Re: Good is that which enhances life
On 02 Sep 2012, at 16:38, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: It depends what standards for and quality of information you have on something. People shouldn't judge what they do not understand. Bruno you understand what Krokodil entails, with solid information, so trying it is nonsense. But I don't think most understand what Cannabis entails because of misinformation. To most people what Krokodil entails is the same as Cannabis. I let a singer songwriter make the point lacking in this thread http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhKq9JvssB8 :) Paraphrasing old Nietsche: Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all. To which I would add: They should be asked to leave, or at least get out of the way. I think we agree, OK? (or I miss something?). Prohibition is exactly what makes information impossible. If all drugs were legal, Krokodil would never have appeared, and everybody would know that cannabis is less toxic (if toxic at all) compared to crack, meth, and krokodil (except it would not exist in that case). If cannabis was not illegal, nobody would ever hide its many medicinal qualities. The deep point is that food and drug is not the business of any collectivity. People should be judged on the harm they do, not on the speculation that they might react in some way with some products. Prohibition is dangerous as it kills democracy, notably. Like the NDAA, fortunately suspended by the supreme court. It would have made possible to detain without trial, for arbitrary time anyone belonging to a fuzzy category of suspects of threat, like if the human rights were not universal: it makes no sense to delimitate a class of people to whom the human rights and the constitutional right don't apply. Prohibition and NDAA belongs to the family of tyrannic technic to maintain anti-democratic powers. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: No Chinese Room Necessary
On 02 Sep 2012, at 19:10, meekerdb wrote: On 9/2/2012 5:45 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: That's all I mean morals; having values about your own actions so that you can recognize that sometimes you do stupid or bad things - by your own standards - but which are not unethical because they have little or no effect on other people. OK. May be it is a difference between english and french, where, at least in my country, moral is just a common term for ethical. Yes, it is in english too. Thanks for telling me. But I'm trying to change that. :-) Hmm You might read again what Humpty Dumpty say about the price of giving too much work to words :) Maybe you can suggest a different word, but the morals/ethics distinction I suggest seems close to common usage. And even if you want to keep the two words as coextensive, it's still useful when someone refers to immoral to think whether he means something he would regard as bad in himself (like enjoying some pot) ? (I can understand but I have to replace pot by alcohol, for which statistics exists that it is bad in himself). or he means it harms other people and should be discouraged by society. I appreciate that you seem to think that the society can only discouraged behavior which harms the others. And that's the main reason I think the distinction is useful. When a politician says X is immoral and we should pass a law against X. his audience thinks, Yes. He's right. I would feel badly if I did X or my child did X. Sometimes X is also bad for other people, i.e. unethical and society should discourage it. But other times it is just personally repugnant to the audience (like homosexuality or getting drunk) and the audience should think, Well I think it's immoral - but it's not unethical. We don't need such a law. By not making the distinction they allow the inference immoral- unethical-illegal. I certainly appreciate your intention. Not sure changing the words can help. We should just stick to don't harm the others, and do as you want as long as no one complain, or something like that. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: No Chinese Room Necessary
On 02 Sep 2012, at 19:32, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Sunday, September 2, 2012 12:59:54 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 9/2/2012 5:01 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Saturday, September 1, 2012 12:43:50 PM UTC-4, Alberto G.Corona wrote: Where is the revulsion, disgust, and blame - the stigma and shaming...the deep and violent prejudices? Surely they are not found in the banal evils of game theory. In the book I referred, it is described the evolutionary role of sentiments. Sentiments are the result of mostly unconscious processing. See for example the cheating detection mechanism in this book, which has been subject to an extensive set of test. and there are many papers about cheater detection. cheater detection is a module of logical reasoning specialized for situations where a deal can be broken. It exist because cheater detection is critical in some situations and it must necessary to react quickly. Its effect is perceived by the conscious as anger of fear, depending on the situation. That's not the point. It doesn't matter how tightly the incidence of sentiment or emotion is bound with evolutionary function, I would expect that given the fact of emotion's existence. The problem that needs to be answered is given a universe of nothing but evolutionary functions, why would or how could anything like an emotion arise? When an amoeba detects a gradient of salinity and moves in the less saline direction does it have a feeling? I imagine that it does. Not much like a feeling we could relate to as human beings, but there is an experience there and it has more qualitative depth to it than when a steel needle interacts with a gradient of salinity, but less depth than when an animal's tongue encounters salinity. I am kind of OK with this, but I tend to consider that amoeba have a tongue; a one cell tongue which is itself. The amoeba has only one cell, so that cell is simultaneously a muscle, a tongue, a neuron, a liver, a digestive cells, even a sort of bone when the conditions are bad and that the amoeba solidifies for a while. The amoebas lost universality and freedom when they developed the collectivist quasi communist pluricellular organisations, known as pluricellular organism, somehow. They even lost their potential immortality except for some gamete cells. Obviously, pluricellularity has strong local advantages, and you can't stop evolution which takes advantage of any improvement of the economy. Note that the unicellular organism have not disappeared, they are as much successful with respect to evolution than us, and they have still some big advantage for possible future environmental changes. If all mammals disappear, the bacteria and amoebas will not care at all. If bacteria and amoebas disappear, we disappear immediately. Bruno Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/P1BsfrVWQZIJ . To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
There is no such thing as cause and effect
Hi meekerdb I don't hold to Popper's criterion. There's got to be a lot of things that are not falsifiable. For example, you drop an apple and gravity pulls it down. You can't turn off the gravity to falsify it, at least in that situation. And any one-time event isn't falsifiable. Death, for example. Actually, Hume discussed cause and effect to some great length. He said that there's no such thing, you merely observe that something follows another and assume cause and effect. There's no proof. There's no real certainty said Hume, that just because the sun comes up every morning that it will do so tomorrow. Leibniz also believed as Hume did. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-02, 15:28:15 Subject: Re: No Chinese Room Necessary On 9/2/2012 9:09 AM, John Clark wrote: 6) Evolution has no foresight: This is the most important reason of all. A jet engine works better than a prop engine in an airplane. I give you a prop engine and tell you to turn it into a jet, but you must do it while the engine is running, you must do it in one million small steps, and you must do it so every one of those small steps immediately improves the operation of the engine. Eventually you would get an improved engine of some sort, but it wouldn't look anything like a jet. Good exposition. But it's not the case every small step must be an improvement. It's sufficient that it not be a degradation. Brent What designer would put a recreational area between two waste disposal sites? --- Woody Allen, on Intelligent Design -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Hating the rich
Hi Craig Weinberg It's OK as far as the left goes to hate the rich. To them, nothing the left does is ever wrong. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-31, 13:24:34 Subject: Re: Hating the rich On Friday, August 31, 2012 4:46:40 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hating the rich is the new racism. Is it? http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-richest-woman-20120830,0,3323996.story Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/2YtUpBZTti4J. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Hating the rich
Roger, On the contrare, science is a product of the left, more or less, whereas anti-evolution is a product of the right, more or less. Science is selfcorrecting and so the left is constantly re-examining its conclusions whether in science or sociology. Whereas the right is unable to correct itself because it is based on the bible or some such tradition. So as a result, the right thinks it cannot be wrong because everything they believe is ordained by God. The left has no such limitation, thank god. Richard On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 8:11 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg It's OK as far as the left goes to hate the rich. To them, nothing the left does is ever wrong. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com *Receiver:* everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-08-31, 13:24:34 *Subject:* Re: Hating the rich On Friday, August 31, 2012 4:46:40 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hating the rich is the new racism. Is it? http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-richest-woman-20120830,0,3323996.story Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/2YtUpBZTti4J. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Monodology 1
Hi Craig Weinberg According to the Monadology, all monads are alive. Even rocks, which are nearly dead. Leibniz is indeed frustratingly difficult, but contrary to (some of ) your comments on the Monadology on the link below, I can't recall a single error. Just to take your criticism of Monodology 1: 1. My topic here will be the monad, which is just a simple substance. By calling it ‘simple’ I mean that it has no parts, though it can be a part of something composite. It is a bit confusing right off the bat. To say that a something is a substance in a colloquial sense implies already that is a ‘thing’ distinct from other things. What I am after is a much deeper simplicity. To me a true monad could only be a boundaryless unity. An everythingness-nothingness ‘carrier-tone’ of experiential readiness from which all experiences are diffracted (divided from within, as ‘chips off the old block’, so to speak). This is what I mean by the Big Diffraction. The monad itself has no parts, but its only nature is the possibility that it imparts. My version of monad does not ‘exist’ as a simple substance but rather it insists as the simplicity and essential wholeness of all experiences. It is sense. It turns out that, upon further analysis, all substances have to be inextended, because all material substances, being extended, are divisible, which in the end gives you nothing. As to the fundamental particles, my footnote here is that while these are not divisble, the Uncertainty Principle in the end gives you nothing fixed you can point to, so even these are not substances. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-31, 14:14:50 Subject: Re: While computers are causal, life is not causal. On Friday, August 31, 2012 8:30:12 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg While computers are causal, perception is not causal. Nothing that living things do is causal. They have an uncaused first or governing cause called the self. Thus life does not have to be causal and isn't. I don't see it as being so cut and dried. What about a virus? Is that a living thing? How about a crystal? I see more of a step-like spectrum from physical to chemical to organic to biological to zoological and anthropological. Living things seem like they do some causal things to me? They seek food when their bodies run low. They grow hair when and where their genes cause it to grow. I agree that perception is not causal, although the elaboration of perception from one individual or species to another can be causal. When we say life, I think that we just mean phenomena which we can relate to and identify with - and that capacity to identify or disidentify is there for a reason. I think though that the reason is not absolute but relative. All living organisms could disappear from the cosmos forever and the universe would still be full of memory, pattern, and experience...just on scales of time and space that are very unfamiliar to us. Monads operate in such a fashion. They are not causal except if that is desired or needed. Huge difference. Did Leibniz think that non-living things were not composed of monads? Here is my look at Monadology if you are interested: http://multisenserealism.com/2012/07/14/notes-on-monadology/ Craig Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 8/31/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-31, 08:12:21 Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On Friday, August 31, 2012 6:08:05 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 31 Aug 2012, at 11:07, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal The burden of proof, IMHO lies on those who claim that computers are alive and conscious. What evidence is there for that ? The causal nature of all observable brains components. (empirical evidence) What about the biological nature of all observable brain components? Much more compelling since it is a change in the biological status of the brain as a whole living organ which marks the difference between life and death, not the presence or absence of logic circuits. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/M49PjD4y4QwJ. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
Personally I call the Platonic realm anything inextended. Anything outside of spacetime.
Hi Craig Weinberg Personally I call the Platonic realm anything inextended. Time necessarily drops out if space drops out. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-31, 16:32:54 Subject: Re: Re: Technological (Machine) Thinking and Lived Being (Erlebnis) On Friday, August 31, 2012 5:53:24 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg You're on the right track, but everybody from Plato on says that the Platonic world is timeless, eternal. And nonextended or spaceless (nonlocal). Leibniz's world of monads satisfies these requirements. But there is more, there is the Supreme Monad, which experiences all. And IS the All. Hegel and Spinoza have the Totality, Kabbala has Ein Sof, There's the Tao, Jung's collective unconscious, there's Om, Brahman, Logos, Urgrund, Urbild, first potency, ground of being, the Absolute, synthetic a prori, etc. I call it the Totality-Singularity or just Everythingness. It's what there is when we aren't existing as a spatiotemporally partitioned subset. It is by definition nonlocal and a-temporal as there is nothing to constrain its access to all experiences. Craig Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 8/31/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-30, 13:53:09 Subject: Re: Technological (Machine) Thinking and Lived Being (Erlebnis) I think that the Platonic realm is just time, and that time is nothing but experience. Thought is the experience of generating hypothetical experience. The mistake is presuming that because we perceive exterior realism as a topology of bodies that the ground of being must be defined in those terms. In fact, the very experience you are having right now - with your eyes closed or half asleep...this is a concretely and physically real part of the universe, it just isn't experienced as objects in space because you are the subject of the experience. If anything, the outside world is a Platonic realm of geometric perspectives and rational expectations. Interior realism is private time travel and eidetic fugues; metaphor, irony, anticipations, etc. Not only Platonic, but Chthonic. Thought doesn't come from a realm, realms come from thought. Craig On Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:54:32 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: What is thinking ? Parmenides thought that thinking and being are one, which IMHO I agree with. Thoughts come to us from the Platonic realm, which I personally, perhaps mistakenly, associate with what would be Penrose's incomputable realm. Here is a brief discussion of technological or machine thinking vs lived experience. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ref/10.1080/00201740310002398#tabModule IMHO Because computers cannot have lived experience, they cannot think. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy Volume 46, Issue 3, 2003 Thinking and Being: Heidegger and Wittgenstein on Machination and Lived-Experience Version of record first published: 05 Nov 2010 Heidegger's treatment of 'machination' in the Beitr? e zur Philosophie begins the critique of technological thinking that would centrally characterize his later work. Unlike later discussions of technology, the critique of machination in Beitr? e connects its arising to the predominance of 'lived-experience' ( Erlebnis ) as the concealed basis for the possibility of a pre-delineated, rule-based metaphysical understanding of the world. In this essay I explore this connection. The unity of machination and lived-experience becomes intelligible when both are traced to their common root in the primordial Greek attitude of techne , originally a basic attitude of wondering knowledge of nature. But with this common root revealed, the basic connection between machination and lived-experience also emerges as an important development of one of the deepest guiding thoughts of the Western philosophical tradition: the Parmenidean assertion of the sameness of being and thinking. In the Beitr? e 's analysis of machination and lived-experience, Heidegger hopes to discover a way of thinking that avoids the Western tradition's constant basic assumption of self-identity, an assumption which culminates in the modern picture of the autonomous, self-identical subject aggressively set over against a pre-delineated world of objects in a relationship of mutual confrontation. In the final section, I investigate an important and illuminating parallel to Heidegger's result: the consideration of the relationship between experience and technological ways of thinking that forms the basis of the late Wittgenstein's famous rule-following considerations. everything-list Roger Clough,
Re: Monodology 1
The monads of string theory each have many parts. To begin with they have 6 dimensions constrained by higher-order EM flux winding through 500 topological holes. They are definitely extended being 1000 Planck lengths in diameter and in an array throughout the universe at a density of about 10^90/cc. IMO science beats philosophy. Richard Ref: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Calabi-Yau_manifold#Calabi-Yau_manifolds_in_string_theory On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 8:27 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg According to the Monadology, all monads are alive. Even rocks, which are nearly dead. Leibniz is indeed frustratingly difficult, but contrary to (some of ) your comments on the Monadology on the link below, I can't recall a single error. Just to take your criticism of Monodology 1: 1. My topic here will be the monad, which is just a simple substance. By calling it ‘simple’ I mean that it *has* no parts, though it can be a part of something composite. It is a bit confusing right off the bat. To say that a something is a substance in a colloquial sense implies already that is a ‘thing’ distinct from other things. What I am after is a much deeper simplicity. To me a true monad could only be a boundaryless unity. An everythingness-nothingness ‘carrier-tone’ of experiential readiness from which all experiences are diffracted (divided from within, as ‘chips off the old block’, so to speak). This is what I mean by the Big Diffractionhttp://multisenserealism.com/about/#jp-carousel-362. The monad itself has no parts, but its only nature is the possibility that it imparts. My version of monad does not ‘exist’ as a simple substance but rather it insists as the simplicity and essential wholeness of all experiences. It is sense. It turns out that, upon further analysis, all substances have to be inextended, because all material substances, being extended, are divisible, which in the end gives you nothing. As to the fundamental particles, my footnote here is that while these are not divisble, the Uncertainty Principle in the end gives you nothing fixed you can point to, so even these are not substances. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com *Receiver:* everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-08-31, 14:14:50 *Subject:* Re: While computers are causal, life is not causal. On Friday, August 31, 2012 8:30:12 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg While computers are causal, perception is not causal. Nothing that living things do is causal. They have an uncaused first or governing cause called the self. Thus life does not have to be causal and isn't. I don't see it as being so cut and dried. What about a virus? Is that a living thing? How about a crystal? I see more of a step-like spectrum from physical to chemical to organic to biological to zoological and anthropological. Living things seem like they do some causal things to me? They seek food when their bodies run low. They grow hair when and where their genes cause it to grow. I agree that perception is not causal, although the elaboration of perception from one individual or species to another can be causal. When we say life, I think that we just mean phenomena which we can relate to and identify with - and that capacity to identify or disidentify is there for a reason. I think though that the reason is not absolute but relative. All living organisms could disappear from the cosmos forever and the universe would still be full of memory, pattern, and experience...just on scales of time and space that are very unfamiliar to us. Monads operate in such a fashion. They are not causal except if that is desired or needed. Huge difference. Did Leibniz think that non-living things were not composed of monads? Here is my look at Monadology if you are interested: http://multisenserealism.com/2012/07/14/notes-on-monadology/ Craig Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 8/31/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Craig Weinberg *Receiver:* everything-list *Time:* 2012-08-31, 08:12:21 *Subject:* Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On Friday, August 31, 2012 6:08:05 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 31 Aug 2012, at 11:07, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal The burden of proof, IMHO lies on those who claim that computers are alive and conscious. What evidence is there for that ? The causal nature of all observable brains components. (empirical evidence) What about the biological nature of all observable brain components? Much more compelling since it is a change in the
Re: Re: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
Hi John Clark God can be thought of as cosmic intelligence or life itself. As to what he can do, there are some limitations in the world he created, for that world is contingent and so contains some missing pieces, misfits, defects, all of that stuff. Crap happens. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-31, 12:28:15 Subject: Re: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 4:58 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote:? ? God is necessary because He runs the whole show. And when in His omniscience God asks Himself How is it that I can run the whole show? How is it that I am able to do anything that I want to do? How do my powers work?, what answer does He come up with? The religious have become adept at dodging that question with bafflegab but the fact remains that if you can't provide a substantive answer then the God theory explains absolutely positively nothing. ? ? John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Is evolution moral ?
