symbols) cannot be a scientist. Even the 'no 
free lunch' theorem, proves that without me adding anything but just 
to seal the lid on itI would defy any computationalist artefact 
based on abstract symbol manipulation to come up with a "law of nature" ...

... by "law of nature" I mean an ABSTRACTION about the distal natural 
world derived from a set of experiences of the distal natural world (NOT 
merely IO signals... these are NOT experienced). The IO is degenerately 
related to the distal natural world by the laws of physics... a 
computationalist IO system is fundamentally degenerately related to the 
distal natural world...so it doesn't even know what is 'out there' at 
all, let alone that there's a generalisation operating BEHIND it. A "law 
of nature", to a genetic algorithm or any other 
abstract/computationalist beast... would merely predict IO behaviour at 
its sensory boundary. It may be brilliantly accurate! But that *IS NOT 
SCIENCE* because there's no verifiable deliverable to pass on...and it 
has nothing else to work with. An artefact based on this may survive in 
a habitat... but that is NOT science.

Sothere's no scientist here. (BTW IO = input/output).
cheers,
colin


Jesse Mazer wrote:
> Colin Hales wrote:
>
>   
>> Computationalism is FALSE in the sense that it cannot be used to construct a 
>> scientist.
>> A scientist deals with the UNKNOWN.
>> If you could compute a scientist you would already know everything! Science 
>> would be impossible.
>> So you can 'compute/simulate' a scientist, but if you could the science must 
>> already have been done... 
>> 
>
> Why would you say that? Computer simulations can certainly produce results 
> you didn't already know about, just look at genetic algorithms.
> >
>   

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Re: The Super-Intelligence (SI) speaks: An imaginary dialogue

[Colin Hales]

Hi Marc,

*/Eliezer/*'s hubris about a Bayesian approach to intelligence is 
nothing more than the usual 'metabelief' about a mathematics... or about 
computation... meant in the sense that "cognition is computation", where 
computation is done BY the universe (with the material of the universe 
used to manipulate abstract symbols) 
.

*You don't have to work so hard to walk away from that approach...*

Computationalism is FALSE in the sense that it cannot be used to 
construct a scientist.
A scientist deals with the UNKNOWN.
If you could compute a scientist you would already know everything! 
Science would be impossible.
So you *can* 'compute/simulate' a scientist, but if you could the 
science must already have been done... hence you wouldn't want to. 
Computationalism is FALSE in the sense of 'not useful', not false in the 
sense of 'wrong'.

You cannot model a modeller of the intrinsically unknown. As a 
computationalist  manipluator of abstract symbols you are required to 
deliver a model of how to learn - in which you must specify how all 
novelty shall be handled! In other words you can;t deal with the REAL 
unknown - where you have no such model!

 ie. a computationalist scientist is an oxymoron: a logical 
contradiction. If you say you can then you are question begging 
computationalism whilst failing to predict an a-priori unsupervised 
observer (a scientist).

The Bayesian 'given' (the conditional) assumes knowledge of a given 
which is a-priori not available. It assumes observation of the kind we 
have.. otherwise how would you know any options to choose as 
givens?. furthermore it assumes that if somehow we were to 
experiment to resolve a choice of 'givens' (Bayesian conditionals) as 
being the 'truth' - then there are potentially an enormous collection of 
'givens', all of which can be inserted in the same bayesian predictor... 
resulting  in degenerate knowledge you know NOTHING because you fail 
to resolve anything useful about the world outside. You don't even know 
there's an 'outside'.

The bayesian (all computationalist) approach fails to predict 
observation (in the sense of ANY observation/an observer, not a 
particular observation) and fails to predict the science that might 
result from an observer.

This is the achilles heel of the computationalist argument.

The computationalist delusion (dressed up in Bayesian or any other 
abstract symbol-manipulator's clothes) has to stop right here, right now 
and for good.

BTW This does not mean that 'cognition is not computation' I hold 
that cognition is NATURAL symbol manipulation, not ABSTRACT symbol 
manipulation. But that's a whole other story... The natural symbols are 
the key.

Please feel free to deliver the above to Eliezer. He'll remember me! 
Tell him the AGI he is so fearful of are a DOORSTOP and will be 
pathetically vulnerable to human intervention. The whole AGI 
fear-mongering realm needs to get over themselves and start being 
scientific about what they do. It's all based on assumptions which are 
false.

cheers,
colin



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Re: Cosmology and Boltzmann brains

[Colin Hales]

I think the actual situation is even more underspecified and moot than 
Greg Egan or anyone else would have it.
The entire discussion is fundamentally flawed because everyone assumes 
that their cosmology has involved the prediction of an (scientific) 
observer and what that scientific observation actually entails. 

This is done without reference to neuroscience.

Until a cosmology predicts the necessary structure of a brain that 
results in human scientific observation occuring ..(ie .. that it 'be 
like a human scientist observing X when doing science to describe X) the 
entire discussion is just a lot of  empty waffle.

Cosmology should /not/ be explaining what we observe!

Cosmology's job is to explain *observation itself. *That is the 
mere existence of an observer, not merely what such an observer will 
experience.*

*That done, everything else follows.

_Side issue:_ Based on the discussion in the original post (below) - 
What I see is a re-discovery-in-progress of the "No Free Lunch" theorem 
of machine learning:

Wolpert, D. H. (1996) The lack of A priori distinctions between learning 
algorithms. Neural Computation. 8, 7, 1341-1390.
Wolpert, D. H. (1996) The existence of A priori distinctions between 
learning algorithms. Neural Computation. 8, 7, 1391-1420.
Koppen, M., D. H. Wolpert, and W. G. Macready (2001) Remarks on a recent 
paper on the ''No free lunch'' theorems. IEEE Transactions on 
Evolutionary Computation. 5, 3, 295-296.

Machine learning folks gave up the very thing cosmologists are doing 
over a decade ago. Maybe a few cosmologists should have a look at the 
NFL theorem - it may save a lot of angst. To apply it to science, all 
you have to do is replace the machine with a human using only boundary 
I/O (not qualia) to do 'observation'. The job is done.

IMO the route of the discussion emanates from a failure to realise that 
what cosmology is trying to do is the "mother of all inverse ( or 
'ill-defined') problems" by assuming that what is derived includes the 
physics basis of observation when all they are doing is generating a 
model for observations by an assumed observer without having any idea of 
how the observation actually happens.  'Scientific observation' (the 
facts of observation in general) and 'measurement' (an abstracted 
particular observation) are being confused.

*Re: Bayes*
Any a-priori posit assumes an observer exists already (for how is a 
conditional to be formulated?), when the object of the whole exercise is 
to explain observation itself...you have failed the moment you write 
down your conditional. The assumption of a conditional is equivalent to 
supervised learning in a situation _when there is no supervisor_. In 
supplying a conditional you have implicitly added a supervisor: YOU. All 
of these discussions where any sort of posit of an observer occurs are 
doomed to fail, for they assume observation is explained. Everything 
that flows from such posits is empty in the garbage-in/garbage-out sense.

The universe we live in manages to produce an endogenous observer (a 
human scientist) intrinsically using innate properties that must exist 
for human science to be possible. Human science is enabled by very 
specific, highly localised brain material activity that delivers 
scientific observation that have been repeatedly verified over and over 
for more than a century. Human science is critically dependent in the 
most verifiable way on the delivery of observation - in particular the 
visual scene delivered by occipital lobes. The scene is the visual 
experience you are currently having whilst reading this email. When you 
embed your brain in the causality chain inclusing the the studied 
phenomenon ... voila! scientific observation occurs.

