Re: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/4/2012 10:07 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/5/2012 12:38 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 8:59 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Notice that both the duplication and the teleportation, as discussed, assume that the information content is exactly copyable. Not exactly. Only sufficiently accurately to maintain your consciousness. If the copy is not exact then functional equivalence is not exact either and this is fatal for the model. Then you should mourn the Stephen P. King of and hour ago. He's been fatally changed. This is not qubits that are involved... The point here is that this comp model assume that Reality is, at is ground level, classical. It doesn't assume that. A fully quantum computation can be performed on a classical, i.e. Turing, computer. Bruno would just say it just takes a lower level of substitution. Yes, a classical computer can emulate a finite quantum computation given sufficient resources. This is not the same thing as the EPR effect that I am considering. The idea that I am considering is more like this: Consider the visible physical universe. We know from observation that not only is it open on one end and that it's expansion is accelerating. People want to put this off on some Dark Energy. I think that it is something else, driving it. Consider a classical computer that needs to emulate a quantum computation. It has to have even increasing resources to keep up with the QC if the QC is modeling an expanding universe. It we take Bruno's AR literally, where are these resources coming from? They are computations. They exist in Platonia. He's trying to explain matter, so he can't very well assume material resources. The world is made out of arithmetic, an infinite resource. Let's turn the tables and make Reality Quantum in its essence. The classical computation may just be something that the QC is running. There's not difference as computations. What is most interesting is that the QC can run an arbitrary number of classical computations, all at the same time. The CC can only barely compute the emulation of a single QC. You are talking about QC and CC as though they were material computers with finite resources. Once you've assumed material resources you've lost any non-circular possibility of explaining them. What if we have an infinite and eternal QC running infinitely many finite CCs and each of these CC's is trying to emulate a single QC. Map this idea out and look at the nice self-referential loop that this defines! You're confused. 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: Sane2004 Step One
On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 11:59:55 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/4/2012 9:48 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Taking another look at Sane2004. This isn't so much as a challenge to Bruno, just sharing my notes of why I disagree. Not sure how far I will get this time, but here are my objections to the first step and the stipulated assumptions of comp. I understand that the point is to accept the given definition of comp, and in that respect, I have no reason to doubt that Bruno has accomplished what he sets out to as far as making a good theory within comp, and if he has not, I wouldn't be qualified to comment on it anyhow. From my perspective however, this is all beside the point, since the only point that matters is the actual truth of what consciousness actually is, and what is it's actual relation to physics and information. Given the fragile and precious nature of our own survival, I think that implications for teleportation and AI simulation/personhood which are derived from pure theory rather than thorough consideration of realism would be reckless to say the least. Hi Craig, Excellent post! Thanks Stephen! *Step one* talks about teleportation in terms of being reconstructed with ambient organic materials. If comp were true though, no organic materials or reconstructions would be necessary. The scanning into a universal machine would be sufficient. Yep, the assumption is that the function that gives rise to Sense is exactly representable as countable and recursively enumerable functions. The trick is finding the machine configuration that matches each of these. That's where the engineers come in and the theorists go out the door. That seems to be the hypocrisy of comp - it assumes that function is enough, that all-but-computation is epiphenomena, but then wants to bring it back home to the material universe to claim the prize. It makes me think of the self-help guru who preaches that money doesn't make you happy in a best-selling book. Taking this to the China Brain level, the universal machine could be a trillion people with notebooks, pencils, paper, and erasers, talking to each other over cell phones. This activity would have to collectively result in the teleported person now being conjured as if by incantation as a consequence of...what? The writing and erasing on paper? The calling and speaking on cell phones? Where does the experience of the now disembodied person come in? The person rides the computation, it is not located any particular place. But all this is predicated on the condition that consciousness is, at its more rubimentary level, nothing but countable and recursively enumerable functions. THe real question that we need to ask is: Might there be a point where we no longer are dealing with countable and recursively enumerable functions? What about countable and recursively enumerable functions that are coding for other countable and recursively enumerable functions? Are those still computable? So far the answer seems to be: Yes, they are. But what about the truth of the statements that those countable and recursively enumerable functions encode? Are they countable and recursively enumerable functions? Nope! Those are something else entirely! Right. Something about microelectronics and neurology though that blinds us to the chasm between the map and the territory. This kind of example with pencil and paper helps me see how really bizarre it is to expect a conscious experience to arise out of mechanism. I guess it's just Leibniz millhouse but really...say we have the code for the experience of the memory of the smell of pancakes. We have a trillion people furiously scribbling on notepads, talking to other scribblers on the phone, passing information, calculating stuff. We introduce this pancake code by calling 350,000 of them on the phone and issuing this code, and they all write it down, add it to the other numbers and addresses and whatnot, make thousands of phonecalls to other people who are also writing this stuff down and adding numbers with their special decoder rings, etc. So why and how does this pancake smell come into play? If we assume that this is possible that the pancake smell is actually conjured in some way for some reason we can't imagine, then doesn't it open the doorway to disembodied spirits everywhere? We wouldn't need a whole Boltzmann brain to conjure a ghost or a demon, just some Boltzmann bits and seeds. To me it only makes sense that we are our whole life, not just the brain cells or functions. The body is a public structural shadow of the private qualitative experience, which is an irreducible (but not incorruptible) gestalt. Step one talks about annihilation as well, but it is not clear what role this actually plays in the process, except to make it seem more like teleportation and less like what