Hi John Clark Indeed the world contains much misery and injustice simply because it isn't Heaven. Leibniz said that without God, it could have been a lot worse. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-31, 13:17:47 Subject: Re: Is evolution moral ? On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 4:54 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Is Evolution Moral?? I think Evolution is a hideously cruel process and if I were God I would have done things very differently, I would have made intense physical pain a physical impossibility, but unfortunately that Yahweh punk got the job and not me. The minimum requirement for calling oneself religious is a belief in God, and if there is anybody who calls himself religious who doesn't think that God is benevolent I have yet to meet him. And yet I maintain that a benevolent God is totally inconsistent with Evolution, which can produce grand and beautiful things but only after eons of monstrous cruelty. ? the moral is that which enhances life I think that's true, and if so then morality is subject to Evolution just like anything else that enhances life. And if its made by something as messy as Evolution then you wouldn't expect a moral system to be entirely free of self contradictions. Consider the moral thought experiments devised by Judith Jarvis Thomson: 1) A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track saving the lives of the five. Unfortunately there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch and kill one man or do nothing and just watch five people die? 2) As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you, your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track killing him to save five people. Should you push the fat man over the edge or do nothing? Almost everybody feels in their gut that the second scenario is much more questionable morally than the first, I do too, and yet really it's the same thing and the outcome is identical. The feeling that the second scenario is more evil than the first seems to hold true across all cultures; they even made slight variations of it involving canoes and crocodiles for south American Indians in Amazonia and they felt that #2 was more evil too. So there must be some code of behavior built into our DNA and it really shouldn't be a surprise that it's not 100% consistent; Evolution would have gained little survival value perfecting it to that extent, it works good enough at producing group cohesion as it is. ? John K Clark ? ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Is evolution moral ?
Bruno, In comp, what is the function of god. My hope is that the function of a god might be to reduce 3p tp 1p. Everything else seems to be capable of running according to algorithms. Is there anything in comp that is non-algorithmic? Richard On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 8:42 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi John Clark Indeed the world contains much misery and injustice simply because it isn't Heaven. Leibniz said that without God, it could have been a lot worse. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com *Receiver:* everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-08-31, 13:17:47 *Subject:* Re: Is evolution moral ? On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 4:54 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.netwrote: Is Evolution Moral?� I think Evolution is a hideously cruel process and if I were God I would have done things very differently, I would have made intense physical pain a physical impossibility, but unfortunately that Yahweh punk got the job and not me. The minimum requirement for calling oneself religious is a belief in God, and if there is anybody who calls himself religious who doesn't think that God is benevolent I have yet to meet him. And yet I maintain that a benevolent God is totally inconsistent with Evolution, which can produce grand and beautiful things but only after eons of monstrous cruelty. � the moral is that which enhances life I think that's true, and if so then morality is subject to Evolution just like anything else that enhances life. And if its made by something as messy as Evolution then you wouldn't expect a moral system to be entirely free of self contradictions. Consider the moral thought experiments devised by Judith Jarvis Thomson: 1) A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track saving the lives of the five. Unfortunately there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch and kill one man or do nothing and just watch five people die? 2) As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you, your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track killing him to save five people. Should you push the fat man over the edge or do nothing? Almost everybody feels in their gut that the second scenario is much more questionable morally than the first, I do too, and yet really it's the same thing and the outcome is identical. The feeling that the second scenario is more evil than the first seems to hold true across all cultures; they even made slight variations of it involving canoes and crocodiles for south American Indians in Amazonia and they felt that #2 was more evil too. So there must be some code of behavior built into our DNA and it really shouldn't be a surprise that it's not 100% consistent; Evolution would have gained little survival value perfecting it to that extent, it works good enough at producing group cohesion as it is. � John K Clark � � -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: Is evolution moral ?
Hi Richard Ruquist There is no god in comp. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Richard Ruquist Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-03, 08:50:32 Subject: Re: Re: Is evolution moral ? Bruno, In comp, what is the function of god. My hope is that the function of a god might be to reduce 3p tp 1p. Everything else seems to be capable of running according to algorithms. Is there anything in comp that is non-algorithmic? Richard On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 8:42 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi John Clark Indeed the world contains much misery and injustice simply because it isn't Heaven. Leibniz said that without God, it could have been a lot worse. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-08-31, 13:17:47 Subject: Re: Is evolution moral ? On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 4:54 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Is Evolution Moral? I think Evolution is a hideously cruel process and if I were God I would have done things very differently, I would have made intense physical pain a physical impossibility, but unfortunately that Yahweh punk got the job and not me. The minimum requirement for calling oneself religious is a belief in God, and if there is anybody who calls himself religious who doesn't think that God is benevolent I have yet to meet him. And yet I maintain that a benevolent God is totally inconsistent with Evolution, which can produce grand and beautiful things but only after eons of monstrous cruelty. the moral is that which enhances life I think that's true, and if so then morality is subject to Evolution just like anything else that enhances life. And if its made by something as messy as Evolution then you wouldn't expect a moral system to be entirely free of self contradictions. Consider the moral thought experiments devised by Judith Jarvis Thomson: 1) A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track saving the lives of the five. Unfortunately there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch and kill one man or do nothing and just watch five people die? 2) As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you, your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track killing him to save five people. Should you push the fat man over the edge or do nothing? Almost everybody feels in their gut that the second scenario is much more questionable morally than the first, I do too, and yet really it's the same thing and the outcome is identical. The feeling that the second scenario is more evil than the first seems to hold true across all cultures; they even made slight variations of it involving canoes and crocodiles for south American Indians in Amazonia and they felt that #2 was more evil too. So there must be some code of behavior built into our DNA and it really shouldn't be a surprise that it's not 100% consistent; Evolution would have gained little survival value perfecting it to that extent, it works good enough at producing group cohesion as it is. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to
Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
Bruno Marchal wrote: If you disagree, please tell me why. I don't disagree. I just point on the fact that you don't give any justification of your belief. If you are correct, there must be something in cells and brains that is not Turing emulable, and this is speculative, as nobody has found anything not Turing emulable in nature. You say this often, Bruno, yet I have never seen an emulation of any living system that functions the same as the original. The default position is that it is not emulable. We have no a priori reason to assume we can substitute one thing with another thing of an entirely different class. We have no more reason to assume that we can substitute a brain with an emulation of a brain than we have that we can substitute a building with a drawing of a building - even if it is so accurate that the illusion of it being a building is perfect at first glance. You still can't live in a drawing. Showing scientifically that nature is infinite isn't really possible. Measurements just can't yield infinity. It is like the natural numbers. You can't see that there are infinitely many of them by using examples. You just have to realize it is inherent to natural numbers that there's always another one (eg the successor). In the same way, nature can only be seen to be infinite by realizing it is an inherent property of it. There simply is no such thing as complete finitiness. No thing in nature has any absolute boundary seperating it from space, and there is no end to space - the notion of an end of space itself seems to be empty. We approach the limits of science here, as we leave the realm of the quantifiable and objectifiable, so frankly your statement just seems like scientism to me. From a mystical perspective (which can provide a useful fundament for science), it can be quite self-evident that everything that exists is infinite (even the finite is just a form of the infinite). A more pratical question would be how / in which form does infinity express in nature?. Of course this is an unlimited question, but I see some aspects of nature that can't be framed in terms of something finite. First uncertainty / indeterminateness. It might be that nature is inherently indeterminate (principle like heisenbergs uncertainty relation suggest it from a scientific perspective) and thus can't be captured by any particular description. So it is not emulable, because emulability rests on the premise that what is emulated can be precisely captured (otherwise we have no way of telling the computer what to do). Secondly entaglement. If all of existence is entangled and it is infinite in scope then everything that exists has an aspect of infiniteness (because you can't make sense of it apart from the rest of existence). Even tiny changes in very small systems might me non-locally magnified to an abitrary degree in other things/realms. This means that entanglement can't be truly simulated, because every simulation would be incomplete (because the state of the system depends on infinitely many other things, which we can't ALL simulate) and thus critically wrong at the right level. It might be possible to simulate the behaviour of the system outwardly, but this would be only superficial since the system would be (relatively) cut off from the transcendental realm that connects it to the rest of existence. For example if someone's brain is substituted he may behave similarily to the original (though I think this would be quite superficial), but he won't be connected to the universal field of experiencing in the same way - because at some level his emulation is only approximate which may not matter much on earth, but will matter in heaven or the beyond (which is what counts, ulitmately). benjayk -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Simple-proof-that-our-intelligence-transcends-that-of-computers-tp34330236p34383078.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: No Chinese Room Necessary
Hi meekerdb The world is contingent and therefore not perfect. I don't see the problem. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: meekerdb Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-02, 15:28:15 Subject: Re: No Chinese Room Necessary On 9/2/2012 9:09 AM, John Clark wrote: 6) Evolution has no foresight: This is the most important reason of all. A jet engine works better than a prop engine in an airplane. I give you a prop engine and tell you to turn it into a jet, but you must do it while the engine is running, you must do it in one million small steps, and you must do it so every one of those small steps immediately improves the operation of the engine. Eventually you would get an improved engine of some sort, but it wouldn't look anything like a jet. Good exposition. But it's not the case every small step must be an improvement. It's sufficient that it not be a degradation. Brent What designer would put a recreational area between two waste disposal sites? --- Woody Allen, on Intelligent Design -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: No Chinese Room Necessary
On Monday, September 3, 2012 4:37:54 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 02 Sep 2012, at 19:32, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Sunday, September 2, 2012 12:59:54 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 9/2/2012 5:01 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Saturday, September 1, 2012 12:43:50 PM UTC-4, Alberto G.Corona wrote: *Where is the revulsion, disgust, and blame - the stigma and shaming...the deep and violent prejudices? Surely they are not found in the banal evils of game theory. ** * In the book I referred, it is described the evolutionary role of sentiments. Sentiments are the result of mostly unconscious processing. See for example the cheating detection mechanism in this book, which has been subject to an extensive set of test. and there are many papers about cheater detection. cheater detection is a module of logical reasoning specialized for situations where a deal can be broken. It exist because cheater detection is critical in some situations and it must necessary to react quickly. Its effect is perceived by the conscious as anger of fear, depending on the situation. That's not the point. It doesn't matter how tightly the incidence of sentiment or emotion is bound with evolutionary function, I would expect that given the fact of emotion's existence. The problem that needs to be answered is given a universe of nothing but evolutionary functions, why would or how could anything like an emotion arise? When an amoeba detects a gradient of salinity and moves in the less saline direction does it have a feeling? I imagine that it does. Not much like a feeling we could relate to as human beings, but there is an experience there and it has more qualitative depth to it than when a steel needle interacts with a gradient of salinity, but less depth than when an animal's tongue encounters salinity. I am kind of OK with this, but I tend to consider that amoeba have a tongue; a one cell tongue which is itself. The amoeba has only one cell, so that cell is simultaneously a muscle, a tongue, a neuron, a liver, a digestive cells, even a sort of bone when the conditions are bad and that the amoeba solidifies for a while. Exactly, although I tend to assume that the undifferentiated sense palette that corresponds to the undifferentiated utility of the amoeba body is qualitatively weaker than a large multicellular organism. There are other possibilities though, and it is even worse than pure speculation to try to guess since our own consciousness inherently prejudices our guesses. It could be the case that the amoeba's relative lack of structure allows it full access to more of the totality of all sense experience, that its every moment is poetry and symphony. It could also be the case that every amoeba in the universe is really the same amoeba experience. Or it could be that in the amoeba's universe it could be the human being and we are the petroleum deposits or whatever. I tend to go with an Occam's razor conservatism on this. While I feel like our naive realism overstates the unconsciousness of non-human entities, I tend to trust the panoramic spread of the continuum from inorganic structure to our own thoughts and feelings. I think that the relative distance in qualities we perceive between animals, amoeba, and rocks, is honoring an underlying reality, if not an absolute caste ranking. I think that one of the main advantages for single celled organisms to want to 'level up' to multicellular might in fact be for the better tasting food and the more exciting reproduction. The amoebas lost universality and freedom when they developed the collectivist quasi communist pluricellular organisations, known as pluricellular organism, somehow. They even lost their potential immortality except for some gamete cells. Obviously, pluricellularity has strong local advantages, and you can't stop evolution which takes advantage of any improvement of the economy. Note that the unicellular organism have not disappeared, they are as much successful with respect to evolution than us, and they have still some big advantage for possible future environmental changes. If all mammals disappear, the bacteria and amoebas will not care at all. If bacteria and amoebas disappear, we disappear immediately. I tend to agree, although this argument biases the bullet over the Bible. Bottom up process has it's trump card of material support, but Top down processes have the polar opposite sort of influence. The universe of cold hard facts could exist in theory without warm soft fiction, but in reality, that is not what we see. We see that fiction triumphs over fact all the time. We see people spend money on looking good instead of being healthy, or risking their lives to have an adventurous feeling, etc. So it is not clear that, especially if amoeba have sense in a more exotically rich manifestation than we might guess, that they would