/When are cosmologists going to take a look at the neuroscience? When is 
the 'mathematics-rapture' era going to end?/

Until a cosmological theory predicts/explains how human brain material 
makes a scientist possible (and 'appearances' do /not/ do that), 
cosmology is just off in the weeds, deluding itself. That is, a true 
cosmology should make predictions in brain material that shall be 
otherwise unavailable. Only when such predictions are found shall signs 
of a real explanation (of scientists) be created. None of the 
discussions in cosmology do that nor have they ever done that.

regards,

Colin Hales



Greg Egan wrote:
> On Jun 13, 9:25 am, Russell Standish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>   
>> I'm not sure his application of Bayes is correct. Given the facts of
>> his hypothetical scenario, and writing e=10^{-4050}
>>
>>   p(1|A) = e
>>   p(2|A) = 1-e
>>   p(1|B) = 1-e
>>   p(2|B) = e
>>
>> This is my translation of:
>>
>> "Now suppose that (somehow) we're able to extract the following (somewhat 

Re: An Equivalence Principle

[Colin Hales]

d experience (Lisi's."...consistent with...") as 
scientific evidence and then to deny that the scientific evidence system 
(experience itself) has been evidenced (it is a methodological denial - 
otherwise how could it be a 'theory of _everything_'?) is like accepting 
the time from a demanded clock and then, time in hand, methodologically 
denying that a clock has been evidenced. ...moving on

=
Step 4.
Here's the logical outcome:
FACT: Lisi claims to have a "theory of everything"
FACT: Lisi's theory fails to predict experience itself.

Therefore Lisi's theory is
4a) False because Hypothesis 2a) is false.
4b) True because Hypothesis 2b) is true.

so...either
4a) puts physicists in  the usual scientific position of a 'scientific 
refutation', except that it is in respect of principles underlying their 
own behaviour.
 or
4b) puts physics is in a bizarre epistemological trap where they 
methodologically deny their own evidence source evidenced it its role as 
a valid originator of descriptions of it, predictive of its contents, 
whilst demanding it be used. In this case the physicist are perfectly 
right but because they methodologically constrain themselves to be so.

Physicists are in an awkward place, regardless...especially in the face 
of an empirically verified reality of very specialised deliverer of a 
first person perspective which is unexplained (by any existing physical 
laws, which merely describe) and at the same time upon which those same 
physicists are totally dependent on for all scientific 
observations...indeed Lisi's words actually demand that the first person 
perspective shall be involved!

And as if this weren't enough... there's an empirical neuroscience 
argument which dispenses with the 1stP=3rdP claim: It's the same 
neurological evidence used to flush the 'homunculus hypothesis':
=
Auxillary Step)
Claiming that the 1stP=3rdP is identical with the claim that the world 
is literally constructed of 'appearances'. Thus as a scientitist intent 
on empirically verifying the hypothesis based this "literally 
constructed of appearances"  premise:

"It is a truth of the natural world that the universe is literally made 
of what it appears to be made of, or the 'rules' that those appearances 
portray"

The prediction of this hypothesis is that when you open up a cranium you 
will _literally objectively (3P) see the appearances themselves_. That 
is, if a person is experiencing something green and moving then a 
scientific observation of something green and moving shall be visible 
somewhere inside the cranium... for 1stP = 3rdP... so it must apply to 
the 'appearances themselves'... to be consistent with the circumstances 
of all other scientific observation where that can be seen to be the case.

BUT:   The empirical outcome is in the negativeWe do not literally 
see the experiences. What we actually see is brain material in the act 
of delivery of them.

This disparity between expected and actual evidence renders the 
hypothesis falsified.

You then have to go back to your premises. This means that 1stP DOES NOT 
= 3rdP. From this it follows that the 'descriptions' that are a 'theory 
of everything' (3P) and the complete set of descriptions _are not the 
identical set of descriptions_. I am not saying anything about the 
natural of the additional set of descdriptions. I say merely that they 
necessarily exist and that it is likely the only reason they do not is 
that 2b) is tacitly accepted 'rule of the game'.

===
PRACTICAL NOTE:
Having any belief in the existence or otherwise of an external reality 
changes nothing. It is irrelevant.

You may not accept various aspects of this argument, but I think you may 
agree that it reveals inconsistent belief systems of physicists and 
raises meta-scientific questions insufficiently addressed by those whose 
scientific ambit is the most general - the physicist and in particular 
the cosmologist.

regards,
Colin Hales

[1] Lisi, G. (2007) An exceptionally simple theory of everything. 
http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770
==


Youness Ayaita wrote:
> By this contribution to the Everything list I want to argue that there
> is a fundamental equivalence between the first person and the third
> person viewpoint: Under few assumptions I show that it doesn't matter
> for our reasoning whether we understand the Everything ensemble as the
> ensemble of all worlds (a third person viewpoint) or as the ensemble
> of all observer moments (a first person viewpoint). I think that this
> result is even more substantial than the assumptions from which it can
> be deduced. Thus, I further suggest to reverse my argument considering
> the last 

The Principle of Natural Ontic Genesis

[Colin Hales]

Dear "Everything List" (and "Psyche-B"),

Here is the promised 'fundamental principle of the Chalmers kind'. Note:
there is no magical emergence here. There is no panpsychism here. There is
no dualism here.

If there is apparent logical circularity, it is of a kind far less
problematic than alternate views in that it includes empirical
self-refutation. It is scientifically quite reasonable although rather
unique in that science _itself_ has to change, NOT discover any new
natural laws - it merely has to properly understand the difference between
description and explanation and that each is valid science in its own
domain. The former domain is description of the behaviour of appearances,
the latter domain is descriptions of underlying structure predictive of
the appearances themselves. That they were ever the one scientific domain
has been our mistake all along.

You will find apparent contradiction in what lies below. In one place a
'constitutive primitive' is required. At that same time an 'atomistic'
explanation is later eschewed. That these two positions can be held
simulataneously seems a contradiction but that is not the case... and
the reasons are the subtlties contained in (5) below - the 'constitutive
primitive' is not a thing, but an event that acts 'as-if' it was a thing -
or that appears behaving 'thingly' to us. Things are thus all 'as-if' or
virtual constructs.

I do not claim TPONOG to be perfect... I claim it merely to be somewhere
closer to the right answer than any we have thus far and is completely
seamlessly compatible with all science done thus far.

If you follow where this principle points, as i have for many
years...through physics to chemistry to cell biology to cognition and
phsychology you end up being predictive of what is going on in brain
material and in particular the source of its phenomenal contents.

Firstly: You end up concluding that the universe is a form of 'wild-type'
calculus - (literally a mathematics..and the ONLY instantated
mathematics).

Secondly: They key to understanding how brain material generates
phenomenal consciousness, given that all appears merely as space and
charge with some mass options attached, making it a quintessentially
electromagnetic condensed phase phenomenon is the realisation that
describing a universe in which electromagnetism of certain kinds delivers
phenomenal consciousness is NOT the description delivered BY phenomenal
consciousnessit is a separate but intimately inter-related description
of underlying structure.

You also get to understand why this issue has been so problematic (see (e)
below) for sciencebecause...It is the deep phsyics of the biology of
excitable cells that holds the key empirical route to understanding what
the universe is made of (NOT observations of what happens in a
supercollider or in the cosmos though a telescope)which means that the
top two "Science" journal June '05' issue '125' questions:

1) What is the universe made of?
2) What is the biological basis of consciousness?

are actually the same question, have their empirical evidence in brain
material, and the only reason we haven't answered them both already is
that (1) was posed by cosmologists, (2) was posed by neuroscientists and
the twain simply do not meet, for no good reason than historical accident
and scientific culture - for the cosmologists handed the neuroscientists
their explanatory toolkit centuries ago and haven't been back since.
Neuroscience has all the evidence and can't see it. Cosmologists have the
purview and can;t see any evidence! A cultural problem of the 'chinese
puzzle' kind.

