RE: QM not (yet, at least) needed to explain why we can't experience other minds
-Original Message- From: Tim May [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, 25 December 2002 2:49 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: QM not (yet, at least) needed to explain why we can't experience other minds On Monday, December 23, 2002, at 08:06 PM, Stephen Paul King wrote: Yes. I strongly suspect that minds are quantum mechanical. My arguement is at this point very hand waving, but it seems to me that if minds are purely classical when it would not be difficult for us to imagine, i.e. compute, what it is like to be a bat or any other classical mind. I see this as implied by the ideas involved in Turing Machines and other Universal classical computational systems. The no cloning theoren of QM seems to have the right flavor to explain how it is that we can not have first person experience of each other's minds, whereas the UTM model seems to strongly imply that I should be able to know exactly what you are thinking. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, this is a the dog did not bark scenario. I just can't see any basis for invoking quantum mechanics and no cloning for why I am not you, or why I cannot plausibly experience being you, and vice versa, and so on. Even if intelligence is purely classical (in terms of the physics), there are excellent reasons why there is no way today (given today's technology, today's interfaces, today's bandwidth) for me to compute what it is to be a bat. Inasmuch as we cannot even build a machine which even remotely resembles a bat, or even an ant, the inability to simulate/understand/be a bat is not surprising. There is no mapping currently feasable between my internal states and a bat's. Even if we are made of relays or transistors. Saying that our inability to know what it is to be another person implies that some principle of QM is likely to be involved is, in my view, unsupported and unrealistic. It may well be that there are deep, QM-related reasons why Alice cannot emulate Bob, but we are probably a long way in _engineering_ terms from knowing that Alice can or cannot emulate Bob, or have a first person understanding of what a bat is, etc. Occam's Razor--don't multiply hypotheses needlessly. In other news, I am enjoying Barrett's book on quantum mechanics and minds. (Interesting to compare his views with Bub, Peres, Isham, and Wheeler.) Got a copy of Joyce's Causal Decision Theory, to go along with the QM papers Bruno and Wei have been citing. Also read an interesting science fiction novel with some new twists on the Many Worlds Interpretation (esp. the DeWitt variant): Finity, by John Barnes. A New Zealand astronomer/mathematician with some interesting ideas about abductive reasoning finds himself slipping between different realities. --Tim May Hi Folks, There is no and never will be any way of describing 'being' save by 'being'. Science can point a big cartoon arrow and say in a cartoon bubble Good folk...The experience of redness is happening right there Aye! There be REDness in there!!, and be absolutely 100% verifyably right, but the experience of REDness is not at the tip of the arrow. You have to be the thing pointed at, experiencing red. This is the great divide between the the type and the token, Pinocchio the puppet and Pinnochio the little boy, the definition and the declaration , the recipe and the cake. Philosophy of mind grapples endlessly with 1st and 3rd person ontology and makes a very good living not sorting it out. Philosophy of science gets a poke in the eye, too - there's no room there for a describer _within_ the described. What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be a 100% unrefuted Popperesque 3rd person descriptive model of a bat kept in a dusty library? We need Popper back for a bit of rework. Just a few clausesspeaking of clauses... Merry christmas to you all and may 2003 bring you all closer to the elusive 'everything'. :-) Colin Hales
Re: Quantum Probability and Decision Theory
Stephen Paul King wrote: it seems to me that if minds are purely classical when it would not be difficult for us to imagine, i.e. compute, what it is like to be a bat or any other classical mind. I see this as implied by the ideas involved in Turing Machines and other Universal classical computational systems. Ah, but human thinking is a resource-bounded, real-time computational activity. Despite the massive parallelism of brain computation, we are of necessity lazy evaluators of thoughts. If we weren't, we'd all go mad or become successful zen practitioners. Sure, we do some free-form associative thought, and ponder connections subconsciously in the background, but if there's one thing my AI and philosophy studies have taught me, it is that prioritization and pruning of reasoning are fundamental keys. There are an infinite number of implications and probability updates that could be explored, given our present knowledge. But clearly we're only going to do task-directed, motivationally directed, sense-data-related subsets of those inferences, and a finite amount of related associative inference in the background to support those. Therefore, if nothing else, we can't imagine what it is like to be a bat because we would have to have the reasoning time and resources to explore all of a bat's experience to get there. And it would also be difficult and probably impossible, because the bat's mind at birth would be preloaded with different firmware instinctive behaviours than ours is. Also, the bat's mind would be connected to a different though analogous set of nerves, sense organs, and motor control systems, and to a differently balanced