Re: Re: A Dialog comparing Comp with Leibniz's metaphysics
Hi Bruno Marchal Natural numbers are monads because 1) the are inextended substances, which is redundant to say. 2) they have no parts. That's a definition of a monad. Except to add that monads are alive, except that numbers are not very alive. I imagine one could write an entire scholarly paper on this issue. OK-- thanks-- there is a level of description that is comp Yes, there are a number of differences between Aristotle's substances and Leibniz's. I would go so far as tpo say that they have little in common: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/#DesSpiLei Leibniz's substances, however, are the bearers of change (criterion (iv)) in a very different way from Aristotle's individual substances. An Aristotelian individual possesses some properties essentially and some accidentally. The accidental properties of an object are ones that can be gained and lost over time, and which it might never have possessed at all: its essential properties are the only ones it had to possess and which it possesses throughout its existence. The situation is different for Leibniz's monads梬hich is the name he gives to individual substances, created or uncreated (so God is a monad). Whereas, for Aristotle, the properties that an object has to possess and those that it possesses throughout its existence coincide, they do not do so for Leibniz. That is, for Leibniz, even the properties that an object possesses only for a part of its existence are essential to it. Every monad bears each of its properties as part of its nature, so if it were to have been different in any respect, it would have been a different entity. Furthermore, there is a sense in which all monads are exactly similar to each other, for they all reflect the whole world. They each do so, however, from a different perspective. For God, so to speak, turns on all sides and considers in all ways the general system of phenomena which he has found it good to produce匒nd he considers all the faces of the world in all possible ways卼he result of each view of the universe, as looked at from a certain position, is卆 substance which expresses the universe in conformity with that view. (1998: 66) So each monad reflects the whole system, but with its own perspective emphasised. If a monad is at place p at time t, it will contain all the features of the universe at all times, but with those relating to its own time and place most vividly, and others fading out roughly in accordance with temporal and spatial distance. Because there is a continuum of perspectives on reality, there is an infinite number of these substances. Nevertheless, there is internal change in the monads, because the respect in which its content is vivid varies with time and with action. Indeed, the passage of time just is the change in which of the monad's contents are most vivid. It is not possible to investigate here Leibniz's reasons for these apparently very strange views. Our present concern is with whether, and in what sense, Leibniz's substances are subjects of change. One can say that, in so far as, at all times, they reflect the whole of reality, then they do not change. But in so far as they reflect some parts of that reality more vividly than others, depending on their position in space and time, they can be said to change. There are whole talks on monadic change on Youtube. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-02, 08:37:43 Subject: Re: A Dialog comparing Comp with Leibniz's metaphysics Hi Roger, On 01 Sep 2012, at 15:59, Roger Clough wrote: A Dialog comparing Comp with Leibniz's metaphysics Abstract The principal conclusion of this discussion is that there is a striking similarity between comp and the metaphysics of Leibniz, I agree. that is why two years ago I have followed different courses on Leibniz. But it is quite a work to make the relationship precise. It is far more simple with Plato, neoplatonists, and mystics. for example that the natural numbers of comp are indeed monads, I am glad you dare to say so, but that could be confusing. You might define monad, and define precisley the relationship. but a critical difference is that not all monads are natural numbers. And not all substances are monads. For students of comp, this should be of no practical importance as long as the computational field is confined to natural numbers. It is, by definition. Which is the basic method of comp. However, if one goes outside of that field, a reassessment of the additional mathematical forms in terms of substances would have to be made. ROGER (a Leibnizian): Hi Bruno Marchal Perhaps I am misguided, but I thought that comp was moreorless a mechanical model of brain and man activity.
monads as numbers
Hi Craig Weinberg Sorry. I guess I should call them monadic numbers. Not numbers as monads, but monads as numbers. The numbers I am thinking of as monads are those flying by in a particular computation. Monads are under constant change. As to history, perceptions, appetites, those would be some king of context as in a subprogram which coud be stored in files. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-02, 08:28:10 Subject: Re: Toward emulating life with a monadic computer On Sunday, September 2, 2012 2:20:49 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Toward emulating life with a monadic computer In a previous discussion we showed that the natural numbers qualify as Leibnizian monads, suggesting the possibility that other mathematical forms might similarly be treated as monadic structures. At the same time, Leibniz's monadology describes a computational architecture that is capable of emulating not only the dynamic physical universe, but a biological universe as well. In either case, the entire universe might be envisioned as a gigantic digital golem, a living figure whose body consists of a categorical nonliving substructure and whose mind/brain is the what Leibniz called the supreme monad. The supreme monad might be thought of as a monarch, since it governs the operation of its passive monadic substructures according to a preestablished harmony. In addition, each monad in the system would possess typical monadic substructures, and possibly further monadic substructures wuithin this, depending spending on the level of complexity desired. Without going into much detail at this point, Leibniz's monadology might be considered as the operating system of such a computer, with the central processing chip as its supreme monad. This CPU continually updates all of the monads in the system according the following scheme. Only the CPU is active, while all of the sub-structure monads (I think in a logical, tree-like structure) are passive. Each monad contains a dynamically changing image (a reflection) of all of the other monads, taken from its particular point of view. These are called its perceptions, which might be thought of as records of the state of any given monad at any given time. This state comprising an image of the entire universe of monads, constantly being updated by the Supreme monad or CPU. In addition to the perceptions, each monad also has a constantly changing set of appetites. And all of these are coorddinated to fit a pre-established harmony. It might be that the pre-established harmony is simply what is happening in the world outside the computer. Other details of this computer should be forthcoming. First I would say that numbers are not monads because numbers have no experience. They have no interior or exterior realism, but rather are the interstitial shadows of interior-exterior events. Numbers are a form of common sense, but they are not universal sense and they are limited to a narrow channel of sense which is dependent upon solid physicality to propagate. You can't count with fog. Secondly I think that the monadology makes more sense as the world outside the computer. Time and space are computational constructs generated by the meta-juxtaposition of sense*(matter+entropy) and (matter/matter)-sense. Matter is the experience of objecthood. Numbers are the subjective-ized essence of objects Craig. Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net 9/2/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/s2J5aGxCEigJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: No Chinese Room Necessary
Hi John Clark IMHO Since it is inextended, intelligence (needed for design or change or life, etc.) is omnipresent in the universe to various degrees It always has been, is now, and ever shall be. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Clark Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-02, 12:09:41 Subject: Re: No Chinese Room Necessary Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com Wrote: There are greath differences between evolutionary designs and rational design. Yes there are big differences, rational designs are, well, rational, but evolutionary designs are idiotic. Mother Nature (Evolution) is a slow and stupid tinkerer, it had over 3 billion years to work on the problem but it couldn't even come up with a macroscopic part that could rotate in 360 degrees! Rational designers had less difficulty coming up with the wheel. The only advantage Evolution had is that until it managed to invent brains it was the only way complex objects could get built. I can think of a few reasons for natures poor design: 1) Time Lags: Evolution is so slow the animal is adapted to conditions that may no longer exist, that's why moths have an instinct to fly into candle flames. I have no doubt that if you just give them a million years or so, evolution will give hedgehogs a better defense than rolling up into a ball when confronted by their major predator, the automobile. The only problem is that by then there won't be any automobiles. 2) Historical Constraints: The eye of all vertebrate animals is backwards, the connective tissue of the retina is on the wrong side so light must pass through it before it hits the light sensitive cells. There's no doubt this degrades vision and we would be better off if the retina was reversed as it is in squids whose eye evolved independently, however It's too late for that to happen now because all the intermediate forms would not be viable. Once a standard is set, with all its interlocking mechanisms it's very difficult to abandon it completely, even when much better methods are found. That's why we still have inches and yards even though the metric system is clearly superior. That's why we still have Windows. Nature is enormously conservative, it may add new things but it doesn't abandon the old because the intermediate stages must also work. That's also why humans have all the old brain structures that lizards have as well as new ones. 3) Lack of Genetic Variation: Mutations are random and you might not get the mutation you need when you need it. Feathers work better for flight than the skin flaps bats use, but bats never produced the right mutations for feathers and skin flaps are good enough. 4) Constraints of Costs and Materials: Life is a tangle of trade offs and compromises. 5) An Advantage on one Level is a Disadvantage on Another: One gene can give you resistance to malaria, a second identical gene will give you sickle cell anemia. 6) Evolution has no foresight: This is the most important reason of all. A jet engine works better than a prop engine in an airplane. I give you a prop engine and tell you to turn it into a jet, but you must do it while the engine is running, you must do it in one million small steps, and you must do it so every one of those small steps immediately improves the operation of the engine. Eventually you would get an improved engine of some sort, but it wouldn't look anything like a jet. If the tire on your car is getting worn you can take it off and put a new one on, but evolution could never do something like that, because when you take the old tire off you have temporally made things worse, now you have no tire at all. With evolution EVERY step (generation), no matter how many, MUST be an immediate improvement over the previous one. it can't think more than one step ahead, it doesn't understand one step backward two steps forward. And that's why there are no 100 ton supersonic birds. Yes I know, such a creature would use a lot of energy, but if we can afford to do so why can't nature? Being slow, weak, and cheap is not my idea a an inspired design. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
Re: Re: A Dialog comparing Comp with Leibniz's metaphysics
Roger, Every natural number is distinct from all others. So your characterization of them as simple with no internal parts has to be incorrect. Leibniz himself says that every monad is distinct: In a confused way they all strive after [vont a] the infinite, the whole; but they are limited and differentiated through the degrees of their distinct perceptions. http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/classics/leibniz/monad.htm Also nowhere in the Monadology do the words extend, inextended, unextended or nonextended appear. So could you give us a link to where he says they are inextended. Richard On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 9:36 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Natural numbers are monads because 1) the are inextended substances, which is redundant to say. 2) they have no parts. That's a definition of a monad. Except to add that monads are alive, except that numbers are not very alive. I imagine one could write an entire scholarly paper on this issue. OK-- thanks-- there is a level of description that is comp Yes, there are a number of differences between Aristotle's substances and Leibniz's. I would go so far as tpo say that they have little in common: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/#DesSpiLei Leibniz's substances, however, are the bearers of change (criterion (iv)) in a very different way from Aristotle's individual substances. An Aristotelian individual possesses some properties essentially and some accidentally. The accidental properties of an object are ones that can be gained and lost over time, and which it might never have possessed at all: its essential properties are the only ones it had to possess and which it possesses throughout its existence. The situation is different for Leibniz's monads—which is the name he gives to individual substances, created or uncreated (so God is a monad). Whereas, for Aristotle, the properties that an object has to possess and those that it possesses throughout its existence coincide, they do not do so for Leibniz. That is, for Leibniz, even the properties that an object possesses only for a part of its existence are essential to it. Every monad bears each of its properties as part of its nature, so if it were to have been different in any respect, it would have been a different entity. Furthermore, there is a sense in which all monads are exactly similar to each other, for they all reflect the whole world. They each do so, however, from a different perspective. For God, so to speak, turns on all sides and considers in all ways the general system of phenomena which he has found it good to produce…And he considers all the faces of the world in all possible ways…the result of each view of the universe, as looked at from a certain position, is…a substance which expresses the universe in conformity with that view. (1998: 66) So each monad reflects the whole system, but with its own perspective emphasised. If a monad is at place p at time t, it will contain all the features of the universe at all times, but with those relating to its own time and place most vividly, and others fading out roughly in accordance with temporal and spatial distance. Because there is a continuum of perspectives on reality, there is an infinite number of these substances. Nevertheless, there is internal change in the monads, because the respect in which its content is vivid varies with time and with action. Indeed, the passage of time just is the change in which of the monad's contents are most vivid. It is not possible to investigate here Leibniz's reasons for these apparently very strange views. Our present concern is with whether, and in what sense, Leibniz's substances are subjects of change. One can say that, in so far as, at all times, they reflect the whole of reality, then they do not change. But in so far as they reflect some parts of that reality more vividly than others, depending on their position in space and time, they can be said to change. There are whole talks on monadic change on Youtube. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-02, 08:37:43 Subject: Re: A Dialog comparing Comp with Leibniz's metaphysics Hi Roger, On 01 Sep 2012, at 15:59, Roger Clough wrote: A Dialog comparing Comp with Leibniz's metaphysics Abstract The principal conclusion of this discussion is that there is a striking similarity between comp and the metaphysics of Leibniz, I agree. that is why two years ago I have followed different courses on Leibniz. But it is quite a work to make the relationship precise. It is far more simple with Plato, neoplatonists, and mystics. for example that the natural numbers of comp are indeed monads,
Where Chalmers went wrong