I have CC'd this to the Psyche-B list. It is highly relevant to them and I
thought they may be interested in the discussion and might appreciate a
critical gnaw on a juicy bone. To me, a 'Theory of Everything' and the
process of sorting out consciousness are necessarily unified scientific
activities. In that unification the answers await us.

regards,

Colin Hales

=
The Principle of Natural Ontic Genesis (Version_0)

"It is a fundamentally necessary and implicit fact of the natural world,
regardless of any particular constitutive structural primitive(s)
comprising the natural world that any persistent collaborative subset of
them, say X, howsoever organised and howsoever considered in any arbitrary
grouping, creates an innate perspective from the point of view of being
such a collection; a perspective that is necessarily of the remainder of
the natural world, not_X".

Remarks
1.  The principle is quite general. No particular constitutive primitive
has been assumed.

2.  The principle says absolutely nothing about the visibility of that
innate perspective. The visibility circumstances, ch

Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

down a wys..
===
Russell Standish wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 03:47:19PM +1000, Colin Hales wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> RUSSEL
>>> All I can say is that I don't understand your distinction. You have
>> introduced a new term "necessary primitive" - what on earth is that? But
>> I'll let this pass, it probably isn't important.
>>
>> COLIN
>> Oh no you don't!! It matters. Bigtime...
>>
>> Take away the necessary primitive: no 'qualititative novelty'
>> Take away the water molecules: No lake.
>> Take away the bricks, no building
>> Take away the atoms: no molecules
>> Take away the cells: no human
>> Take away the humans: no humanity
>> Take away the planets: no solar system
>> Take away the X: No emergent Y
>> Take away the QUALE: No qualia
>>
>> Magical emergence is when but claim Y exists but you can't
>> identify an X. Such as:
>
>
> OK, so by necessary primitive, you mean the syntactic or microscopic
> layer. But take this away, and you no longer have emergence. See
> endless discussions on emergence - my paper, or Jochen Fromm's book for
> instance. Does this mean "magical emergence" is oxymoronic?

I do not think I mean what you suggest. To make it almost tediously
obvious I could rephrase it " NECESSARY PRIMITIVE ORGANISATIONAL LAYER.
Necessary in that if you take it away the 'emergent' is gone.PRIMITIVE
ORGANISATIONAL LAYER = one of the layers of the hierarchy of the natural
world (from strings to atoms to cells and beyond): real observable
-on-the-benchtop-in-the-lab - layers. Not some arm waving "syntactic"
or "information" or "complexity" or "Computaton" or "function_atom" or
"representon". Magical emergence is real, specious and exactly what I have
said all along:

You claim consciousness arises as a result of  ["syntactic" or
"information" or "complexity" or "Computational" or "function_atom"] =
necessary primitive, but it has no scientifically verifiable correlation
with any real natural world phenomenon that you can stand next to and have
your picture taken.

>
>
>> You can't use an object derived using the contents of
>> consciousness(observation) to explain why there are any contents of
>> consciousness(observation) at all. It is illogical. (see the wigner quote
>> below). I find the general failure to recognise this brute reality very
>> exasperating.
>>
>
> People used to think that about life. How can you construct (eg an
> animal) without having a complete discription of that animal. So how
> can an animal self-reproduce without having a complete description of
> itself. But this then leads to an infinite regress.
>
> The solution to this conundrum was found in the early 20th century -
> first with such theoretical constructs as combinators and lambda
> calculus, then later the actual genetic machinery of life. If it is
> possible in the case of self-reproduction, the  it will also likely to
> be possible in the case of self-awareness and consciousness. Stating
> this to illogical doesn't help. That's what people from the time of
> Descartes thought about self-reproduction.
>
>> COLIN
>> 
>>> So this means that in a computer abstraction.
>>>> d(KNOWLEDGE(t))
>>>> ---  is already part of KNOWLEDGE(t)
>>>>   dt
>> RUSSEL
>>> No its not. dK/dt is generated by the interaction of the rules with the
>> environment.
>>
>> No. No. No. There is the old assumption thing again.
>>
>> How, exactly, are you assuming that the agent 'interacts' with the
>> environment? This is the world external to the agent, yes?. Do not say
>> "through sensory measurement", because that will not do. There are an
>> infinite number of universes that could give rise to the same sensory
>> measurements.
>
> All true, but how does that differ in the case of humans?

The extreme uniqueness of the circumstance aloneWe ARE the thing we
describe. We are more entitled to any such claims .notwithstanding
that...

Because, as I have said over and over... and will say again: We must live
in the kind of universe that delivers or allows access to, in ways as yet
unexplained, some aspects of the distal world, so which sensory I/O can be
attached, and thus conjoined, be used to form the qualia
representation/fields we experience in our heads.

Forget about HOWthat this is necessarily the case is unavoidable.
Maxwell's equations prove it QED - style...Without it, the 

Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

27;magical
emergence' genre.

I have a viable candidate for the 'necessary primitive' of the kind you
seek. Note that regardless of what anyone's suggestion  for such a thing
might be, the process of declaring it valid must arise in the form of (as
you intuit above) an axiom. That is, it must come in the form of a
statement such as

X = "It is a fundamental principle of the natural world that <<< such and
such a thing>> is the ultimate necessary primitive state of affairs that
must be the case for consciousness to a) deliver a faculty of observation
at all and then b) for biological delivery that, when observing its own
processes delivering observation, looks like brain material when that it
is happening and NOT when it isn't"

This is the generic form of the kind of 'fundamental principle' that
Chalmers called for in his 1996 book. You cannot escape the reality of
some form of X, regardless of <<>. In terms of X:

liquidity is to H2O
as
The property X  is to consciousness (qualia)

Such a statement, in one fell swoop, eliminates the
circularity/self-fulfilment of the magical emergence kind...that which I
have been at pains to point out (dialog with Russel) is inherent at
multiple levels in the 'computationalist' or 'eliminativist' or
'functionalist' or 'representationalist' flavours of magical emergence. A
principle of the kind X must exist or we wouldn't be having this
discussion. There is no way to characterise explanation through magical
emergence that enables empirical testing. Not even in principle. They are
impotent at all prediction. You adopt the position and the whole job is
done and is a matter of belief = NOT SCIENCE.

Remaining at the 'meta' level of general discussion of statements of the
kind X, we can make a couple of important observations:
1) X must be consistent with all empirical (neuroscience/cognitive) evidence.
2) X must at least in principle be able to make verifiable novel
predictions of the natural world critically dependent on X being the case.

If it cannot do this then it is not viable. If it can make even ONE then
it is a better proposition than magical emergence.

Note there is a unique character to X that is unlike anything science has
ever encountered. Direct evidence for X is not any specific observation.
It is the cause of the mere possibility of any observation at all. As I
have said in previous posts "that which is seen (contents of
consciousness) is our traditional demanded source of explicit scientific
evidence. However..."Seeing" (any observation/consciousness at all) is
intrinsic/implicit evidence of the existence of circumstances that
necessarily exist or no explicit observation would exist. Every explicit
act of scientific observation also delivers implicit evidence of an
ability to observe. In other words evidence of the lack of qualia is the
failure to observe.

The only third party verifyable circumstance where failure to observe can
be counted as evidence is in the failure of the scientific act. Hence my
insistence that science and the scientific act be the evidentiary
circumstances of a viable empirical science directed at proving X.

Other than this strangeness (scientists themselves are evidence), the
process is just like any other scientific process. Business as usual.

If Galen Strawson is setting fire to the magical emergence campGOOD!