Re: Sane2004 Step One
On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 12:06:18 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 11:48 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: yes, doctor: This is really the sleight of hand that props up the entire thought experiment. If you agree that you are nothing but your brain function and that your brain function can be replaced by the functioning of non-brain devices, then you have already agreed that human individuality is a universal commodity. We knew you didn't accept this, so the rest of the argument is irrelevant to you. However, I'm still not sure despite multiple posts what your position is on how much of your brain function could be replaced by an appropriate machine. Presumably you agree that some of it can. For example, if your job is to repeatedly push a button then a computer could easily control a robot to perform this function. And this behaviour could be made incrementally more complicated, so that for example the robot would press the button faster if it heard the command faster, if that were also part of your job. With a good enough computer, good enough I/O devices and good enough programming the robot could perform very complex tasks. You would say it still does only what it's programmed to do, but how far do you think given the most advanced technology it could get slotting into human society and fooling everyone into believing that it is human? What test would you devise in order to prove that it was not? I think it would progress just like dementia or brain cancer as far as the subject is concerned. They would experience increasing alienation from their mind and body as more of their brain was converted to an automated processing and control system. The extent to which that would translate into behavior that doctors, family, and friends would notice depends entirely on the quality of the technology used to destroy and replace the person. The test that I would use would be, as I have mentioned, to have someone be walked off of their brain one hemisphere at a time, and then walked back on. Ideally this process would be repeated several times for different durations. That is the only test that could possibly work as far as I can tell - of course it wouldn't prove success or failure beyond any theoretical doubt, but it would be a pretty good indicator. Craig Stathis Papaioannou -- 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/-/lZ4Lsi036kkJ. 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 9/5/2012 12:44 AM, Jason Resch wrote: The brain can process data as it is listening (like buffering a video download) and likely predict the final word before it is done being uttered. To prove the brain somehow overcomes this half second delay in a convincing way, you would need to engineer an experiment where a number flashes on a screen and a person has to push the right button in under half a second. If you need two brains involved, then put a screen between them with a computer screen and number pad facing each one. Each time one person enters the right number, a new number appears on the other person's screen. And it goes back and forth which each person pressing the button as quickly as they can after the new number appears. If this experiment shows the interaction can take place faster than the video processing of the visual centers in the brain then this would become a problem worth trying to solve. I'm not convinced there is any problem here that can't be explained using classical means. Jason Hi Jason, I am saying that what we actually observe in experiments as the 1/2 sec delay is the window where things are simultaneous. From the inside there is no delay. That is what needs to be explained, no? -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 12:47 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 9:37 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi Russel, In Craig's defense. When did ontological considerations become a matter of contingency? You cannot Choose what is Real! But you choose what is real in your theory of the world. Then you see how well your theory measures up. The Standard Model is a theory of energy and matter that has passed thousands of empirical tests to very high accuracy. Its ontology is elementary particles. It replaced a lot of other theories that had different ontologies. Hi Brent, Sure, we do chose our theories, but we don't get to chose the facts. I am just looking at what may be down the road. ;-) That is the entire point of Reality. It is not up to the choice of any one. It is that which is incontrovertible for All of us. The Moon does not vanish when you stop looking at it, simply because you're not its only onlooker! So you think somebody has to be looking at the Moon for it to exist? No. Existence is necessary possibility. It is not contingent. The specifics of observed properties, that is another story. Existence is not dependent on us; what we measure, is. -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 2:03 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 10:07 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/5/2012 12:38 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 8:59 PM, Stephen P. King wrote: Notice that both the duplication and the teleportation, as discussed, assume that the information content is exactly copyable. Not exactly. Only sufficiently accurately to maintain your consciousness. If the copy is not exact then functional equivalence is not exact either and this is fatal for the model. Then you should mourn the Stephen P. King of and hour ago. He's been fatally changed. Never, I am not the impermanent image on the world stage. I am the fire that casts the images. This is not qubits that are involved... The point here is that this comp model assume that Reality is, at