Hi Stathis Papaioannou IMHO Chalmer's biggest error has been not to recognize that the self does not appear in all of neurophilosophy. This IMHO is the glaring shortcoming of materialism. The lights are on, but nobody's home. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stathis Papaioannou Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-02, 07:17:41 Subject: Re: No Chinese Room Necessary On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 10:39 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: That implies that T-cells need a feeling to guide them not to kill friendly cells. That H2O needs a feeling to guide it not to dissolve non-polar molecules. If you believe in functionalism, then all feeling is a metaphysical epiphenomenon. I think the opposite makes more sense - everything is feeling, function is the result of sense, not the other way around. T-cells do feel. Molecules do feel. How could it be any other way? Panpsychism is not inconsistent with functionalism. David Chalmers is a functionalist and panpsychist. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 Aug 2012, at 15:12, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Aug 2012, at 12:04, benjayk wrote: But this avoides my point that we can't imagine that levels, context and ambiguity don't exist, and this is why computational emulation does not mean that the emulation can substitute the original. But here you do a confusion level as I think Jason tries pointing on. A similar one to the one made by Searle in the Chinese Room. As emulator (computing machine) Robinson Arithmetic can simulate exactly Peano Arithmetic, even as a prover. So for example Robinson arithmetic can prove that Peano arithmetic proves the consistency of Robinson Arithmetic. But you cannot conclude from that that Robinson Arithmetic can prove its own consistency. That would contradict Gödel II. When PA uses the induction axiom, RA might just say huh, and apply it for the sake of the emulation without any inner conviction. I agree, so I don't see how I confused the levels. It seems to me you have just stated that Robinson indeed can not substitue Peano Arithmetic, because RAs emulation of PA makes only sense with respect to PA (in cases were PA does a proof that RA can't do). Right. It makes only first person sense to PA. But then RA has succeeded in making PA alive, and PA could a posteriori realize that the RA level was enough. Sorry, but it can't. It can't even abstract itself out to see that the RA level would be enough. I see you doing this all the time; you take some low level that can be made sense of by something transcendent of it and then claim that the low level is enough. This is precisely the calim that I don't understand at all. You say that we only need natural numbers and + and *, and that the rest emerges from that as the 1-p viewpoint of the numbers. Unfortunately the 1-p viewpoint itself can't be found in the numbers, it can only be found in what transcends the numbers, or what the numbers really are / refer to (which also completely beyond our conception of numbers). That's the problem with Gödel as well. His unprovable statement about numbers is really a meta-statement about what numbers express that doesn't even make sense if we only consider the definition of numbers. He really just shows that we can reason about numbers and with numbers in ways that can't be captured by numbers (but in this case what we do with them has little to do with the numbers themselves). I agree that computations reflect many things about us (infinitely many things, even), but we still transcend them infinitely. Strangely you agree for the 1-p viewpoint. But given that's what you *actually* live, I don't see how it makes sense to than proceed that there is a meaningful 3-p point of view where this isn't true. This point of view is really just an abstraction occuring in the 1-p of view. Bruno Marchal wrote: Like I converse with Einstein's brain's book (à la Hofstatdter), just by manipulating the page of the book. I don't become Einstein through my making of that process, but I can have a genuine conversation with Einstein through it. He will know that he has survived, or that he survives through that process. On some level, I agree. But not far from the level that he survives in his quotes and writings. Bruno Marchal wrote: That is, it *needs* PA to make sense, and so we can't ultimately substitute one with the other (just in some relative way, if we are using the result in the right way). Yes, because that would be like substituting a person by another, pretexting they both obeys the same role. But comp substitute the lower process, not the high level one, which can indeed be quite different. Which assumes that the world is divided in low-level processes and high-level processes. Bruno Marchal wrote: It is like the word apple cannot really substitute a picture of an apple in general (still less an actual apple), even though in many context we can indeed use the word apple instead of using a picture of an apple because we don't want to by shown how it looks, but just know that we talk about apples - but we still need an actual apple or at least a picture to make sense of it. Here you make an invalid jump, I think. If I play chess on a computer, and make a backup of it, and then continue on a totally different computer, you can see that I will be able to continue the same game with the same chess program, despite the computer is totally different. I have just to re-implement it correctly. Same with comp. Once we bet on the correct level, functionalism applies to that level and below, but not above (unless of course if I am willing to have some change in my consciousness, like amnesia, etc.). Your chess example only works because chess is already played on a computer. Yes, you can often substitute one computer for another (though even this often comes with problems),
Re: Re: Toward emulating life with a monadic computer
Hi Stephen P. King 1) The pre-established harmony is beyond the laws of physics. For nothing is perfect in this contingent world. The preestablished harmony was designed before the beginning of gthe world, and since God is good, presumably gthe pre-established harmony is the best possible one in a contingent world. One indication is the sheer improbability of the structure of the physical universe so that life is possible. I liken it to a divine musical composition with God as the conductor, and various objects playing parts in harmony. 2) The monads have no windows, so they are all blind. The perceptions are images are provided by God, or the Supreme monad, the only one able to see all and know all. Each monad is provided with a continually updated view of the perceptions\ all all of the mother monad perceptions, so it k nows everything in the universe from its own point of view. 3) I have been criticized for calling the monadic structure as tree-like, and I could be wrong. But as I understand them, the monads can be described by category theory if that's the right word, since each substance can be desribed by its predicates and presumably the predicates have predicates and so on. Since all of the monads necessarily are within the supreme monad, it would be the root of the tree. Of course a tree with an infinite number of branches and subbranches, etc. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-02, 10:32:01 Subject: Re: Toward emulating life with a monadic computer Dear Roger, I am most interested in a detailed discussion of the 1) preestablished harmony 2) reflections or images 3) Tree-like structure 4) whatever might be exterior to a monad. On 9/2/2012 2:19 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Toward emulating life with a monadic computer In a previous discussion we showed that the natural numbers qualify as Leibnizian monads, suggesting the possibility that other mathematical forms might similarly be treated as monadic structures. At the same time, Leibniz's monadology describes a computational architecture that is capable of emulating not only the dynamic physical universe, but a biological universe as well. In either case, the entire universe might be envisioned as a gigantic digital golem, a living figure whose body consists of a categorical nonliving substructure and whose mind/brain is the what Leibniz called the supreme monad. The supreme monad might be thought of as a monarch, since it governs the operation of its passive monadic substructures according to a preestablished harmony. In addition, each monad in the system would possess typical monadic substructures, and possibly further monadic substructures wuithin this, depending spending on the level of complexity desired. Without going into much detail at this point, Leibniz's monadology might be considered as the operating system of such a computer, with the central processing chip as its supreme monad. This CPU continually updates all of the monads in the system according the following scheme. Only the CPU is active, while all of the sub-structure monads (I think in a logical, tree-like structure) are passive. Each monad contains a dynamically changing image (a reflection) of all of the other monads, taken from its particular point of view. These are called its perceptions, which might be thought of as records of the state of any given monad at any given time. This state comprising an image of the entire universe of monads, constantly being updated by the Supreme monad or CPU. In addition to the perceptions, each monad also has a constantly changing set of appetites. And all of these are coorddinated to fit a pre-established harmony. It might be that the pre-established harmony is simply what is happening in the world outside the computer. Other details of this computer should be forthcoming. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
Hi benjayk Computers have no intelligence --not a whit, since intelligence requires ability to choose, choice requires awareness or Cs, which in term requires an aware subject. Thus only living entities can have ingtelligence. A bacterium thus has more intel;ligence than a computer, even the largest in the world. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: benjayk Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-03, 10:12:46 Subject: Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 Aug 2012, at 15:12, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Aug 2012, at 12:04, benjayk wrote: But this avoides my point that we can't imagine that levels, context and ambiguity don't exist, and this is why computational emulation does not mean that the emulation can substitute the original. But here you do a confusion level as I think Jason tries pointing on. A similar one to the one made by Searle in the Chinese Room. As emulator (computing machine) Robinson Arithmetic can simulate exactly Peano Arithmetic, even as a prover. So for example Robinson arithmetic can prove that Peano arithmetic proves the consistency of Robinson Arithmetic. But you cannot conclude from that that Robinson Arithmetic can prove its own consistency. That would contradict G?el II. When PA uses the induction axiom, RA might just say huh, and apply it for the sake of the emulation without any inner conviction. I agree, so I don't see how I confused the levels. It seems to me you have just stated that Robinson indeed can not substitue Peano Arithmetic, because RAs emulation of PA makes only sense with respect to PA (in cases were PA does a proof that RA can't do). Right. It makes only first person sense to PA. But then RA has succeeded in making PA alive, and PA could a posteriori realize that the RA level was enough. Sorry, but it can't. It can't even abstract itself out to see that the RA level would be enough. I see you doing this all the time; you take some low level that can be made sense of by something transcendent of it and then claim that the low level is enough. This is precisely the calim that I don't understand at all. You say that we only need natural numbers and + and *, and that the rest emerges from that as the 1-p viewpoint of the numbers. Unfortunately the 1-p viewpoint itself can't be found in the numbers, it can only be found in what transcends the numbers, or what the numbers really are / refer to (which also completely beyond our conception of numbers). That's the problem with G?el as well. His unprovable statement about numbers is really a meta-statement about what numbers express that doesn't even make sense if we only consider the definition of numbers. He really just shows that we can reason about numbers and with numbers in ways that can't be captured by numbers (but in this case what we do with them has little to do with the numbers themselves). I agree that computations reflect many things about us (infinitely many things, even), but we still transcend them infinitely. Strangely you agree for the 1-p viewpoint. But given that's what you *actually* live, I don't see how it makes sense to than proceed that there is a meaningful 3-p point of view where this isn't true. This point of view is really just an abstraction occuring in the 1-p of view. Bruno Marchal wrote: Like I converse with Einstein's brain's book (? la Hofstatdter), just by manipulating the page of the book. I don't become Einstein through my making of that process, but I can have a genuine conversation with Einstein through it. He will know that he has survived, or that he survives through that process. On some level, I agree. But not far from the level that he survives in his quotes and writings. Bruno Marchal wrote: That is, it *needs* PA to make sense, and so we can't ultimately substitute one with the other (just in some relative way, if we are using the result in the right way). Yes, because that would be like substituting a person by another, pretexting they both obeys the same role. But comp substitute the lower process, not the high level one, which can indeed be quite different. Which assumes that the world is divided in low-level processes and high-level processes. Bruno Marchal wrote: It is like the word apple cannot really substitute a picture of an apple in general (still less an actual apple), even though in many context we can indeed use the word apple instead of using a picture of an apple because we don't want to by shown how it looks, but just know that we talk about apples - but we still need an actual apple or at least a picture to make sense of it. Here you make an invalid jump, I think. If I play chess on a computer, and make a backup of
Re: Good is that which enhances life
I agree with those statements. I just found the discussion a bit biased towards the dangers of Cannabis and lacking in perspective. For instance, it was claimed, and still is often claimed Cannabis reduces motivation. The notorious British pot writer Howard Marks replies to this in his book Mr. Nice, as a very motivated trafficker and smoker of marijuana in the 70s and 80s, that (I paraphrase) when on Cannabis, its just very difficult to do the things you really don't want to do. It's the plants way of reminding us that we are free to pursue the things we want to, and if we're just more serious about being lazy enough, we can probably devise ways of securing our lives with less effort. But doing the things we like, Cannabis is a motivator. It's natural that somebody working in an job-environment exploiting them, will not want to work if they take a couple of puffs. I don't think they're demotivated, but if stagnation and depression persists, they should probably relax more, reorient their lives to making a more enjoyable living, more easily. And if not they should forget Cannabis. It also forces teens to become inventive with their laziness, as they go seek out liminal cracks between the edifices of civilization and nature. The places teenagers retreat to, when they get stoned: forest edges, panoramic vistas in nature, some magical hidden spot in a park. In the age of getting lost in Facebook and fancy mobile phones, this escapist behavior is relatively benign, if not positive for development of mind. Sure it can be dangerous when people get locked in their own boredom and don't pick up the sense of letting go of fixed ideals, to pursue something better; but mostly they do and relative to background of other addictions and the behavioral modifications they produce, the dangers are relatively small, and that a cannabis ideology paired with an open mind, is one of the few dependencies, that reverberate beyond personal satisfaction and create benefits for society, as all the books, poetry, art, thinking, and music it has inspired, are aimed at relaxing our fixations with threats, evils, making judgements and instead, chilling us out a bit. This type of dis-inhibition is more benign than alcohol. I find media consumption, gambling, and nursing of the majority of obsessions and fetishes to some form of fixed ideal people lock themselves up with, much more problematic. So yes, we agree on the prohibition things, that there are danger etc. but I thought it should be noted equally, that there are benefits for more than billionaires and rich people, and that these are not exceptional in any way. It's just not talked about for obvious reasons, even though we all benefit from the creative attitudes of beatles, stones, hendrix, or pink floyd etc. once in awhile. On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 9:22 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 02 Sep 2012, at 16:38, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: It depends what standards for and quality of information you have on something. People shouldn't judge what they do not understand. Bruno you understand what Krokodil entails, with solid information, so trying it is nonsense. But I don't think most understand what Cannabis entails because of misinformation. To most people what Krokodil entails is the same as Cannabis. I let a singer songwriter make the point lacking in this thread http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhKq9JvssB8 :) Paraphrasing old Nietsche: Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all. To which I would add: They should be asked to leave, or at least get out of the way. I think we agree, OK? (or I miss something?). Prohibition is exactly what makes information impossible. If all drugs were legal, Krokodil would never have appeared, and everybody would know that cannabis is less toxic (if toxic at all) compared to crack, meth, and krokodil (except it would not exist in that case). If cannabis was not illegal, nobody would ever hide its many medicinal qualities. The deep point is that food and drug is not the business of any collectivity. People should be judged on the harm they do, not on the speculation that they might react in some way with some products. Prohibition is dangerous as it kills democracy, notably. Like the NDAA, fortunately suspended by the supreme court. It would have made possible to detain without trial, for arbitrary time anyone belonging to a fuzzy category of suspects of threat, like if the human rights were not universal: it makes no sense to delimitate a class of people to whom the human rights and the constitutional right don't apply. Prohibition and NDAA belongs to the family of tyrannic technic to maintain anti-democratic powers. Bruno -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group,
Monads with power steering