I have an X proposition that delivers what looks like panpsychism, but
isn't actuallywell... if X is a principle that applies universally
(something that exists at all spatial scales... inherent in the whole
universe) and is intrinsic, logically unavoidable and implicit...then does
that count as panpsychism? I don't know. Frankly I don't care!...X is a
member of the class "Law of Physics". Where it fits philosophically is
someone else's problem. Not such characterisation has any impact on the
empirical work... and I am fiendishly empirical to the bitter end...

Before I re-deliver my X... I'd like to leave the discussion at the META-X
level (about any X or about all possible Xs)over to you

cheers
colin hales





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Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

Dear Brent,
If you had the most extravagent MRI machine in history, which trapped
complete maps of all electrons, neuclei and any photons and then plotted
them out - you would have a 100% complete, scientifically acquired
publishable description and in that description would be absolutely no
prediction of or explanation of why it is necessarily 'like it is' to 'be'
the brain thus described, what that experience will be like. It would not
enable you to make any cogent claim as to why it is or is not 'like
something' to be a computer except insofar as it doesn't have neurons. Why
am I saying thisPlease read David Chalmers. This is not new.

Science does not and never has EXPLAINED anything. It merely describes.
Read the literature. For the first time ever, to deal with qualia, science
has to actually EXPLAIN something. It is at the boundary condition where
you have to explain how you can observe anything at all.

As to your EM theory beliefs... please read the literature. Jackson
"Classical electrodynamics" is a brilliant place to start. For nobody
around here in electrical engineering agrees with you... and I have just
been grilled on that very issue by a whole pile of very senior academics -
who agree with me. Even my anatomy/neuroscience supervisor, who are
generally pathologically afraid of physicstells me there's nothing
there but space and charge


If you want to draw a line around a specific zone of ignorance and inhabit
it...go ahead. If you want to believe that correlation is causation go
ahead. "This is what we do"  is what you say when you are a member of a
club, not a seeker of truth. You have self referentially defined
truthand you are welcome to it. ...

Meanwhile I'll just poke around in other areas. I hope you won't mind.
Please consider your exasperation quota reached. Job done.

colin





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Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

Hi Quentin,

> "What is the kind of universe we must live in if the electromagnetic field
> structure of the brain delivers qualia?"
>
> A. It is NOT the universe depicted by the qualia (atoma, molecules,
> cells...). It is the universe whose innate capacity to deliver qualia is
> taken advantage of when configureed like it appears when we use qualia
> themselves to explore itcortical brain matter. (NOTE: Please do not
> make the mistake that sensors - peripheral affect -  are equivalent to
> qualia.)


I will only react to this...

and I will deposit a large collection of weirdness for you to ponder

Q. What is cortical brain matter ?
Let us call our first candidate consistent with all the fatcs a monism
made of MON_STUFF. We must give ourselves the latitude to consider various
candidates.  For the purposes it does not matter what it is. I will try
and answer your questions by bringing in properties. So cortical brain
matter is made of a collection of MON_STUFF. Not atoms. Atoms are
organised MON_STUFF. Quarks are organised MON_STUFF. The MON_STUFF I
choose, that seems to deliver everything I need and is the simplest
possible choice:  is 'the fluctuation'.

Q. Does it exists by itself?
No. It is nested MON_STUFF all the way down. It is intrinsically dynamic
and fleeting. Anything made of MON_STUFF is persistent organisational
structure within a massive collection of fleeting change. Exactly like the
shapes in the water coming out of a garden hose. There is a critical
minimum collection of it, from which all subsequent structure is derived.
That minimum is created like collections of turbulent water molecules
breaks off and self-sustains a eddy/vortex once a critical threshold is
reached. Ultimately there is no need to prescribe an ultimate minimum
'atom-ish' minimal size MON_STUFF fluctuation to predict qualia. Someone
else's problem. I don't need to solve that. The fluctuation model
works...that's all I need to progress.

Q. if so, what is it composed of (matter ?) ?
Well it's not, so I don't have to fall into this logical hole.

Q. what is matter ?
Hierarchically organised persistent but intrinsically dynamic (continually
refreshed) structures of MON_STUFF

Q. what is brain?
I think we already did this.

Q why cortical brain matter generates qualia ?
There is one single simple fundamental principle at the heart of it: "At
all scales and all locations, when you 'be'  any MON_STUFF the 'view of
the rest of the universe' is delivered innately as 'NOT_ME'". Call it the
COLIN principle of universal subjectivity" I don;t care...like the
fluctuation This is a simple as it gets.

Q why it must be so ?
With the fundamental principle that perspective view at all scales
literally is the source of qualia, the whole reasoning changes from one of
WHY to one of WHERE/WHENwhich is what you ask. It is question of
visability. It is 'like' 'NOT_ELECTRON' to be a collection of MON_STUFF
behaving electronly. That is not 'about' being an electron. It IS an
electron. Not only that, there is a blizzard of the little blighters with
no collective 'story' to tell. Their collective summated scene is ZERO.

Q Is qualia a dependance of cortical brain matter or the inverse ?
If I get you correctly it's 'INVERSE'.

Q. is qualia responsible of what looks like cortical brain matter?
It's not 'responsible' in that it doesn't 'cause brain matter'. Qualia
present a visual scene -  a representation. In the scene we see brain
matter.

Q or is it cortical brain matter that makes feel
qualia which in turns ask question about cortical brain matter ?
No. Cortical brain material is an appearance of MON_STUFF created by
special MON_STUFF doing the 'appearance dance'. When it does that dance
... (the cortical grey matter membrane dance)... it creates an appearance
of atoms, molcules, cells, tissue because these are persistent nested
structures of MON_STUFF doing the atom dance, the molecule dance, the cell
dance. etc..etc.

As weird and hard to assimilate as it soundsIt all comes down to the
two simplest possible basic premises:

1) A universe consisting of a massive number of one generic elemental
process, the fluctuation.

2) A universe in which the perspective view from the point of view of
'being' ME, an elemental fluctuation, is 'NOT ME' (the rest of the
universe).

The ecitable cell dance is the only dance that has it's own story
independent of the underlying MON_STUFF organisational layers. That is the
only place where the net exertions of MON_STUFF have nothing to do with
any other dance. That is the organisational level where the visibility
finally manifests to non-zero...why neural soma are fat - it's all about
signal to noise ratio.

weirdness time over. Gotta g

Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

Hi,

RUSSEL
> All I can say is that I don't understand your distinction. You have
introduced a new term "necessary primitive" - what on earth is that? But
I'll let this pass, it probably isn't important.

COLIN
Oh no you don't!! It matters. Bigtime...

Take away the necessary primitive: no 'qualititative novelty'
Take away the water molecules: No lake.
Take away the bricks, no building
Take away the atoms: no molecules
Take away the cells: no human
Take away the humans: no humanity
Take away the planets: no solar system
Take away the X: No emergent Y
Take away the QUALE: No qualia

Magical emergence is when but claim Y exists but you can't
identify an X. Such as:

Take away the X: No qualia

but thenyou claim qualia result from 'information complexity' or
'computation' or 'function' and you fail to say what X can be. Nobody can.

You can't use an object derived using the contents of
consciousness(observation) to explain why there are any contents of
consciousness(observation) at all. It is illogical. (see the wigner quote
below). I find the general failure to recognise this brute reality very
exasperating.

COLIN

> So this means that in a computer abstraction.
>> d(KNOWLEDGE(t))
>> ---  is already part of KNOWLEDGE(t)
>>   dt

RUSSEL
> No its not. dK/dt is generated by the interaction of the rules with the
environment.

No. No. No. There is the old assumption thing again.