neurochemical emotional (reasoning prioritization) system. Regarding emulating another person's experience. The trouble is, again, that you'd have to emulate all of it from (before) birth, because clearly our minds are built up of our individual experiences and responses to our environment, and our own particularly skewed generalizations from those, as much as from anything else. And again, you'd have to compensate (emulate) for the subtle but vast differences in the firmware of each person's brain as it came out of the womb. It's an impossible project in practical terms, even if the brains are Turing equivalent, which they are. You don't need to resort to QM to explain the difficulty of emulating other minds. It's simply a question of combinatorics and vast complexity and subtlety of firmware, experience and knowledge. Remember on the other hand that human linguistic communication only communicates tips of icebergs of meaning explicitly in the words, and assumes that the utterer and the reader/listener share a vast knowledge, belief and experience base, and have similar tendencies toward conjuring up thinking contexts in response to the prodding of words. (Words are to mentally stored concepts as URLs are to documents). In order to communicate, we do have to emulate (imagine) our target audience's thought patterns and current thinking context and emotional state, so that we can know which sequence of words is likely to direct their thoughts and feelings thus and so as we wish to direct them. Eric
R: Quantum Omni-Presents
Eric Hawthorne There are more mysteries to be solved here, clearly. For sure :-) As you know Santa Claus is nothing more and nothing less than St. Nicholas of Myra (Lycia), http://www.stnicholascenter.org/Brix?pageID=35 whose relics are in Bari (Italy), under the name of San Nicola di Bari. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11063b.htm http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/nicholas-bari.html http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/goldenlegend/GL-vol2-nicholas.html As you can see (or read) the relics continued to exude, to stream manna, water, oil, myrtle, myrrha just as they had in Myra. From the earliest time St. Nicholas devotees have asked for protection and health in mind and body through the use of the manna. It was diluted and made available (ahem, for sale!) in bottles decorated with images of the saint. Over the centuries a unique art of painting these glass bottles developed in Apulia. Every year the translation of the Nicholas relics to Bari is celebrated with a great festival which culminates in the extraction of the manna by the rector of the Basilica. http://www.stnicholascenter.org/Brix?pageID=41 http://www.stnicholascenter.org/Brix?pageID=42 http://www.stnicholascenter.org/stnic/images/bari-manna-bottle-wmaster.jpg s. [Oh, forgot to mention the MTI, the many times in one world interpretation, which has been proved many times in laboratories, using laser pulses, well next time!]
Fw: Quantum Omni-Presents
- Original Message - From: John M [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: scerir [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 25, 2002 3:43 PM Subject: Re: Quantum Omni-Presents Ohh there is much more to Santa Claus! I was shown in Southern Calabria (opposite Bari) the house where THEIR bishop Niccolo, the REAL Santa Claus was born, in most of Europe he was a German bishop and his day of giving presents is Dec. 6, a Turkish friend (Muslim) said, he honors Santa Claus, who was living in Turkey, while in the US they mixed up the St. Niclas (Dec.6) with Father Christmas (maybe the precusrsor for Chris Kindle of NYC,) the German folklore-heritage, who came at Christmas eve to the children - and call the Christmas DAY remnant (of both) the American Santa Claus who abides at the North Pole (Not the village with that name in Alaska, mind you) with his reindeers etc. and descends through the chimney, so obligatory in American homes of decency. This is my Christmas day comment in the topic. Merry Christmas Santa Claus (John MIkes). - Original Message - From: scerir [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 25, 2002 4:41 AM Subject: R: Quantum Omni-Presents Eric Hawthorne There are more mysteries to be solved here, clearly. For sure :-) As you know Santa Claus is nothing more and nothing less than St. Nicholas of Myra (Lycia), http://www.stnicholascenter.org/Brix?pageID=35 whose relics are in Bari (Italy), under the name of San Nicola di Bari. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11063b.htm http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/nicholas-bari.html http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/goldenlegend/GL-vol2-nicholas.html As you can see (or read) the relics continued to exude, to stream manna, water, oil, myrtle, myrrha just as they had in Myra. From the earliest time St. Nicholas devotees have asked for protection and health in mind and body through the use of the manna. It was diluted and made available (ahem, for sale!) in bottles decorated with images of the saint. Over the centuries a unique art of painting these glass bottles developed in Apulia. Every year the translation of the Nicholas relics to Bari is celebrated with a great festival which culminates in the extraction of the manna by the rector of the Basilica. http://www.stnicholascenter.org/Brix?pageID=41 http://www.stnicholascenter.org/Brix?pageID=42 http://www.stnicholascenter.org/stnic/images/bari-manna-bottle-wmaster.jpg s. [Oh, forgot to mention the MTI, the many times in one world interpretation, which has been proved many times in laboratories, using laser pulses, well next time!]