Hi Richard Ruquist My claim was a bit over simplified. Although numbers do not have parts, my thinking was of monads as numbers not numbers as monads. So they have history, context, desires, etc. Monads have all kinds of accessories. Power steering anti-skid brakes, you name it. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Richard Ruquist Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-03, 10:07:37 Subject: Re: Re: A Dialog comparing Comp with Leibniz's metaphysics Roger, Every natural number is distinct from all others. So your characterization of them as simple with no internal parts has to be incorrect. Leibniz himself says that every monad is distinct: In a confused way they all strive after [vont a] the infinite, the whole; but they are limited and differentiated through the degrees of their distinct perceptions. http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/classics/leibniz/monad.htm Also nowhere in the Monadology do the words extend, inextended, unextended or nonextended appear. So could you give us a link to where he says they are inextended. Richard On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 9:36 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Natural numbers are monads because 1) the are inextended substances, which is redundant to say. 2) they have no parts. That's a definition of a monad. Except to add that monads are alive, except that numbers are not very alive. I imagine one could write an entire scholarly paper on this issue. OK-- thanks-- there is a level of description that is comp Yes, there are a number of differences between Aristotle's substances and Leibniz's. I would go so far as tpo say that they have little in common: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/#DesSpiLei Leibniz's substances, however, are the bearers of change (criterion (iv)) in a very different way from Aristotle's individual substances. An Aristotelian individual possesses some properties essentially and some accidentally. The accidental properties of an object are ones that can be gained and lost over time, and which it might never have possessed at all: its essential properties are the only ones it had to possess and which it possesses throughout its existence. The situation is different for Leibniz's monads梬hich is the name he gives to individual substances, created or uncreated (so God is a monad). Whereas, for Aristotle, the properties that an object has to possess and those that it possesses throughout its existence coincide, they do not do so for Leibniz. That is, for Leibniz, even the properties that an object possesses only for a part of its existence are essential to it. Every monad bears each of its properties as part of its nature, so if it were to have been different in any respect, it would have been a different entity. Furthermore, there is a sense in which all monads are exactly similar to each other, for they all reflect the whole world. They each do so, however, from a different perspective. For God, so to speak, turns on all sides and considers in all ways the general system of phenomena which he has found it good to produce匒nd he considers all the faces of the world in all possible ways卼he result of each view of the universe, as looked at from a certain position, is卆 substance which expresses the universe in conformity with that view. (1998: 66) So each monad reflects the whole system, but with its own perspective emphasised. If a monad is at place p at time t, it will contain all the features of the universe at all times, but with those relating to its own time and place most vividly, and others fading out roughly in accordance with temporal and spatial distance. Because there is a continuum of perspectives on reality, there is an infinite number of these substances. Nevertheless, there is internal change in the monads, because the respect in which its content is vivid varies with time and with action. Indeed, the passage of time just is the change in which of the monad's contents are most vivid. It is not possible to investigate here Leibniz's reasons for these apparently very strange views. Our present concern is with whether, and in what sense, Leibniz's substances are subjects of change. One can say that, in so far as, at all times, they reflect the whole of reality, then they do not change. But in so far as they reflect some parts of that reality more vividly than others, depending on their position in space and time, they can be said to change. There are whole talks on monadic change on Youtube. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time:
Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect
On 03 Sep 2012, at 13:48, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb I don't hold to Popper's criterion. There's got to be a lot of things that are not falsifiable. For example, you drop an apple and gravity pulls it down. ? Falsifiable means can be falsified. here the gravity can be falsfied: you drop the apple and gravity pulls it up. Hi Bruno Marchal IMHO and for what it's worth, if you don't at least give a rough definition of consciousness, you might leave out something some of us consider essential, such as a subject: Cs = subject + object If you don't include the subject, then: Cs = object which makes it a noun. Persponally I believe that it's a dipole. I have no definition of consciousness. With comp I can show why there are none. But this does not prevent us to reason on it, once we can agree on some principles about it. To get the consequences of comp, about consciousness, you need only to agree with this: 1) that you are conscious (or that the humans are conscious) 2) that our consciousness is invariant for digital functional change made at *some* description level of the brain or body or local environment or even some physical universe. All the rest follows from arithmetic and Church thesis if you agree on 1) and 2). 3) It's also probably why taxing the rich ultimnately doesn''t work, it lowers everybody's income to fit the curve. A nd why trickle down doesn't work. I do agree with this. The leftist idea of distributing richness cannot work for many reasons. But richness must be based on facts, and not on propaganda. Today we are living a perversion of capitalism, because too much investment are money stealing in disguise. The whole oil, and military industries, jail systems, and pharmaceutical industries are build on sands. It will crumbled down, and the sooner the better. But it will take time as the most of the middle class and banks are hostage (not always knowingly) of professional liars. Hi Richard Ruquist There is no god in comp. Here I disagree. If you are OK to semi-axiomatically define God by 1) what is responsible for our existence 2) so big as to be beyond nameability Then there is a God in comp. Of course if you define God by white giant with a beard, and sitting on a cloud, then you are very plausibly right. A little more on this in my reply to Richard. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: monads as numbers
Hi Roger, I think of number as the conceptual continuity between the behaviors of physical things - whether it is the interior view of things as experiences through time or the exterior view of experiences as things. Numbers don't fly by in a computation, that's a cartoon. All that happens is that something which is much smaller and faster than we are, like a semiconductor or neuron, is doing some repetitive, sensorimotive behavior which tickles our own sense and motive in a way that we can understand and control. Computation doesn't exist independently as an operation in space, it is a common sense of matter, just as we are - but one does not reduce to the other. Feeling, emotion, and thought does not have to be made of computations, they can be other forms of sensible expression. Counting is one of the things that we, and most everything can do in one way or another, but nothing can turn numbers into anything other than more numbers except non-numerical sense. Craig On Monday, September 3, 2012 9:53:21 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Sorry. I guess I should call them monadic numbers. Not numbers as monads, but monads as numbers. The numbers I am thinking of as monads are those flying by in a particular computation. Monads are under constant change. As to history, perceptions, appetites, those would be some king of context as in a subprogram which coud be stored in files. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net javascript: 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Craig Weinberg javascript: *Receiver:* everything-list javascript: *Time:* 2012-09-02, 08:28:10 *Subject:* Re: Toward emulating life with a monadic computer On Sunday, September 2, 2012 2:20:49 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: *Toward emulating life with a monadic computer* ** In a previous discussion we showed that the natural numbers qualify as Leibnizian monads, suggesting the possibility that other mathematical forms might similarly be treated as monadic structures. At the same time, Leibniz's monadology describes a computational architecture that is capable of emulating not only the dynamic physical universe, but a biological universe as well. In either case, the entire universe might be envisioned as a gigantic digital golem, a living figure whose body consists of a categorical nonliving substructure and whose mind/brain is the what Leibniz called the supreme monad. The supreme monad might be thought of as a monarch, since it governs the operation of its passive monadic substructures according to a preestablished harmony. In addition, each monad in the system would possess typical monadic substructures, and possibly further monadic substructures wuithin this, depending spending on the level of complexity desired. Without going into much detail at this point, Leibniz's monadology might be considered as the operating system of such a computer, with the central processing chip as its supreme monad. This CPU continually updates all of the monads in the system according the following scheme. Only the CPU is active, while all of the sub-structure monads (I think in a logical, tree-like structure) are passive. Each monad contains a dynamically changing image (a reflection) of all of the other monads, taken from its particular point of view. These are called its perceptions, which might be thought of as records of the state of any given monad at any given time. This state comprising an image of the entire universe of monads, constantly being updated by the Supreme monad or CPU. In addition to the perceptions, each monad also has a constantly changing set of appetites. And all of these are coorddinated to fit a pre-established harmony. It might be that the pre-established harmony is simply what is happening in the world outside the computer. Other details of this computer should be forthcoming. First I would say that numbers are not monads because numbers have no experience. They have no interior or exterior realism, but rather are the interstitial shadows of interior-exterior events. Numbers are a form of common sense, but they are not universal sense and they are limited to a narrow channel of sense which is dependent upon solid physicality to propagate. You can't count with fog. Secondly I think that the monadology makes more sense as the world outside the computer. Time and space are computational constructs generated by the meta-juxtaposition of sense*(matter+entropy) and (matter/matter)-sense. Matter is the experience of objecthood. Numbers are the subjective-ized essence of objects Craig. Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net 9/2/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. -- You
Re: Is evolution moral ?
On 03 Sep 2012, at 14:50, Richard Ruquist wrote:
Bruno,
In comp, what is the function of god.
It is responsible for the existence of numbers and their relations,
notably in distinguishing what is true and false.
My hope is that the function of a god
might be to reduce 3p tp 1p.
It does exactly that. Both:
- informally, as making true the statement I am reconstituted in
Moscow in the case I am reconstituted in Moscow, and perhaps else
where.
- and formally (or meta-formally) when, following Theaetetus, we
define knowledge as the conjunction of provability (ideal machine's
believability), and truth (like in Knowable('p') = provable('p') p).
This gives God (Truth) a mean to, well, not exactly reducing, but
awakening the 1p, from the 3p. It makes the first person as
unnameable as God/Truth.
Everything else seems to be capable
of running according to algorithms.
In the hierarchy of complexity, what is computable is at the Sigma_0
and sigma_1 arithmetical level, but the sigma_2 is no more computable,
nor is any Sigma_n level for n bigger than 1.
Arithmetical truth is maximally non computable as being a union of all
Sigma_i.
Just to say that the computable part of the arithmetical truth is very
tiny.
And the first person indeterminacy can be used to explain why the
average universal number is confronted to the whole hierarchy, and
actually even beyond, epistemologically.
Is there anything in comp
that is non-algorithmic?
The search for the truth of arithmetical sentences which are more
complex than the sigma_1 one.
By a theorem of Kleene and Mostowski, the sigma_1 sentences can be
roughly described by the sentences having the shape ExP(x) with P(x)
decidable. Their negation are already not computable and are called
Pi_1, they have the shape AxP(x). Example: Riemann hypothesis (this is
equivalent with a P1_1 arithmetical sentence, as shown by Turing).
Then you have the Sigma_2 and Pi_2, with the shape ExAyP(x,y) P
decidable, and AxEyP(x,y) respectively. Etc.
Most truth about numbers and machines are not algorithmic (we assume
Church Thesis 'course).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Re: Good is that which enhances life
My experience is that canabis increases my motivation and creativity. Am I an exception? On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy multiplecit...@gmail.com wrote: I agree with those statements. I just found the discussion a bit biased towards the dangers of Cannabis and lacking in perspective. For instance, it was claimed, and still is often claimed Cannabis reduces motivation. The notorious British pot writer Howard Marks replies to this in his book Mr. Nice, as a very motivated trafficker and smoker of marijuana in the 70s and 80s, that (I paraphrase) when on Cannabis, its just very difficult to do the things you really don't want to do. It's the plants way of reminding us that we are free to pursue the things we want to, and if we're just more serious about being lazy enough, we can probably devise ways of securing our lives with less effort. But doing the things we like, Cannabis is a motivator. It's natural that somebody working in an job-environment exploiting them, will not want to work if they take a couple of puffs. I don't think they're demotivated, but if stagnation and depression persists, they should probably relax more, reorient their lives to making a more enjoyable living, more easily. And if not they should forget Cannabis. It also forces teens to become inventive with their laziness, as they go seek out liminal cracks between the edifices of civilization and nature. The places teenagers retreat to, when they get stoned: forest edges, panoramic vistas in nature, some magical hidden spot in a park. In the age of getting lost in Facebook and fancy mobile phones, this escapist behavior is relatively benign, if not positive for development of mind. Sure it can be dangerous when people get locked in their own boredom and don't pick up the sense of letting go of fixed ideals, to pursue something better; but mostly they do and relative to background of other addictions and the behavioral modifications they produce, the dangers are relatively small, and that a cannabis ideology paired with an open mind, is one of the few dependencies, that reverberate beyond personal satisfaction and create benefits for society, as all the books, poetry, art, thinking, and music it has inspired, are aimed at relaxing our fixations with threats, evils, making judgements and instead, chilling us out a bit. This type of dis-inhibition is more benign than alcohol. I find media consumption, gambling, and nursing of the majority of obsessions and fetishes to some form of fixed ideal people lock themselves up with, much more problematic. So yes, we agree on the prohibition things, that there are danger etc. but I thought it should be noted equally, that there are benefits for more than billionaires and rich people, and that these are not exceptional in any way. It's just not talked about for obvious reasons, even though we all benefit from the creative attitudes of beatles, stones, hendrix, or pink floyd etc. once in awhile. On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 9:22 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 02 Sep 2012, at 16:38, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: It depends what standards for and quality of information you have on something. People shouldn't judge what they do not understand. Bruno you understand what Krokodil entails, with solid information, so trying it is nonsense. But I don't think most understand what Cannabis entails because of misinformation. To most people what Krokodil entails is the same as Cannabis. I let a singer songwriter make the point lacking in this thread http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhKq9JvssB8 :) Paraphrasing old Nietsche: Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all. To which I would add: They should be asked to leave, or at least get out of the way. I think we agree, OK? (or I miss something?). Prohibition is exactly what makes information impossible. If all drugs were legal, Krokodil would never have appeared, and everybody would know that cannabis is less toxic (if toxic at all) compared to crack, meth, and krokodil (except it would not exist in that case). If cannabis was not illegal, nobody would ever hide its many medicinal qualities. The deep point is that food and drug is not the business of any collectivity. People should be judged on the harm they do, not on the speculation that they might react in some way with some products. Prohibition is dangerous as it kills democracy, notably. Like the NDAA, fortunately suspended by the supreme court. It would have made possible to detain without trial, for arbitrary time anyone belonging to a fuzzy category of suspects of threat, like if the human rights were not universal: it makes no sense to delimitate a class of people to whom the human rights and the constitutional right don't apply. Prohibition and NDAA belongs to the family of tyrannic technic to maintain anti-democratic powers.