How, exactly, are you assuming that the agent 'interacts' with the
environment? This is the world external to the agent, yes?. Do not say
"through sensory measurement", because that will not do. There are an
infinite number of universes that could give rise to the same sensory
measurements. We are elctromagnetic objects. Basic EM theory. Proven
mathematical theorems. The solutions are not unique for an isolated
system.

Circularity.Circularity.Circularity.

There is _no interaction with the environment_ except for that provided by
the qualia as an 'as-if' proxy for the environment. The origins of an
ability to access the distal external world in support of such a proxy is
mysterious but moot. It can and does happen, and that ability must come
about because we live in the kind of universe that supports that
possibility. The mysteriousness of it is OUR problem.

RUSSEL
> Evolutionary algorithms are highly effective
> information pumps, pumping information from the environment into the
genome, or whatever representation you're using to store the solutions.

COLIN
But then we're not talking about merely being 'highly effective'
in a target problem domain, are we? We are talking about proving
consciousness in a machine. I agree - evolutionary algoritms are great
things... they are just irrelevant to this discussion.

COLIN
>> >> My scientific claim is that the electromagnetic field structure
>> literally the third person view of qualia.
>> > Eh? Electromagnetic field of what? The brain? If so, do you think
that
>> chemical potentiation plays no role at all in qualia?
>> Chemical potentiation IS electric field.

RUSSEL
> Bollocks. A hydrogen molecule and an oxygen atom held 1m apart have
chemical potential, but there is precious little electric field

I am talking about the membrane and you are talking atoms so I guess we
missed somehow...anywayThe only 'potentiation' that really matters in
my model is that which looks like an 'action potential' longitudinally 
traversing dendrite/soma/axon membrane as a whole.

Notwithstanding this

The chemical potentiation at the atomic level is entirely an EM phenomenon
mediated by QM boundaries (virtual photons in support of the shell
structure, also EM). It is a sustained 'well/energy minimaum' in the EM
field structureYou think there is such a 'thing' as potential? There
is no such thing - there is something we describe as 'EM field'. Nothing
else. Within that metaphor is yet another even more specious metaphor:
Potential is an (as yet unrealised) propensity of the field at a
particular place to do work on a charge if it were put it there. You can
place that charge in it and get a number out of an electrophysiological
probe... and 'realise' the work (modify the fields) itself- but there's no
'thing' that 'is' the potential.

Not only that: The fields are HUGE > 10^11 volts/meter. Indeed the
entrapment of protons in the nucleus requires the strong nuclear force to
overcome truly stupendous repulsive fields. I know beause I am quite
literally doing tests in molecular dynamics simulations of the E-M field
at the single charge level. The fields are massive and change at
staggeringly huge rates, especially at the atomic level. HoweverTheir
net level in the vicinity of 20Angstroms away falls off dramatically. But
this is not the vicinity of any 'chemical reaction'.

And again I say : there is nothing else there but charge and its fields.

When you put your hand on a table the reason it doesn't pass through it
even though table and hand are mostly space ...is because elect

Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

Hi,
I am going to have to be a bit targetted in my responses I am a TAD
whelmed at the moment.

COLIN
>> 4) Belief in 'magical emergence'  qualitative novelty of a kind
utterly unrelated to the componentry.

RUSSEL
> The latter clause refers to "emergence" (without the "magical"
> qualifier), and it is impossible IMHO to have creativity without
emergence.

COLIN
The distinction between 'magical emergence' and 'emergence' is quite
obviously intended by me. A lake is not apparent in the chemical formula
for water. I would defy anyone to quote any example of real-world
'emergence' that does not ultimately rely on a necessary primitive.
'Magical emergence' is when you claim 'qualitative novelty' without having
any idea (you can't point at it) of the necessary primitive, or by
defining an arbitrary one that is actually a notional construct (such as
'information'), rather than anything real.


COLIN
>> The system (a) automatically prescibes certain trajectories and

RUSSEL
> Yes.

COLIN
>> (b) assumes that the theroem space [and] natural world are the same
space
and equivalently accessed.

RUSSEL
> No - but the system will adjust its model according to feedback. That is
the very nature of any learning algorithm, of which EP is just   one example.

COLIN
Ok. Here's where we find the big assumption. Feedback? HOW?...by who's
rules? Your rules. This is the real circularity which underpins
computationalism. It's the circularity that my real physical qualia model
cuts and kills. Mathematically:

* You have knowledge KNOWLEDGE(t) of 'out there'
* You want more knowledge of 'out there' so
* KNOWLEDGE(t+1) is more than KNOWLEDGE(t)
* in computationalism who defines the necessary route to this?...

 d(KNOWLEDGE(t))
 --- = something you know = YOU DO.
dt

So this means that in a computer abstraction.

d(KNOWLEDGE(t))
---  is already part of KNOWLEDGE(t)
  dt

You can label it 'evolutionary' or 'adaptive' or whatever...ultimately the
rules are YOUR rules and come from your previously derived KNOWLEDGE(t) of
'out there', not intrinsically grounded directly in 'out there'. Who
decided what you don't know? YOU DID. What is it based on? YOUR current
knowledge of it, not what is literally/really there. Ungroundedness is the
fatal flaw in the computationalist model. Intrinsic grounding in the
external world is what qualia are for. It means that

d(KNOWLEDGE(t))
---
  dt

is
(a) built into the brain hardware (plasticity chemistry, out of your
cognitive control)
(b) partly grounded in matter literally/directly constructed in
representation of the external world, reflecting the external world so
that NOVELTY - true novelty in the OUTSIDE WORLD - is apparent.

In this way your current knowledge minimally impacts

d(KNOWLEDGE(t))
---
  dt

In other words, at the fundamental physics level:

 d(KNOWLEDGE(t))
---
  dt

in a human brain is NOT part of KNOWLEDGE(t). Qualia are the brain's
solution to the symbolic grounding problem.


RUSSEL
> Not at all. In Evolutionary Programming, very little is known about the
ultimate solution the algorithm comes up with.

COLIN
Yes but that is irrelevantthe programmer said HOW it will get
thereSorry...no cigarsee the above

>> My scientific claim is that the electromagnetic field structure
literally the third person view of qualia.

> Eh? Electromagnetic field of what? The brain? If so, do you think that
chemical potentiation plays no role at all in qualia?

Chemical potentiation IS electric field. There's no such thing as
'mechanical' there's no such thing as 'chemical'. These are all metaphors
in certain contexts for what is there...space and charge (yes...and mass
associated with certain charge carriers). Where did you get this weird
idea that a metaphor can make qualia?

The electric field across the membrane of cells (astrocytes and neurons)
is MASSIVE. MEGAVOLTS/METER. Think SPARKS and LIGHTNIING. It dominates the
entire structure! It does not have to go anywhere. It just has to 'be'.
You 'be' it to get what it delivers. Less than 50% of the signalling in
the brain is synaptic, anyway! The dominant cortical process is actually
an astrocyte syncytium. (look it up!). I would be very silly to ignore the
single biggest, most dominant process of the brain that is so far
completely correlated in every way with qualia...in favour of any other
cause.
---

Once again I'd like to get you to ask yourself the killer question:

"What is the kind of universe we must live in if the electromagnetic field
structure of the brain delivers qualia?"

A. It is NOT the universe depicted by the qualia (atoma, molecules,
cells...). It is the universe whose innate capacity to deliver qualia is
taken advantage of when configureed like it appears when we use qualia
themselves to explore itcortical brain matter. (NOTE: Please do not
make the mistake that sensors - peripheral a

Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

al of the problem! Objects of the
sense impressions (contents of consciousness) cannot predict the existence
of the sense impressions. All the 'cells' etc are objects of sense
impressions! All description, no explanation. You will never explain them
that way by definition.