is ground level, classical. It doesn't assume that. A fully quantum computation can be performed on a classical, i.e. Turing, computer. Bruno would just say it just takes a lower level of substitution. Yes, a classical computer can emulate a finite quantum computation given sufficient resources. This is not the same thing as the EPR effect that I am considering. The idea that I am considering is more like this: Consider the visible physical universe. We know from observation that not only is it open on one end and that it's expansion is accelerating. People want to put this off on some Dark Energy. I think that it is something else, driving it. Consider a classical computer that needs to emulate a quantum computation. It has to have even increasing resources to keep up with the QC if the QC is modeling an expanding universe. It we take Bruno's AR literally, where are these resources coming from? They are computations. They exist in Platonia. He's trying to explain matter, so he can't very well assume material resources. The world is made out of arithmetic, an infinite resource. Sure, but the explanation of the idea requires matter to be communicated. A slight oversight perhaps. Let's turn the tables and make Reality Quantum in its essence. The classical computation may just be something that the QC is running. There's not difference as computations. You are correct but only in the absence of considerations of inputs and outputs and their concurrency. Abstract theory leaves out the obvious, but when it pretends to toss out the obvious, that is going to far. What is most interesting is that the QC can run an arbitrary number of classical computations, all at the same time. The CC can only barely compute the emulation of a single QC. You are talking about QC and CC as though they were material computers with finite resources. Once you've assumed material resources you've lost any non-circular possibility of explaining them. No, I am pointing out that real computations require real resources. Only when we ignore this fact we can get away with floating castles in midair. What if we have an infinite and eternal QC running infinitely many finite CCs and each of these CC's is trying to emulate a single QC. Map this idea out and look at the nice self-referential loop that this defines! You're confused. Maybe. I can handle being wrong. I learn from mistakes. Brent -- -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 2:20 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Something about microelectronics and neurology though that blinds us to the chasm between the map and the territory. This kind of example with pencil and paper helps me see how really bizarre it is to expect a conscious experience to arise out of mechanism. I guess it's just Leibniz millhouse but really...say we have the code for the experience of the memory of the smell of pancakes. We have a trillion people furiously scribbling on notepads, talking to other scribblers on the phone, passing information, calculating stuff. We introduce this pancake code by calling 350,000 of them on the phone and issuing this code, and they all write it down, add it to the other numbers and addresses and whatnot, make thousands of phonecalls to other people who are also writing this stuff down and adding numbers with their special decoder rings, etc. So why and how does this pancake smell come into play? Hi Craig, You are up awful late! So am I, GULP! The smell is at a different level. We can't account for things in a flat logical structure. -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 2:20 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: To me it only makes sense that we are our whole life, not just the brain cells or functions. The body is a public structural shadow of the private qualitative experience, which is an irreducible (but not incorruptible) gestalt. Bingo! -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 2:20 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: All that matters is that it can exactly carry our the necessary functions. Individual minds are just different versions of one and the same mind! To steal an idea from Deutsch, Other histories are just different universes are just different minds... The hard question is: How the hell do they get synchronized with each other? I think they are synchronization itself to begin with. The question to me is, how do they get de-synchronized, and I think it's by introducing latency on a borrowed-as-space basis. Hi Craig, I am low on brain juice but here goes. What is synchronization at one level is non-synchronization at some other. The idea is to start off thinking that what is fundamental is change, shit is constantly happening; it never sits still, really. Existence is an eternal process? -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 2:20 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Why? If everything is a singular totality on one level, then synchronization is the precondition of time. Time is nothing but perspective-orchestrated de-synchronization. No. Time is an order of sequentially givens. DO not assume per-orderings because those have to be accounted for by something else. Think of Rubber Ducks swimming in a long row. Did they just get to be in that order by random chance, really? -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 2:20 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Yeah, I don't know, any kind of universe-as-machine cosmology seems no better than a theological cosmology. What machine does the machine run on? What meta-arithmetic truths make arithmetic truths true? Maybe it is the act of us being aware of them that collectively makes them true. Jaakko Hintikka has some ideas on that: http://books.google.com/books?hl=enlr=id=K7yJLmZCbFUCoi=fndpg=PA415ots=IXTvX1iloMsig=OD5xNX3OZBcCWgiVjkVGPCX_11I#v=onepageqf=false We just need to widely expand what the we is! Poor humans think that they are it. What Hubris! -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 2:20 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: That's the right question to be asking! Errors are sentences that are false in some code. Exactly how does this happen if one's beliefs are predicated on Bp p(is true)? Yeah, it seems to me like we should have to be spraying cybercide all over the place to prevent supercomputers from springing up in the vacuum flux or the sewer systems of large cities. It is the I/O that makes the difference. We do actually spay cybercide when we spray for mosquitoes. What is it that bacteria and virii are, from the logical side of the duality after all? -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 2:35 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 12:48:09 AM UTC-4, Brent wrote: So you think somebody has to be looking at the Moon for it to exist? What is existence other than the capacity to be detected in some way by some thing (itself if nothing else)? Necessary Possibility, its exactly that. What would be the difference between a moon that has no possibility of being detected in any way by any thing and nothingness? Nada. Craig -- 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: There is no such thing as cause and effect