Re: Monads with power steering
How can monads store information without any internal parts? On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Richard Ruquist My claim was a bit over simplified. Although numbers do not have parts, my thinking was of monads as numbers not numbers as monads. So they have history, context, desires, etc. Monads have all kinds of accessories. Power steering anti-skid brakes, you name it. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Richard Ruquist Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-03, 10:07:37 Subject: Re: Re: A Dialog comparing Comp with Leibniz's metaphysics Roger, Every natural number is distinct from all others. So your characterization of them as simple with no internal parts has to be incorrect. Leibniz himself says that every monad is distinct: In a confused way they all strive after [vont a] the infinite, the whole; but they are limited and differentiated through the degrees of their distinct perceptions. http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/classics/leibniz/monad.htm Also nowhere in the Monadology do the words extend, inextended, unextended or nonextended appear. So could you give us a link to where he says they are inextended. Richard On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 9:36 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Natural numbers are monads because 1) the are inextended substances, which is redundant to say. 2) they have no parts. That's a definition of a monad. Except to add that monads are alive, except that numbers are not very alive. I imagine one could write an entire scholarly paper on this issue. OK-- thanks-- there is a level of description that is comp Yes, there are a number of differences between Aristotle's substances and Leibniz's. I would go so far as tpo say that they have little in common: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/#DesSpiLei Leibniz's substances, however, are the bearers of change (criterion (iv)) in a very different way from Aristotle's individual substances. An Aristotelian individual possesses some properties essentially and some accidentally. The accidental properties of an object are ones that can be gained and lost over time, and which it might never have possessed at all: its essential properties are the only ones it had to possess and which it possesses throughout its existence. The situation is different for Leibniz's monads—which is the name he gives to individual substances, created or uncreated (so God is a monad). Whereas, for Aristotle, the properties that an object has to possess and those that it possesses throughout its existence coincide, they do not do so for Leibniz. That is, for Leibniz, even the properties that an object possesses only for a part of its existence are essential to it. Every monad bears each of its properties as part of its nature, so if it were to have been different in any respect, it would have been a different entity. Furthermore, there is a sense in which all monads are exactly similar to each other, for they all reflect the whole world. They each do so, however, from a different perspective. For God, so to speak, turns on all sides and considers in all ways the general system of phenomena which he has found it good to produce…And he considers all the faces of the world in all possible ways…the result of each view of the universe, as looked at from a certain position, is…a substance which expresses the universe in conformity with that view. (1998: 66) So each monad reflects the whole system, but with its own perspective emphasised. If a monad is at place p at time t, it will contain all the features of the universe at all times, but with those relating to its own time and place most vividly, and others fading out roughly in accordance with temporal and spatial distance. Because there is a continuum of perspectives on reality, there is an infinite number of these substances. Nevertheless, there is internal change in the monads, because the respect in which its content is vivid varies with time and with action. Indeed, the passage of time just is the change in which of the monad's contents are most vivid. It is not possible to investigate here Leibniz's reasons for these apparently very strange views. Our present concern is with whether, and in what sense, Leibniz's substances are subjects of change. One can say that, in so far as, at all times, they reflect the whole of reality, then they do not change. But in so far as they reflect some parts of that reality more vividly than others, depending on their position in space and time, they can be said to change. There are whole talks on monadic change on Youtube. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that
Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect
Bruno wrote: *... If you are OK to semi-axiomatically define God by 1) what is responsible for our existence 2) so big as to be beyond nameability Then there is a God in comp...* Is it fair to say that you substitute (= use) the *G O D* word in a sense paraphrasable (by me) into an imaginary description *'what we cannot even imagine'?* (- believed mostly in the 'religious-biblical(?)' format of the following part of your post: *...Of course if you define God by white giant with a beard, and sitting on a cloud, ... ) * Such word-play would have not much merit in reasonable thinking. It would not counteract the 'faith-based' religious superstition now so widely spread among many human minds. John M On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 11:06 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 03 Sep 2012, at 13:48, Roger Clough wrote: Hi meekerdb I don't hold to Popper's criterion. There's got to be a lot of things that are not falsifiable. For example, you drop an apple and gravity pulls it down. ? Falsifiable means can be falsified. here the gravity can be falsfied: you drop the apple and gravity pulls it up. Hi Bruno Marchal IMHO and for what it's worth, if you don't at least give a rough definition of consciousness, you might leave out something some of us consider essential, such as a subject: Cs = subject + object If you don't include the subject, then: Cs = object which makes it a noun. Persponally I believe that it's a dipole. I have no definition of consciousness. With comp I can show why there are none. But this does not prevent us to reason on it, once we can agree on some principles about it. To get the consequences of comp, about consciousness, you need only to agree with this: 1) that you are conscious (or that the humans are conscious) 2) that our consciousness is invariant for digital functional change made at *some* description level of the brain or body or local environment or even some physical universe. All the rest follows from arithmetic and Church thesis if you agree on 1) and 2). 3) It's also probably why taxing the rich ultimnately doesn''t work, it lowers everybody's income to fit the curve. A nd why trickle down doesn't work. I do agree with this. The leftist idea of distributing richness cannot work for many reasons. But richness must be based on facts, and not on propaganda. Today we are living a perversion of capitalism, because too much investment are money stealing in disguise. The whole oil, and military industries, jail systems, and pharmaceutical industries are build on sands. It will crumbled down, and the sooner the better. But it will take time as the most of the middle class and banks are hostage (not always knowingly) of professional liars. Hi Richard Ruquist There is no god in comp. Here I disagree. If you are OK to semi-axiomatically define God by 1) what is responsible for our existence 2) so big as to be beyond nameability Then there is a God in comp. Of course if you define God by white giant with a beard, and sitting on a cloud, then you are very plausibly right. A little more on this in my reply to Richard. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi benjayk Computers have no intelligence --not a whit, since intelligence requires ability to choose, choice requires awareness or Cs, which in term requires an aware subject. Thus only living entities can have ingtelligence. A bacterium thus has more intel;ligence than a computer, even the largest in the world. Your proof is missing a step: showing why computers cannot have an aware subject Another problem is that your assumption that the ability to choose requires consciousness means that deep blue (which chooses optimum chess moves), and Watson (who chose categories and wagers in Jeopardy) are conscious. I don't dispute that they may be conscious, but if they are that contradicts the objective of your proof. If you still maintain that they are not conscious, despite their ability to choose, then there must be some error in your argument. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
On 03 Sep 2012, at 15:11, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: If you disagree, please tell me why. I don't disagree. I just point on the fact that you don't give any justification of your belief. If you are correct, there must be something in cells and brains that is not Turing emulable, and this is speculative, as nobody has found anything not Turing emulable in nature. You say this often, Bruno, yet I have never seen an emulation of any living system that functions the same as the original. This is not a valid argument. I have never seen a man walking on Mars, but this does not make it impossible. With comp we cannot emulate a rock, so we can't certainly emulate a living creature, as it is made of the apparent matter, which needs the complete UD*. But with comp all universal machine can emulate any universal machine, so if I am a program, at some levcel of description, the activity of that program, responsible for my consciousness here and now, can be emulated exactly. The default position is that it is not emulable. On the contrary. Having no evidence that there is something non Turing emulable playing a role in the working mind, beyond its material constitution which by comp is only Turing recoverable in the limit (and thus non emulable) to bet that we are not machine is like speculating on something quite bizarre, just to segregationate negatively a class of entities. This is almost akin to saying that the Indians have no souls, as if they would, they would know about Jesus, or to say that the Darwinian theory is rather weak, as it fails to explain how God made the world in six day. We have no a priori reason to assume we can substitute one thing with another thing of an entirely different class. Nature does that all the time. We did it already consciously when we accept a pump in place of a heart, or even when we just buy glasses. Some people will accept an artificial hypo campus, just because they need a way to stock new long term memories, and the doctor claimed it is the only known way to help a patient. We have no more reason to assume that we can substitute a brain with an emulation of a brain than we have that we can substitute a building with a drawing of a building LISP can pass the FORTRAN test. It can emulate precisely FORTRAN. The very hypothesis of digitality is what makes possible the confusion of level, at some precise level (and below). Nobody asks you to believe it works, but until we find a real evidence against comp (like a different physics), it is a matter of personal opinion. - even if it is so accurate that the illusion of it being a building is perfect at first glance. You still can't live in a drawing. The drawn people can live in a drawing. It sounds weird, because you have gone used the statical drawing in place of the dynamical emulating. A virtual typhoon cannot make you wet, unless you have been virtualized before. An emulated typhon can make wet emulated people, with comp. There is no contradiction as we assume that the brain, even in the generalized sense, is a universal emulator, so that *you* are already emulated by a natural organic computer. Showing scientifically that nature is infinite isn't really possible. Right. Nor is it possible to show it is finite. But we can do theories, and reason in those theories, and then compare with the observations, etc. Measurements just can't yield infinity. It is like the natural numbers. You can't see that there are infinitely many of them by using examples. Indeed. You just have to realize it is inherent to natural numbers that there's always another one (eg the successor). In the same way, nature can only be seen to be infinite by realizing it is an inherent property of it. There simply is no such thing as complete finitiness. No thing in nature has any absolute boundary seperating it from space, and there is no end to space - the notion of an end of space itself seems to be empty. Assuming space exist. But OK. We approach the limits of science here, as we leave the realm of the quantifiable and objectifiable, so frankly your statement just seems like scientism to me. It would be if I was pretending to defend a truth, but I am just humbly showing the consequence of a belief. From a mystical perspective (which can provide a useful fundament for science), it can be quite self-evident that everything that exists is infinite (even the finite is just a form of the infinite). Ha Ha ! You gently set the trap. I can say this: if comp is true and if both you and me, and the readers, are consistent, then you can understand, soon or later, why if you are correct, you lost correctness when appealing to that experience of the infinite. If not, *you* are the scientist speculating on a possibility which can lead to a prohibition of a entheotechnology
Re: Hating the rich
Roger, again I have to violate my decision NOT to participate in your diatribes... This is a very nice 'politically correct' sounding variant of an untrue maxim. People do not 'H A T E ' the rich: they may admire, envy, detest, fight against, disagree with, obey, lick-ass, etc., but not 'hate' - and you are wrong - with some ostentational ignorance - about the term, to call it a new (form of) *racism*. Racism has a clandestine, but not ignorable false mental characteristic: to FEEL superior to the 'hated race'. No such thing in the ordinary people vs. the self-pretended superheroes of the super-rich. They have circumstances available giving the idea of being above the law and above the rest of the (lower???) society. There are exceptions, I am referring to the 'average plutocrat'. They have wealthy upbringing with best education-potential, best health care and activities developing them better than most of the 'lower' class kids, - with ancestors leaving wealth (sometimes by killing off their competitors) and possessions to secure a wealthy start-up. Not comparable to a 'boondox-kid' or even a poor city-kid with malnutrition, educational deficiencies, gang-influence etc. So - no matter how nice your maxim sounds: I reject it. John M On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 4:45 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hating the rich is the new racism. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 8/31/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so everything could function. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect
On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: I don't hold to Popper's criterion. There's got to be a lot of things that are not falsifiable. Popper didn't say everything is falsifiable, he said if it's not falsifiable then it's pointless to subject your valuable brain cells to the ware and tear of thinking about them because you're never going to make any progress, none zero goose egg. Your time could be better spent thinking about other things, falsifiable things, because those you just might be able to figure out; no guarantee but at least you have a chance. For example, you drop an apple and gravity pulls it down. You can't turn off the gravity to falsify it Yes you can, get in a rocket and travel far from the center of the earth, or just get in a elevator and cut the cable. Actually, Hume discussed cause and effect to some great length. He said [blah blah]. Leibniz also believed as Hume did. These philosophers died several centuries before the discovery of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the electromagnetic theory of light and even thermodynamics and a understanding of what energy and entropy are. They knew nothing about chemistry or atoms and couldn't tell a electron from Electra, they didn't know about the big bang or that the universe was expanding much less accelerating, in fact the very concept of acceleration would have been considered cutting edge science for them. The idea that these ancients had anything useful to say to a modern physicist about cause and effect or anything else is utterly ridiculous. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: While computers are causal, life is not causal.
On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 7:36 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote I would call that reacting. Call it whatever you like, just don't call me late for dinner. But you're welcome to call it causal I think I'll do just that, and thank you for giving me permission. I believe that you should know all of the factors involved before calling something causal. I agree, but I don't need to know anything about a event to say that it's causal or it's not causal, a fact that should be less controversial than 2+2=4. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Hating the rich
On 9/3/2012 8:26 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: Roger, On the contrare, science is a product of the left, more or less, whereas anti-evolution is a product of the right, more or less. Science is selfcorrecting and so the left is constantly re-examining its conclusions whether in science or sociology. Whereas the right is unable to correct itself because it is based on the bible or some such tradition. So as a result, the right thinks it cannot be wrong because everything they believe is ordained by God. The left has no such limitation, thank god. Richard Dear Richard, As I read your post above I was filled with a large diversity of emotions and ruminated a long time over whether or not to respond to it. I think that you might appreciate a different point of view. I happened to have been raised by a family that was a prototypical Bible Thumper even to the point that my parents where missionaries to a foreign country where I learned via home schooling. I discovered after many years that it is only a very small minority of people that actually live their lives under the belief that everything is ordained by a person-like God. I also discovered, as I have continued my education, that there is another minority that believe that everything is ordained but not by some kind of person but instead by inhuman entities named boundary conditions and initial conditions. What is the real difference other than naming conventions? Could you stop for a moment and think about the idea that nothing at all is ordained http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ordained and that the concept is a fiction that we have habituated ourselves into believing merely because it gives us a comfortable illusion of control. Humans are strange creatures, if they can't control things themselves they will accept that someone else that is a friend controls things, but get all crazy angry at even the hint that someone else could control things to the disadvantage of the home team. Control freaks, we are such control freaks that we are entirely missing the point of it all. Laws of Nature are merely a concept we invented to explain things to ourselves, no one has the power to control all things. Power is a delusion. I challenge you to write about one example of a real person that is well known as a Leftist that does not believe that everything is ordained by something. You should spend a little time thinking hard about what you are saying here as it is a massive exercise in self-contradiction. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The indestructable Pareto distribution
On 9/3/2012 8:56 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi R AM Many economists find that an incredible number of things fit the Pareto distriution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution such that, to make up an example, 20% of the people own 80% of the wealth. In some cases, the effect might be second order, so don't ask me for proof, but it seems to be inescapable: 1) It doesn't matter much what the economic system is or who is president, it's very stubborn. 2) I don't think that even Marxism can change thIS fundamental distribution of wealth. 3) It's also probably why taxing the rich ultimnately doesn''t work, it lowers everybody's income to fit the curve. And why trickle down doesn't work. Roger Hi Roger, The only time that people are equal is when they are dead or mindless. I challenge you to explain to us in simple monadic terms the origin of valuation, for example: how the price of an apple is determined. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: A Dialog comparing Comp with Leibniz's metaphysics