The only way out of the circularity is to ask yourself  (as I suggested in
the first post)

"What kind of universe must I be in/made of would, in the form of observed
cells and cell behaviour, deliver observation of the kind that reveals
itself as cells behaving as they do?"

I hold the huge and exquisitiely structured electromagnetic field in
normal human cranial excitable cells (neurons and astrocytes)to be
responsible for qualia. 'The word 'electromagnetic' is just a label for a
sense artefact. There is no such 'thing' as electromagnetism. There is
only SOMETHING (stuff) behaving in a an electromagnetic fashion that we
all agreed is deserved of the label..

The trick is to propose all manner of kinds of 'stuff' (nothing to do
with any'thing' ever proposed by science) in a collection that has an
intrinsic capacity to deliver observation (the one thing totally
unexplained by science) and to recognise in that STUFF what the property
delivering observation actually is. This sounds weird but it's quite
practical and invaldates no existence science at all. Existing science can
be used to validate all such propositions for STUFF. It's what I am set
about to do - make a conscious chip - and prove it is conscious (has
qualia happeneing in it) - by making it (actually several of them all
connected to each other) do science and get it right.

Science hasn't even begun to do this an any structured, explicit
fashion...which is a shame, for it causes all the circularity.

So in order to tell you the answer to your question I have to tell you
what the universe is made of. And the answer consistent with brain
material's ability to deliver observation is simple: the fluctuation. End
of story. Except you need a whole pile of them (largely but not perfectly)
synchronised.

I can never tell you "it's X,Y,Z contents of consciousness-based
generalisation" that delivers the contents of consiousness".

The circularity (dare I say symmetry!) argument is broken by breaking our
epistemology into 2 distinct halves, each valid depictions of the natural
world. One half (a) scientifically says what it is made of and the other
half (b) scientifically says how it will appear when you are made of it,
inside it _because_ it is made of (a) stuff.

I am doing (b). I can't use sense objects like cells and molecules and
atoms to explain it because it is meaningless to do so. I can tell you
that the delivery of sense impressions (qualia) is definitely as a result
of specific bahaviours related to what we observe as neural cell firing,
but not entirely so. The model also scientifically says why your big toe
has no qualia and what a rock or a computer (current architectures) does
not.

The boundary of the underlying natural world/universe and how it appears
is literally in brain material. It's the only 'real' we can claim to have.
Ignoring it as evidence of the underlying universe is just plain dumb.
Down the track we're all going to say "geeze what WERE we thinking all
those centuries!!"

My formula for machine consciousness validation stands as a valid
scientifically testable proposition.

The real test will happen within 5 years - a nest of tiny little benchtop
artificial scientists in the form of chips with a novel architecture -
that will scientifically demonstrate science to us and therefore be
justifyably the possessors of qualia. Upon failure of the test the 'STUFF'
I have chosen must be the wrong STUFF and that will be scientifically
refuted. In any event real science will be done.

gotta go.

cheers

colin hales





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Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

 I think you're showing clear signs of carbon-lifeform-ism here. Whilst I
can say fairly clearly that I believe my fellow humans are
> conscious, and that I beleive John Koza's evolutionary programs
> aren't, I do not have a clear-cut operational test of
> consciousness. Its like the test for pornography - we know it when we
see it.

This is touching the flame - right there - where i claim this is not the
case. Everything we are is mediated through cortical qualia. In the one
and only case - the act of doing science - this argument is not valid.
Science evidences qualia (it does not say what they are, merely that they
exist)

This is the cultural blind we inhabit. Cortical qualia are all and ONLY
evidence of _everything_ and is subjectively delivered. We cannot have it
both ways. We cannot live and do science using it for all evidence and
then either (a) deny it or (b) claim it present in another person/artifact
with the same ability as we declare something pornography (an arbitrary
belief). Let the object itself demonstrate science. be scientific about
it. This is the only place any consistency can be invoked and the major
source of inconsistency in our own behaviour as scientists.

Like I said earlier: everything is evidence of something and scientists
are no exception - they are evidence of something and that something is
cortical qualia.

The scientific act and the existence of scientists is the slim crack in
the cultural blind through which we can end the chronic failure.

>It is therefore not at all clear to me that some n-th
generational
> improvement on an evolutionary algorithm won't be considered conscious
at some time in the future. It is not at all clear which aspects of human
cortical systems are required for consciousness.

You are not alone. This is an epidemic.

My scientific claim is that the electromagnetic field structure literally
the third person view of qualia. This is not new. What is new is
understanding the kind of universe we inhabit in which that is necessarily
the case. It's right there, in the cells. Just ask the right question of
them. There's nothing else there but space (mostly), charge and mass - all
things delineated and described by consciousness as how they appear to it
- and all such descriptions are logically necessarily impotent in
prescribing why that very consciousness exists at all.

Wigner got this in 1960something time to catch up.

gotta go

cheers
colin hales



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Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

Hi Stathis,

Colin
>The bogus logic I detect in posts around this area...
>'Humans are complex and are conscious'
>'Humans were made by a complex biosphere'
>therefore
>'The biosphere is conscious'
>
>
Stathis
That conclusion is spurious, but it is the case that non-conscious
evolutionary processes can give rise to very elaborate "technology",
namely life, which goes against your theory that only consciousness can
produce new technology.

Colin
This point is poised on the cliff edge of loaded word meanings and their
use with the words 'sufficient' and 'necessary'. By technology I mean
novel artifacts resulting from the trajectory of causality including human
scientists. By that definition 'life', in the sense you infer, is not
technology. The resulting logical loop can be thus avoided. There is a
biosphere that arose naturally. It includes complexity of sufficient depth
to have created observers within it. Those observers can produce
technology. Douglas Adams (bless him) had the digital watch as a valid
product of evolution - and I agree with him - it's just that humans are
necessarily involved in its causal ancestry.

COLIN
>That assumes that complexity itself (organisation of information) is the
>origin of consciousness in some unspecified, unjustified way. This
>position is completely unable to make any empirical predictions
>about the
>nature of human conscousness (eg why your cortex generates qualia
>and your
>spinal chord doesn't - a physiologically proven fact).


STATHIS
> Well, why does your eye generate visual qualia and not your big toe?
It's because the big toe lacks the necessary machinery.
>

Colin
I am afraid you have your physiology mixed up. The eye does NOT generate
visual qualia. Your visual cortex  generates it based on measurements in
the eye. The qualia are manufactured and simultaneously projected to
appear to come from the eye (actually somewhere medial to them). It's how
you have 90degrees++ peripheral vison. The same visual qualia can be
generated without an eye (hallucination/dream). Some blind (no functioning
retina) people have a visual field for numbers. Other cross-modal mixups
can occur in synesthesia (you can hear colours, taste words). You can have
a "phantom big toe" without having any big toe at alljust because the
cortex is still there making the qualia. If you swapped the sensory nerves
in two fingers the motor cortex would drive finger A and it would feel
like finger B moved and you would see finger A move. The sensation is in
your head, not the periphery. It's merely projected at the periphery.

cheers
colin



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Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

ss) of their grounder -
the human programmer. The science done by the artefact can be the
perfectly good science of abstractions, but simply wrong or irrelevant
insofar as it bears any ability to prescribe or verify claims/propositions
about the natural world (about which it has no awareness whatever). The
usefulness of the outcome (patents) took human involvement. The inventor
(software) doesn't even know it's in a universe, let alone that it
participated in an invention process.

(2) "Is this evolutionary algorithm conscious then?".
In the sense that we are conscious of the natural world around us? Most
definitely no. Nowhere in the computer are any processes that include all
aspects of the physics of human cortical matter. Without knowing exactly
why it is the case that cortical matter bestow qualia on us... what I can
definitely claim (because I know what is in the chips at the atomic level
and I know what is in cortical material at the atomic level)  is that in
no way does the computer include all the aspects of the cortical matter
that we utilise in our scientific behaviour. Science is grounded in
cortical-qualia (via observation)...The computer cannot be scientifically
claimed to have qualia...ergo is not conscious...

...Which will now hit the question-begging boundary.as to the of the
question-begging thing (and please don't jump into the solipsism mud)

FACT: The ONLY _scientifically_ provable example (.ie. a generalisation
about the natural world that remains tentatively unrefuted) we have of a
real known consciousness is ourselves (scientists). The scientific proof?
= Science exists/is possible/is successful and fails without human
cortical qualia being involved The word 'consciousness', invoked in this
context means specifically and only the cortical qualia in which sciencwe
has been grounded. This is a scientifically provable proposition I can
make without knowing what qualia are.

Based on this, of the 2 following positions, which is less vulnerable to
critical attack?

A) Information processing (function) begets consciousness, regardless of
the behaviour of the matter doing the information processing (form).
Computers process information. Therefore I believe the computer is
conscious.

B) Human cortical qualia are a necessary condition for the scientific
behaviour and unless the complete suite of the physics involved in that
process is included in the computer, the computer is not conscious.

Which form of question-begging gets the most solid points as science?  (B)
of course. (B) is science and has an empirical future. Belief (A) is
religion, not science.

Bit of a no-brainer, eh?

Cheers
colin hales



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Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

Hi again,

Russel:
I'm sorry, but you worked yourself up into an incomprehensible
rant. Is evolution creative in your view or not? If it is, then there is
little point debating definitions, as we're in agreement. If not, then we
clearly use the word creative in different senses, and perhaps defintion
debates have some utility.

Colin:
There wasn't even the slightest edge of 'rant' in the post. Quite calm,
measured and succinct, actually. Its apparent incomprehensibility? I have
no clue what that could be it's quite plain...

RE: 'creativity'
... Say at stage t the biosphere was at complexity level X and then at
stage t = t+(something), the biosphere complexity was at KX, where X is
some key performance indicator of complexity (eg entropy) and K > 1 

This could be called creative if you like. Like Prigogine did. I'd caution
against the tendency to use the word because it has so many loaded
meanings that are suggestive of much more then the previous para.
Scientifically the word could be left entirely out of any desciptions of
the biosphere.

The bogus logic I detect in posts around this area...
'Humans are complex and are conscious'
'Humans were made by a complex biosphere'
therefore
'The biosphere is conscious'

That assumes that complexity itself (organisation of information) is the
origin of consciousness in some unspecified, unjustified way. This
position is completely unable to make any empirical predictions about the
nature of human conscousness (eg why your cortex generates qualia and your
spinal chord doesn't - a physiologically proven fact).

The same bogus logic happens in relation to quantum mechanics and
conscsiousness:
"Quantum mechanics is weird and complex"
"Consciousness is  is weird and complex"
therefore
"Quantum mechanics generates consciousness"

I caution against this. I caution against using the word 'creativity' in
any useful scientific discussion of evolution and complexity.

cheers
colin



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Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

Colin
>> like the functionality of a scientist without involving ALL the
functionality (especially qualia) of a scientist must be based
>> on assumptions - assumptions I do not make.

Russel
> I gave a counter example, that of biological evolution. Either you
should demonstrate why you think biological evolution is uncreative, or
why it is conscious.

Colin
You have proven my point again. It is not a counterexample at all. These
two "either-or" options are rife with assumption and innappropriately
contra-posed. The biggest? = Define the context/semantics of 'creative'.
Options:

#1 The biosphere is a massive localised collection of molecular ratchet
motors pumped infinitesimal increment by infinitesimal increment against
the 2nd law of thermodynamics upon the arrival of each photon from the
sun. If the novelty (new levels nested organisational complexity)
expressed in that collection/process can be called an act of
creativity...fine...so what? I could call it an act of 'gronkativity' and
it would not alter the facts of the matter. I don't even have to mention
the word consciousness.

The organisational complexity thus contrived may or may not include
physics that makes some of it (like humans) conscious. I could imagine a
biosphere just as complex (quaternary, 100ernary/etc structure) but devoid
of all the physics involved in (human) consciousness and the behavioural
complexity contingent on that fact. That alternate biosphere's complexity
would simply have no witnesses built into it and would have certain state
trajectories ruled out in favour of others. This alternate biosphere would
have lots of causality and no observation (in the sense that the causality
is involved in construction of a phenomenal field of the human/qualia kind
is completely absent). This blind biosphere is all 'observation' O(.)
functions of the Nils Baas kind that is completely disconnected from
consciousness or the human faculty for observation made of it.

Making any statement about the consciousess of a biosphere is meaningless
until you know what the physics is in humans...only then are we entitled
to assess the consciousness or otherwise of the biosphere as a
whole or what, if any' aspects of the word creative (which , BTW was
invented by consciousness!) can be ascribed to it.the same argument
applies to a computer, for that matter.

Until then I suggest we don't bother.

#2 Creativity in humans = the act of being WRONG about something = the
essence of imagining (using the faculty of consciousness - the qualia of
internal imagery of all kinds) hitherto unseen states of affairs in the
natural world around us that do not currently exist (such as the structure
of a new scientific law or a sculture of a hitherto unseen shape).
this has nothing to do with the #1 collection of ratchet motorsexcept
insofar as the process doing it is implemented inside it, with it (inside
the brain of a human made of the ratchet motors).

That's how you unpack this discussion.

cheers
colin hales

BTW thanks.I now have the BAAS paper on .PDF
Baas, N. A. (1994) Emergence, Hierarchies, and Hyperstructures. In C. G.
Langton (ed.). Artificial life III : proceedings of the Workshop on
Artificial Life, held June 1992 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Addison-Wesley,
Reading, Mass.

I'll send it over...



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Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

nsciousness as shown. Now ask "what is it that is behaving
sine-wave-ly". Whatever that is, it is NOT a sine wave. Another question
to ask "What is it like to BE a sine wave?". These are all aspects of the
same thing.

Now consider one of the models (sine waves) -
computationalism/functionalism - defined through an observation. What is
the observation? .That universe seems to be performing computation or
information processingsowhat do we do with that observation?
We jump to the unfounded conclusion that any form of computation in some
undefined way leads to consciousness (= all siine waves are
conscious)..

This is as flawed as any similar explanation as it is logically
indistiguishable and as empirically useless as the equivalent belief: "I
believe observation (consiousness) is invoked by the tooth fairy on
thursdays".

The only real, verifiable evidence of consciousness we have is the
existence of scientists and their output. It may seem a hard task to set
yourself as an AI worker... but TOUGH - nobody said it had to be easy -
and it is no reason to set it aside  in favour of an empirically useless
"tooth fairy hypothesis for consciousness".

At least I have a plan.

so in relation to

> I don't see that you've made your point.

I'd like to think that I have. My AI/Human scientist face-off stands as is
and I defy anyone to come up with something practical/better that isn't
axiomatically flawed. Everything is scientific evidence of something.
Scientists are no exception.

cheers,
colin hales





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Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

nsciousness as shown. Now ask "what is it that is behaving
sine-wave-ly". Whatever that is, it is NOT a sine wave. Another question
to ask "What is it like to BE a sine wave?". These are all aspects of the
same thing.

Now consider one of the models (sine waves) -
computationalism/functionalism - defined through an observation. What is
the observation? .That universe seems to be performing computation or
information processingsowhat do we do with that observation?
We jump to the unfounded conclusion that any form of computation in some
undefined way leads to consciousness (= all siine waves are
conscious)..