On 9/3/2012 9:36 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Natural numbers are monads because 1) the are inextended substances, which is redundant to say. 2) they have no parts. That's a definition of a monad. Except to add that monads are alive, except that numbers are not very alive. I imagine one could write an entire scholarly paper on this issue. OK-- thanks-- there is a level of description that is comp Yes, there are a number of differences between Aristotle's substances and Leibniz's. I would go so far as tpo say that they have little in common: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/#DesSpiLei Leibniz's substances, however, are the bearers of change (criterion (iv)) in a very different way from Aristotle's individual substances. An Aristotelian individual possesses some properties essentially and some accidentally. The accidental properties of an object are ones that can be gained and lost over time, and which it might never have possessed at all: its essential properties are the only ones it had to possess and which it possesses throughout its existence. The situation is different for Leibniz's /monads/—which is the name he gives to individual substances, created or uncreated (so God is a monad). Whereas, for Aristotle, the properties that an object /has to/ possess and those that it possesses /throughout its existence/ coincide, they do not do so for Leibniz. That is, for Leibniz, even the properties that an object possesses only for a part of its existence are essential to it. Every monad bears each of its properties as part of its nature, so if it were to have been different in any respect, it would have been a different entity. Furthermore, there is a sense in which all monads are exactly similar to each other, for they all reflect the whole world. They each do so, however, from a different perspective. For God, so to speak, turns on all sides and considers in all ways the general system of phenomena which he has found it good to produce…And he considers all the faces of the world in all possible ways…the result of each view of the universe, as looked at from a certain position, is…a substance which expresses the universe in conformity with that view. (1998: 66) Hi, I must point out that this quote precisely describes an infinite NP-Complete problem! Consider the simple example of the Traveling Salesman that must consider all possible routes to the cities she must visit to find the path that is the shortest that covers all the stops she must made. Finding the solution requires a computation that consumes resources that increase exponentially with the number of differing possibilities. This it would require aleph_1 resourses to compute such a problem what had only aleph_0 different possibilities. Even God itself cannot contradict mathematical facts. Thus there is no Pre-established (or ordained) Harmony, as such is a self-contradictory idea. So each monad reflects the whole system, but with its own perspective emphasised. If a monad is at place p at time t, it will contain all the features of the universe at all times, but with those relating to its own time and place most vividly, and others fading out roughly in accordance with temporal and spatial distance. Because there is a continuum of perspectives on reality, there is an infinite number of these substances. Nevertheless, there is internal change in the monads, because the respect in which its content is vivid varies with time and with action. Indeed, the passage of time just is the change in which of the monad's contents are most vivid. It is not possible to investigate here Leibniz's reasons for these apparently very strange views. Our present concern is with whether, and in what sense, Leibniz's substances are subjects of change. One can say that, in so far as, at all times, they reflect the whole of reality, then they do not change. But in so far as they reflect some parts of that reality more vividly than others, depending on their position in space and time, they can be said to change. There are whole talks on monadic change on Youtube. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Where Chalmers went wrong
On 9/3/2012 10:09 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stathis Papaioannou IMHO Chalmer's biggest error has been not to recognize that the self does not appear in all of neurophilosophy. This IMHO is the glaring shortcoming of materialism. The lights are on, but nobody's home. Hi Roger, You might wish to red Chalmer's book as he makes this exact point. Chalmers argues forcefully against materialism. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net mailto:rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Stathis Papaioannou mailto:stath...@gmail.com *Receiver:* everything-list mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-09-02, 07:17:41 *Subject:* Re: No Chinese Room Necessary On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 10:39 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com mailto:%20whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: That implies that T-cells need a feeling to guide them not to kill friendly cells. That H2O needs a feeling to guide it not to dissolve non-polar molecules. If you believe in functionalism, then all feeling is a metaphysical epiphenomenon. I think the opposite makes more sense - everything is feeling, function is the result of sense, not the other way around. T-cells do feel. Molecules do feel. How could it be any other way? Panpsychism is not inconsistent with functionalism. David Chalmers is a functionalist and panpsychist. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. mailto:%20everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. mailto:%20unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Toward emulating life with a monadic computer
On 9/3/2012 10:22 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King 1) The pre-established harmony is beyond the laws of physics. For nothing is perfect in this contingent world. The preestablished harmony was designed before the beginning of gthe world, and since God is good, presumably gthe pre-established harmony is the best possible one in a contingent world. Hi Roger, One cannot make claims that are self-contradictions. Creation can not happen if the means that allow the creation are not available prior to the creation. One indication is the sheer improbability of the structure of the physical universe so that life is possible. I liken it to a divine musical composition with God as the conductor, and various objects playing parts in harmony. 2) The monads have no windows, so they are all blind. The perceptions are images are provided by God, or the Supreme monad, the only one able to see all and know all. Each monad is provided with a continually updated view of the perceptions\ all all of the mother monad perceptions, so it k nows everything in the universe from its own point of view. 3) I have been criticized for calling the monadic structure as tree-like, and I could be wrong. But as I understand them, the monads can be described by category theory if that's the right word, since each substance can be desribed by its predicates and presumably the predicates have predicates and so on. Since all of the monads necessarily are within the supreme monad, it would be the root of the tree. Of course a tree with an infinite number of branches and subbranches, etc. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 03 Sep 2012, at 15:11, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: If you disagree, please tell me why. I don't disagree. I just point on the fact that you don't give any justification of your belief. If you are correct, there must be something in cells and brains that is not Turing emulable, and this is speculative, as nobody has found anything not Turing emulable in nature. You say this often, Bruno, yet I have never seen an emulation of any living system that functions the same as the original. This is not a valid argument. I have never seen a man walking on Mars, but this does not make it impossible. No, but we have no big gaps of belief to bridge if we consider a man walking on Mars. It's not much different than the moon. Yet emulating a natural system is something which we haven't even remotely suceeded in. Yes, we simulated some systems, but they couldn't perform the same function. We also substituted some parts with non-living matter, but not with a mere computer. And then another, much bigger step is required in order to say *everything*/everyone/every part can be emulated. It is like saying that we can walk on all things, because we can walk on the moon. We most certainly can't walk on the sun, though. Bruno Marchal wrote: With comp we cannot emulate a rock, so we can't certainly emulate a living creature, as it is made of the apparent matter, which needs the complete UD*. But with comp all universal machine can emulate any universal machine, so if I am a program, at some levcel of description, the activity of that program, responsible for my consciousness here and now, can be emulated exactly. But why would you be a program? Why would you be more finite than a rock? I can't follow your logic behind this. Yes, assuming COMP your reasoning makes some sense, but then we are confronted with the absurd situation of our local me's being computational, yet everything we can actually observe being non-computational. Bruno Marchal wrote: The default position is that it is not emulable. On the contrary. Having no evidence that there is something non Turing emulable playing a role in the working mind, We do have evidence. We can't even make sense of the notion of emulating what is inherently indeterminate (like all matter, and so the brain as well). How to emulate something which has no determinate state with machines using (practically) determinate states? We can emulate quantum computers, but they still work based on definite/discrete states (though it allows for superposition of them, but they are collapsed at the end of the computation). Even according to COMP, it seems that matter is non-emulable. That this doesn't play a role in the working of the brain is just an assumption (I hope we agree there is a deep relation between local mind and brain). When we actually look into the brain we can't find anything that says whatever is going on that is not emulable doesn't matter. Bruno Marchal wrote: beyond its material constitution which by comp is only Turing recoverable in the limit (and thus non emulable) But that is the point. Why would its material constitution not matter? For all we know it matters very much, as the behaviour of the matter in the brain (and outside of it) determines its function. Bruno Marchal wrote: to bet that we are not machine is like speculating on something quite bizarre, just to segregationate negatively a class of entities. I don't know what you arguing against. I have never negatively segregationated any entity. It is just that computers can't do everything humans can, just as adults can't do everything children can (or vice versa) or plants can't do everything animals do (and vice versa) or life can't do what lifeless matter does (and vice versa). I have never postulated some moral hierarchy in there (though computers don't seem to mind always doing what they are told to do, which we might consider slavery, but that is just human bias). Also, I don't speculate on us not being machines. We have no a priori reason to assume we are machines in the first place, anymore than we have a reason to assume we are plants. Bruno Marchal wrote: This is almost akin to saying that the Indians have no souls, as if they would, they would know about Jesus, or to say that the Darwinian theory is rather weak, as it fails to explain how God made the world in six day. I am not saying computers have no souls. Indeed, computers are just as much awareness as everything else. There is ONLY soul. So I am not excluding or segregating anyone or anything. Computers are just intelligent in a different kind of way, just as indians are different from germans in some ways (though obviously computers are far more different to us). Bruno Marchal wrote: We have no a priori reason to assume we can substitute one thing with another thing of an entirely different class.
Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect
On 9/3/2012 8:06 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: 3) It's also probably why taxing the rich ultimnately doesn''t work, it lowers everybody's income to fit the curve. A nd why trickle down doesn't work. I do agree with this. The leftist idea of distributing richness cannot work for many reasons. But richness must be based on facts, and not on propaganda. Today we are living a perversion of capitalism, because too much investment are money stealing in disguise. The whole oil, and military industries, jail systems, and pharmaceutical industries are build on sands. It will crumbled down, and the sooner the better. But it will take time as the most of the middle class and banks are hostage (not always knowingly) of professional liars. I'm not sure what is meant by 'taxing the rich doesn't ultimately work'? If it means it doesn't produce equality and prosperity, I'd agree. But in the U.S. the tax rate paid by the rich has been higher (even much higher) in the past and at the same time there was prosperity and economic growth. Now the rich (by which I mean people who live comfortably solely on their investments) pay a lower tax rate than the poorest working person. So 'taxing the rich' can certainly work in the sense of fairness. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Hating the rich
Stephan, You seem to agree with me but missed my point. Scientists are willing to adjust their thinking when new information is available. Fundamentalists are not because all the important information is ancient. You may argue correctly that not all scientists are left wing and not all fundamentalists are right wing. You may also argue correctly that important information such as economics is not ancient. But I claim that my broad brush characterizations are more accurate that Roger's. Richard On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 2:17 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 9/3/2012 8:26 AM, Richard Ruquist wrote: Roger, On the contrare, science is a product of the left, more or less, whereas anti-evolution is a product of the right, more or less. Science is selfcorrecting and so the left is constantly re-examining its conclusions whether in science or sociology. Whereas the right is unable to correct itself because it is based on the bible or some such tradition. So as a result, the right thinks it cannot be wrong because everything they believe is ordained by God. The left has no such limitation, thank god. Richard Dear Richard, As I read your post above I was filled with a large diversity of emotions and ruminated a long time over whether or not to respond to it. I think that you might appreciate a different point of view. I happened to have been raised by a family that was a prototypical Bible Thumper even to the point that my parents where missionaries to a foreign country where I learned via home schooling. I discovered after many years that it is only a very small minority of people that actually live their lives under the belief that everything is ordained by a person-like God. I also discovered, as I have continued my education, that there is another minority that believe that everything is ordained but not by some kind of person but instead by inhuman entities named boundary conditions and initial conditions. What is the real difference other than naming conventions? Could you stop for a moment and think about the idea that nothing at all is ordained and that the concept is a fiction that we have habituated ourselves into believing merely because it gives us a comfortable illusion of control. Humans are strange creatures, if they can't control things themselves they will accept that someone else that is a friend controls things, but get all crazy angry at even the hint that someone else could control things to the disadvantage of the home team. Control freaks, we are such control freaks that we are entirely missing the point of it all. Laws of Nature are merely a concept we invented to explain things to ourselves, no one has the power to control all things. Power is a delusion. I challenge you to write about one example of a real person that is well known as a Leftist that does not believe that everything is ordained by something. You should spend a little time thinking hard about what you are saying here as it is a massive exercise in self-contradiction. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Hating the rich
I couldn't agree more, Stephen. Great post. The most common forms of left and right really are different forms of the same phenomenon. Statism, authority (whether of the state or of God or of science or of the market), thinking in terms of enemies and supporters. The difference is merely in relatively superficial political or religious issues. Opress the rich or opress the poor? Believe in God or in the Great Law of the universe? Belief in free markets or believe in a social state? Belief in forcing people to be social or belief in forcing people to adhere to societal norms? (Obviously there are also people that consider themselves left or right to whom not all of that or nothing applies to. I am just referring to the majority.) benjayk -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Hating-the-rich-tp34372531p34384484.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Our Creator Is A Cosmic Computer Programmer
FYI Our Creator Is A Cosmic Computer Programmer - Says JPL Scientist 3 September, 2012 Share this story: Share on facebook Share on twitter Share on email Share on print More Sharing Services 5 Follow us: MessageToEagle.com - Are we just a computer simulation? Who or what is the creator? More and more scientists are now seriously considering the possibility that we might live in a matrix, and they say that evidence could be all around us. Rich Terrell, from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology has helped design missions to Mars, discovered four new moons around Saturn, Neptune and Uranus and taken pictures of the distant solar system. Terrell has his opinion about our creator who most refer to as God. One has to think what are the requirements for God? God is an inter-dimensional being connected with everything in the Universe, a creator that is responsible for the Universe and in some way can change the laws of physics, if he wanted to. I think those are good requirements for what God ought to be, Terrell says. This is the same as programmers creating simulations, Terrell explains. Rich Terrell goes through his argument using Moore's Law and the Turing Test. Terrell wondered, how much computing power would a simulation of the Earth require? Humans are doubling the computing power every 13 months and Terrell says that computers already match the human brain in computational speed. Right now our fastest computers on the planer are capable of one million billion operations per second Terrell says. At this rate, in 10 years, Terrell believes computers will be able to create a photo real simulation of all that we see around us - the Earth. But can a computer populate such a simulation with thinking beings, artificially intelligent simulated beings, like humans? Terrell thinks so and that humans are on the verge of creating worlds inside computers populated by sentient beings. Terrell says he has found evidence that God is a programmer in nature. Look at the way the Universe behaves, it's quantized, it's made of pixels. Space is quantitized, matter is quantitized, energy is quantitized, everything is made of individual pixels. Which means the Universe has a finite number of components. Which means a finite number of states. Which means it's computer. That infers the Universe could be created by lines of code in a computer, Terrell says. Our creator is a cosmic computer programmer, says Rich Terrell. Is there evidence of computer processing of our objective reality? One clue is an experiment in the physics laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. A 1928 experiment (the Thomson experiment plus the Davisson-Germer experiment) provide evidence. Using an electron beam transmitted through a piece of graphite with a screen behind is set up. The background screen records how the electrons ricochet off the graphite. At this subatomic level, the pattern is not random, as might be expected, but is a diffraction pattern. The idea that we might live in a computer simulation ahs been suggested by a number of scientists. Terrell notes, The experiment shows something really rather extraordinary, that matter, even though it behaves when you are looking at it, measuring it, as individual particles, when you are not looking at it, matter is diffuse. It spreads out, it doesn't have a finite form in the Universe. When observed they are dots, when we look away, they lose their physical form. Is this behavior of matter similar, or parallel, to the behavior in a simulation? Terrell says this is the case! As in a simulation, The Universe gives you what you are looking at when you look at it. Further, When you are not looking at it, it's not necessarily there. This results in a Universe that is pixelated and only assumes definite form when observed. This is how computer simulations operate. Terrell's idea is not really new and he is not the only scientist who has suggested we might be living in a computer simulation. In his science paper The Simulation Argument Professor Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, suggested it is likely we are already in a simulation being run by a post human civilization in our own future. We discussed Bostrom's ideas in our article Do We Live In A Computer Simulation Created By An Advanced Alien Civilization? Research conducted by other scientists such as for example David Bohm, Karl Pribram and Alain Aspect suggest that Our Universe Is A Gigantic And Wonderfully Detailed Holographic Illusion. The idea that our creator is a computer programmer is controversial and can even be offending to religious people, but Terrell has his own views on religion, spiritultiy and science. Our world bears all the hallmarks of one that is simulated. Who would be more likely to simulate humans than humans from the future, our descendants? They would be god-like beings able to create their own universes. Terrell actually finds
Re: The indestructable Pareto distribution
Marxism is more a criticism of capitalism than an economic system. I guess the system should be called centralized planning. The system and the policy can make a big difference in distributio of wealth. The nordic countries are very egalitarian (and rich) countries. So it was Japan. Germany is more equal than the USA. In fact the US is an outlier among the rich countries (much more unequal than the rest). Also, until the end of the seventies, inequalities did grow much slowly than after the eighties. Policies and systems do make a difference. El sep 3, 2012 1:57 p.m., Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net escribió: Hi R AM Many economists find that an incredible number of things fit the Pareto distriution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution such that, to make up an example, 20% of the people own 80% of the wealth. In some cases, the effect might be second order, so don't ask me for proof, but it seems to be inescapable: 1) It doesn't matter much what the economic system is or who is president, it's very stubborn. 2) I don't think that even Marxism can change thIS fundamental distribution of wealth. 3) It's also probably why taxing the rich ultimnately doesn''t work, it lowers everybody's income to fit the curve. A nd why trickle down doesn't work. Roger Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* R AM ramra...@gmail.com *Receiver:* everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-08-31, 13:09:44 *Subject:* Re: Re: Marxism and the pursuit of money, sex and power The L-Curve: A Graph of the US Income Distribution http://www.lcurve.org/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.+everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+ unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. +unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Our Creator Is A Cosmic Computer Programmer
On 9/3/2012 1:51 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote: Look at the way the Universe behaves, it's quantized, it's made of pixels. Space is quantitized, matter is quantitized, energy is quantitized, everything is made of individual pixels That's way overstated. The evidence is against space being quantized. There is no refraction effect on gamma rays of different frequencies from distant supernovae. Energy is quantized in local potentials, not in general. What is quantized in general is changes in action. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Our Creator Is A Cosmic Computer Programmer
I did not write that. I know about the Fermi telescope results as they falsify Loop Quantum Gravity. Richard On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 5:08 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/3/2012 1:51 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote: Look at the way the Universe behaves, it's quantized, it's made of pixels. Space is quantitized, matter is quantitized, energy is quantitized, everything is made of individual pixels That's way overstated. The evidence is against space being quantized. There is no refraction effect on gamma rays of different frequencies from distant supernovae. Energy is quantized in local potentials, not in general. What is quantized in general is changes in action. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Our Creator Is A Cosmic Computer Programmer
On 9/3/2012 5:08 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/3/2012 1:51 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote: Look at the way the Universe behaves, it's quantized, it's made of pixels. Space is quantitized, matter is quantitized, energy is quantitized, everything is made of individual pixels That's way overstated. The evidence is against space being quantized. There is no refraction effect on gamma rays of different frequencies from distant supernovae. Energy is quantized in local potentials, not in general. What is quantized in general is changes in action. Brent -- Hi, Yep, the evidence contraindicates for any kind of Planck scale foaminess as well. It is almost as if gravity's effects vanish above some very high energy / very small scale. This would solve the singularity problem if understood... -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Hating the rich
On Monday, September 3, 2012 8:11:54 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg It's OK as far as the left goes to hate the rich. To them, nothing the left does is ever wrong. Is there any ideology in which the members think that what they do is wrong? You can criticize the left about a lot of things, but that it might be blind to its own faults isn't really one of them. If anything, the left is does all of the hand-wringing while the right seems to capitalize on its ability to forget its failures and rationalize the successes of its opponents. Craig Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net javascript: 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Craig Weinberg javascript: *Receiver:* everything-list javascript: *Time:* 2012-08-31, 13:24:34 *Subject:* Re: Hating the rich On Friday, August 31, 2012 4:46:40 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hating the rich is the new racism. Is it? http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-richest-woman-20120830,0,3323996.story Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/2YtUpBZTti4J. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/pOSNemvIfnQJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
On Monday, September 3, 2012 12:22:48 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Roger Clough rcl...@verizon.netjavascript: wrote: Hi benjayk Computers have no intelligence --not a whit, since intelligence requires ability to choose, choice requires awareness or Cs, which in term requires an aware subject. Thus only living entities can have ingtelligence. A bacterium thus has more intel;ligence than a computer, even the largest in the world. Your proof is missing a step: showing why computers cannot have an aware subject Another problem is that your assumption that the ability to choose requires consciousness means that deep blue (which chooses optimum chess moves), and Watson (who chose categories and wagers in Jeopardy) are conscious. I don't dispute that they may be conscious, but if they are that contradicts the objective of your proof. If you still maintain that they are not conscious, despite their ability to choose, then there must be some error in your argument. Its circular reasoning to look for proof of consciousness since consciousness is a first person experience only, and by definition cannot be demonstrated as an exterior phenomenon. You can't prove to me that you exist, so why would you be able to prove that anything has or does not have an experience, or what that experience might be like. Instead, we have to go by what we have seen so far, and what we know of the differences between computers and living organisms. While the future of computation is unknowable, we should agree that thus far: 1) Machines and computers have not demonstrated any initiative to survive or evolve independently of our efforts to configure them to imitate that behavior. 2) Our innate prejudices of robotic and mechanical qualities defines not merely an unfamiliar quality of life but the embodiment of the antithesis of life. I am not saying this means it is a fact, but we should not ignore this enduring and universal response which all cultures have had toward the introduction of mechanism. The embodiment of these qualities in myth and fiction present a picture of materialism and functionalism as evacuated of life, soul, authenticity, emotion, caring, etc. Again, it is not in the negativity of the stereotype, but the specific nature of the negativity (Frankenstein, HAL) or positivity (Silent Running robots, Star Wars Droids) which reveals at best a pet-like, diminutive objectified pseudo-subjectivity rather than a fully formed bio-equivalence. 3) Computers have not evolved along a path of increasing signs toward showing initiative. Deep Blue never shows signs that it wants to go beyond Chess. All improvements in computer performance can easily be categorized as quantitative rather than qualitative. They have not gotten smarter, we have just sped up the stupid until it seems more impressive. 4) Computers are fundamentally different than any living organism. They are assembled by external agents rather than produce themselves organically through division of a single cell. None of these points prove that the future of AI won't invalidate them, but at the same time, they constitute reasonable grounds for skepticism. To me, the preponderance of evidence we have thus far indicates that any assumption of computing devices as they have been executed up to this point developing characteristics associated with biological feeling and spontaneous sensible initiative is purely religious faith. Craig Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/T3doVNWdqdQJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
I should add a number 5...Cognitive Bias. How is it not obvious that computer scientists would want to believe very badly in the unlimited potential of developing computers? Why is this not considered a factor? We have study after study showing how the human mind is so effective at fooling itself when it wants to believe, placebo effect, the hundreds of forms of logical fallacy...has information science dared to put its own wishful thinking under the microscope? Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/FVE9_h1v3H8J. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Personally I call the Platonic realm anything inextended. Anything outside of spacetime.
On Monday, September 3, 2012 8:33:34 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Personally I call the Platonic realm anything inextended. Time necessarily drops out if space drops out. I see the opposite. If space drops out, all you have is time. I can count to 10 in my mind without invoking any experience of space. I can listen to music for hours without conjuring any spatial dimensionality. I think that space is the orthogonal reflection of experience, and that time, is that reflection (space) reflected again back into experience a spatially conditioned a posteriori reification of experience. Craig Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net javascript: 9/3/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Craig Weinberg javascript: *Receiver:* everything-list javascript: *Time:* 2012-08-31, 16:32:54 *Subject:* Re: Re: Technological (Machine) Thinking and Lived Being (Erlebnis) On Friday, August 31, 2012 5:53:24 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg You're on the right track, but everybody from Plato on says that the Platonic world is timeless, eternal. And nonextended or spaceless (nonlocal). Leibniz's world of monads satisfies these requirements. But there is more, there is the Supreme Monad, which experiences all. And IS the All. Hegel and Spinoza have the Totality, Kabbala has Ein Sof, There's the Tao, Jung's collective unconscious, there's Om, Brahman, Logos, Urgrund, Urbild, first potency, ground of being, the Absolute, synthetic a prori, etc. I call it the Totality-Singularity or just Everythingness. It's what there is when we aren't existing as a spatiotemporally partitioned subset. It is by definition nonlocal and a-temporal as there is nothing to constrain its access to all experiences. Craig Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 8/31/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Craig Weinberg *Receiver:* everything-list *Time:* 2012-08-30, 13:53:09 *Subject:* Re: Technological (Machine) Thinking and Lived Being (Erlebnis) I think that the Platonic realm is just time, and that time is nothing but experience. Thought is the experience of generating hypothetical experience. The mistake is presuming that because we perceive exterior realism as a topology of bodies that the ground of being must be defined in those terms. In fact, the very experience you are having right now - with your eyes closed or half asleep...this is a concretely and physically real part of the universe, it just isn't experienced as objects in space because you are the subject of the experience. If anything, the outside world is a Platonic realm of geometric perspectives and rational expectations. Interior realism is private time travel and eidetic fugues; metaphor, irony, anticipations, etc. Not only Platonic, but Chthonic. Thought doesn't come from a realm, realms come from thought. Craig On Thursday, August 30, 2012 11:54:32 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: What is thinking ? Parmenides thought that thinking and being are one, which IMHO I agree with. Thoughts come to us from the Platonic realm, which I personally, perhaps mistakenly, associate with what would be Penrose's incomputable realm. Here is a brief discussion of technological or machine thinking vs lived experience. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ref/10.1080/00201740310002398#tabModule IMHO Because computers cannot have lived experience, they cannot think. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy Volume 46http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sinq20?open=46#vol_46, Issue 3 http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/sinq20/46/3, 2003 Thinking and Being: Heidegger and Wittgenstein on Machination and Lived-Experience Version of record first published: 05 Nov 2010 Heidegger's treatment of 'machination' in the Beitr锟�e zur Philosophie begins the critique of technological thinking that would centrally characterize his later work. Unlike later discussions of technology, the critique of machination in Beitr锟�e connects its arising to the predominance of 'lived-experience' ( Erlebnis ) as the concealed basis for the possibility of a pre-delineated, rule-based metaphysical understanding of the world. In this essay I explore this connection. The unity of machination and lived-experience becomes intelligible when both are traced to their common root in the primordial Greek attitude of techne , originally a basic attitude of wondering knowledge of nature. But with this common root revealed, the basic connection between machination and lived-experience also emerges as an important development of one of the deepest guiding thoughts of the Western philosophical tradition: the
Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect
On Monday, September 3, 2012 1:38:03 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Roger Clough rcl...@verizon.netjavascript: wrote: I don't hold to Popper's criterion. There's got to be a lot of things that are not falsifiable. Popper didn't say everything is falsifiable, he said if it's not falsifiable then it's pointless to subject your valuable brain cells to the ware and tear of thinking about them because you're never going to make any progress, none zero goose egg. Your time could be better spent thinking about other things, falsifiable things, because those you just might be able to figure out; no guarantee but at least you have a chance. For example, you drop an apple and gravity pulls it down. You can't turn off the gravity to falsify it Yes you can, get in a rocket and travel far from the center of the earth, or just get in a elevator and cut the cable. Actually, Hume discussed cause and effect to some great length. He said [blah blah]. Leibniz also believed as Hume did. These philosophers died several centuries before the discovery of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, the electromagnetic theory of light and even thermodynamics and a understanding of what energy and entropy are. They knew nothing about chemistry or atoms and couldn't tell a electron from Electra, they didn't know about the big bang or that the universe was expanding much less accelerating, in fact the very concept of acceleration would have been considered cutting edge science for them. The idea that these ancients had anything useful to say to a modern physicist about cause and effect or anything else is utterly ridiculous. The idea that someone considers the sum total of human thought irrelevant in the face of the achievements of recent physics is so profoundly prejudiced and counter to scientific thought that is utterly ridiculous. Is it possible that the architects of the pyramids might have known something that the architects of large hotels don't? Could Shakespeare know something about writing in English that J.K. Rowling doesn't? The philosophers who you dismiss have a lot more to do with why you know the words cause and effect than does the work of any contemporary physicist. They formulated the way that we think about it to this day, far more successfully I might add, then the muddle of conflicting interpretations and shoulder shrugging mysticism that has come out of quantum mechanics. I can respect your boldness in being willing to break from the past - I don't care much for elevating the past either, but the more I see of the originality and vision of philosophers, the less impressed I am with the instrumentalism of modernity. Craig John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/HeVvx0-g6gkJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Our Creator Is A Cosmic Computer Programmer
On 9/3/2012 9:00 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Even if there were evidence of quantized space, it could not be distinguished from evidence of quantized synchronization of detection. All theories of discrete space proposed so far predict that there will be a slight dependence of the speed of photons on their frequency. Over cosmic distances this implies that photons from a supernova will arrive here at different times depending on their frequency. Since this would be *non-synchronized* detection I expect it is easily distinguished from whatever is meant by quantized synchronization of detection. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 11:30 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Monday, September 3, 2012 12:22:48 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Roger Clough rcl...@verizon.net wrote: Hi benjayk Computers have no intelligence --not a whit, since intelligence requires ability to choose, choice requires awareness or Cs, which in term requires an aware subject. Thus only living entities can have ingtelligence. A bacterium thus has more intel;ligence than a computer, even the largest in the world. Your proof is missing a step: showing why computers cannot have an aware subject Another problem is that your assumption that the ability to choose requires consciousness means that deep blue (which chooses optimum chess moves), and Watson (who chose categories and wagers in Jeopardy) are conscious. I don't dispute that they may be conscious, but if they are that contradicts the objective of your proof. If you still maintain that they are not conscious, despite their ability to choose, then there must be some error in your argument. Its circular reasoning to look for proof of consciousness since consciousness is a first person experience only, and by definition cannot be demonstrated as an exterior phenomenon. You can't prove to me that you exist, so why would you be able to prove that anything has or does not have an experience, or what that experience might be like. I was not looking for a proof of consciousness. I was merely pointing out that according to Roger's definition of intelligence (the ability to choose), computers should already be considered intelligent. He further claimed that the ability to choose required consciousness, so according to his reasoning, this would further imply that computers are already conscious. I pointed out this was surprising given that he came to the opposite conclusion. Instead, we have to go by what we have seen so far, and what we know of the differences between computers and living organisms. While the future of computation is unknowable, we should agree that thus far: 1) Machines and computers have not demonstrated any initiative to survive or evolve independently of our efforts to configure them to imitate that behavior. 2) Our innate prejudices of robotic and mechanical qualities defines not merely an unfamiliar quality of life but the embodiment of the antithesis of life. I am not saying this means it is a fact, but we should not ignore this enduring and universal response which all cultures have had toward the introduction of mechanism. The embodiment of these qualities in myth and fiction present a picture of materialism and functionalism as evacuated of life, soul, authenticity, emotion, caring, etc. Again, it is not in the negativity of the stereotype, but the specific nature of the negativity (Frankenstein, HAL) or positivity (Silent Running robots, Star Wars Droids) which reveals at best a pet-like, diminutive objectified pseudo-subjectivity rather than a fully formed bio-equivalence. 3) Computers have not evolved along a path of increasing signs toward showing initiative. Deep Blue never shows signs that it wants to go beyond Chess. All improvements in computer performance can easily be categorized as quantitative rather than qualitative. They have not gotten smarter, we have just sped up the stupid until it seems more impressive. 4) Computers are fundamentally different than any living organism. They are assembled by external agents rather than produce themselves organically through division of a single cell. None of these points prove that the future of AI won't invalidate them, but at the same time, they constitute reasonable grounds for skepticism. To me, the preponderance of evidence we have thus far indicates that any assumption of computing devices as they have been executed up to this point developing characteristics associated with biological feeling and spontaneous sensible initiative is purely religious faith. Would you consider it religious faith to believe that men could one day build heavier than air flying machines in the 1800s? We had the example of birds, which are heavier than air, yet can fly. If a bird'd body is fundamentally mechanical, then it stands to reason that certain machines can fly. Likewise, if the brain is fundamentally mechanical (rather than magical) it also stands to reason that certain machines can think. This is not religious faith, unless you consider disbelief in magic a form of religious faith. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