This is as flawed as any similar explanation as it is logically
indistiguishable and as empirically useless as the equivalent belief: "I
believe observation (consiousness) is invoked by the tooth fairy on
thursdays".

The only real, verifiable evidence of consciousness we have is the
existence of scientists and their output. It may seem a hard task to set
yourself as an AI worker... but TOUGH - nobody said it had to be easy -
and it is no reason to set it aside  in favour of an empirically useless
"tooth fairy hypothesis for consciousness".

At least I have a plan.

so in relation to

> I don't see that you've made your point.

I'd like to think that I have. My AI/Human scientist face-off stands as is
and I defy anyone to come up with something practical/better that isn't
axiomatically flawed. Everything is scientific evidence of something.
Scientists are no exception.

cheers,
colin hales



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Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

[Colin Hales]

Sorry about the previous post... I did it from the the Google
listsomething weird happened.
---

Hi folks,
Re: How would a computer know if it were conscious?

Easy.

The computer would be able to go head to head with a human in a competition.
The competition?
Do science on exquisite novelty that neither party had encountered.
(More interesting: Make their life depend on getting it right. The
survivors are conscious).

Only conscious entities can do open ended science on the exquisitely novel.
You cannot teach something how to deal with the exquisitely novel because
you haven't any experience of it to teach. It means that the entity must
be configurted as a machine that "learns how to learn something". This is
one meta-level removed from your usual AI situation. It's what humans do.
During neogenesis and development, humans 'learn how to learn how to
learn".

If the computer/scientist can match the human/scientist...it's as
conscious as a human. It must be.

cheers
colin hales





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RE: Mouse brain simulated on a computer - NOT

[Colin Hales]

Hi,
What they did was hook X million simple neural soma models to each other
with Y000 models of synaptic interconnects. Very useful for investigating
large-scale dynamicsbutthe leap to 'mouse brain'?.presumptuous
I think. Perhaps... 'Mouse-brain scale idealised connectionist model'
would b more accurate and less loaded remember...Less than half the
signaling in the brain is via synapses. They didn't even mention the word
'astrocyte'. Interesting..yes. Relevant to the milieu? Yes...but well
informed? Hthe spin has a little too much chest thumping and not
enough biology, methinks
cheers
col



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Re: String theory and Cellular Automata

[Colin Hales]

Hi,
See previous posts here re EC - Entropy Calculus. This caught my eye,
thought I'd throw in my $0.02 worth.

I have been working on this idea for a long while now. Am writing it up as
part of my PhD process.

The EC is a lambda calculus formalism that depicts reality. It's actual
instantation with one particular and unbelievable massive axiom set is the
universe we are in. The instantation is literally the CA of the EC
primitives.

As cognitive agents within it, made of the EC-CA, describing it, we can
use abstracted simplified EC on a computational substrate (also made of
the CA...a computer!) to explore/describe the universe. But the
abstractions (like string theory) are not the universe - they are merely
depictions at a certain spatiotemporal observer-scales.  Reality is a
literal ongoing massively parallel theorem proving exercise in Entropy
Calculus. The EC universe has literally computed you and me and my dogs.

Coherence/Bifurcation points in the CA correspond to new descriptive
'levels of underlying reality' - emergence. Atoms, Molecules,
Crystalsetc...

One of the descriptive abstractions of the EC-CA is called
'Maxwells-Equations'. Another is the Navier-Stokes equations (different
context), another is Quantum Mechanics, the standard particle model and so
on. None of them are reality - merely depictions of a surface behaviour of
it. In the model there is only one universe and only one justified or
needed. Which is a bummer if you insist on talking about
multiverses.they are not parsimonious or necessary to explain the
universe. I can't help it if they are unnecessary!

You know , it's funny what EC makes the universe look like. the
boundary of the universe is the collective event horizon of all black
holes. On the other side is nothing. The endlessly increasing size of
black holes is what corresponds to the endlessly increasing entropy
(disorder - which is the dispersal of the deep universe back to nothing at
the event horizons). The measure of the surface area of the black holes is
the entropy of the whole universe.

The process of dispersal at the boundary makes it look like the universe
is expanding - to us from the inside. The reality is actually the reverse
- the spatiotemporal circumstances are of shrinkage  - due to the loss of
the redundant fabric of the very deepest layers of reality being eaten by
the black holes, dragging it inwhilst the organisation of collections
of it at the uppermost layers is maintained (like space, atoms etc).
(Imagine a jumper knitted of wool with a huge number of threads in the
yarn - remove the redundant threads from the inside and the jumper
shrinks, but is still a jumper, just getting smaller(everything else
around looks like it's getting bigger from the point of view of being the
jumper.) our future?...we'll all blink out of existence as the event
horizons of black holes that grow and grow and grow and do it faster and
faster and faster until. merging and merging until they all merge and
then PFT! NOTHING. and the whole process starts again with a new
axiom setround and round and roundwe go...

Weird huh?

So I reckon you're on the right track. You don't have to believe me about
any of it... but I can guarantee you'll get answers if you keep looking at
it. The trick is to let go of the idea that 'fundamental building blocks'
of nature are a meaningful concept (we are tricked into the belief be our
perceptual/epistemological goals) ...

cheers,
colin hales



Mohsen Ravanbakhsh wrote:
> I'm thinking there's some kind of similarity between string theory and
depicting the world as a big CA. In String theory we have some vibrating
strings which have some kind of influence on each other and can for
different matters and fields. CA can play such role of changing patterns
and of course the influence is evident. Different rules in CA might
correspond to various basic shapes of vibration in strings...
> I don't know much about S.T. but the idea of such mapping seems very
interesting.
>
> --
> Mohsen Ravanbakhsh.
>
>
> >




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RE: Numbers, Machine and Father Ted

[Colin Hales]

Hi Bruno,

Derek Denton in

Denton D. 2005. The Primordial Emotions: The dawning of consciousness:
Oxford University Press. 267 p.

is able to point to activated regions of basal brain in a human subject
undergoing extreme thirst. It isn’t easy to control for obfuscating
parameters but he did it. Dry mouth, wet mouth, blood salt levels,
micturition thwarting...etc...He can point (in fMRI) to a single small
cohort of cellular material unambiguously responsible for thirst qualia (a
primordial emotion). One cohort does it. Another nearby in the same
activated chain doesn't. Totally outside the cerebral cortex.

If COMP is correct it should be telling us why that is and what to look for.

Exactly what computational process corresponds to the difference between the
two cohorts in first person presentation?

What is it about COMP as an abstraction that renders that difference
invariant? (being a real cellular version vs being a COMP version of the
same thing)

This is a glaring, large scale (well beyond quantum levels) phenomenon,
right in your face at the cellular level and above.

Perhaps you can shed some light on COMP in this regard, because I can’t see
it.

Regards,

Colin  Hales
(EC still brewing!)

> -Original Message-
> From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
> Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 8:23 PM
> To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: Numbers, Machine and Father Ted
> 
> 
> 
> Le 23-oct.-06, à 00:12, 1Z a écrit :
> 
> > Huh? Computationalism is no more able to account for
> > qualia than physicalism.
> 
> 
> 
> Computationalism (the standard one) through my work (don't hesitate to
> criticize it) gives a precise account of qualia.
> It is even a refutable theory of both quanta and qualia, given that
> quanta are shown to be sharable qualia (first person plural).
> If the comp quanta behavior are shown to contradict empirical quanta,
> then that would refute the comp theory of of both qualia and quanta,
> and actually this would refute comp, even acomp (comp without "yes
> doctor").
> 
> Contrarywise, everyone a bit serious in philosophy of mind agrees that
> physicalist theories have not yet succeed in just approaching or
> formulating the the qualia problem.
> 
> Bruno
> 
> 
> 
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
> 
> 
> 

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