On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 2:27:18 AM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/5/2012 12:40 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 11:14:17 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/4/2012 9:07 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 8:49:45 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/4/2012 4:23 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote: What struck me is that the the USERS of wealth in directing the life of the country. seem to be exporting jobs overseas and hiding their money there as well. Richard OK, let us confiscate all capital and distribute it evenly to every one. Then what? then we have democracy? No, because people always congregate into groups, it is their nature. And from there it is Lord of the Flies all over. It has happened many times before. Why do we never learn? I think that's why Jefferson was keen on periodic revolutions. If inequality is inevitable though, it makes sense to mediate that tendency to some extent if we can, rather than giving carte blanche to the winning savages. It's like saying we should learn that there is always crime so why bother with police. Isn't civilization based upon the effort to tame our innate tendencies toward self interest? Or at least to agree to conspire against the barbarians outside of the walls. Hi Craig, I completely agree, but that is exactly why Jefferson was also keen on a fully armed populace. Gun control is unilaterally the way that Tyrannies eliminate the revolutions. You don't need gun control to put down a revolution anymore though. The government would love an armed uprising - the perfect pretext to roll in the tanks. Tank control is the way that Tyrannies eliminate revolutions. Nuclear proliferation treaties. The government has nerve gas, hydrogen bombs, integrated surveillance, bulletproof crowd control gear...guns are no threat to Tyranny in this country at all. Tyranny loves private citizens to have a false sense of security with guns, not to mention their ubiquity allows anyone who they want to get rid of to be accused of threatening police with a gun. We are supposed to have Police, not to control the populace, but to enforce the laws that we all agree upon as citizens (social contract theory?). Failure to enforce laws leads to dire consequences. What makes the US unique is the rule of Law and not of men. Change this and we are doomed to be the next Venezuela or Cuba. We don't agree on the laws though, they are passed by armies of lawyers who manufacture consent on behalf of the ultra-wealthy. wouldn't even need to confiscate all capital, and I don't think that anyone is suggesting that. Just make hoarding wealth more expensive. Sure! A tax credit for investing. Oh way, that already exists! It is why the investment tax is so low as it is! Investing in guaranteed payouts is what makes hoarding of wealth possible. When is it savings and when is it hoarding. Who decides the difference? It's like a pyramid scheme. If most of what your money is spent on is purely to make more money from the accumulation of money rather than to purchase goods and services (including employment) then it is hoarding. It's not that hard to decide the difference. Why do the pension funds like to invest in big Venture Capital funds, like Bain Capitalhttp://www.factcheck.org/2012/05/lemon-picking-bain-capital-obama-style/and not MF Global or Solyndra? Are the people whose lively hood is completely dependent on their pensions hoarding or saving for a rainy day? Pension funds have been largely replaced by 401k I think, which offer a very limited selection - almost entirely mixes of the same 50 companies. They invest in those types of funds because those are the people who lobbied for the 401k's existence. Not that people wouldn't invest in them if they delivered the highest returns - they would, of course, but given the chance these days, people would much rather have the opportunity to put a lot of their money in a stable investment that earns 6% a year like they used to have in the 70s with regular savings accounts. The retirement accounts on Fidelity 401k now offer almost zero for money market now. All they offer is a place for tax deferred stagnation unless you play at their casino by their rules. Why would we want to give tax breaks for the wealthy to find ways of taking more money out of the economy faster? OK, let us make up a policy. Let us test various possibilities. How will we manage the risk that we have to take to make investments? We don't. If you have the money to risk in an investment to make more money, then the risk is yours to take. If you don't want to take the risk, why not invest in your own family? Do we sink out money into untested theories or proven ones? Where is the money coming from in the first place? Value
Re: Re: Toward emulating life with a monadic computer
Hi Stephen P. King There was only one Big Bang, at least this time around, because they have been able to measure it happening about 19 billion years ago. There are otgher measurments such as the background radiation that tell us more about it. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 11:55:08 Subject: Re: Toward emulating life with a monadic computer On 9/4/2012 10:58 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King IMHO I would put it that life begets life, no means required. Just as at Christmas time in church we pass a flame from one candle to another. Creation was like an ignition of life like a flame, like lighting a match. Hi Roger, But you are still not seeing the point that there is a difference between ontologies that postulate a special initial event that holds globally for all worlds and ontologies that consider initial events as the dual of event horizons, e.g they are local events and not global absolutes. I am inclined to believe in an Infinite and eternal Omniverse within which our local universe is just a finite projection of the whole. This includes the idea that it will appear to have an initial event simply because the observers in this universe cannot look back any further than our common event horizon. What Life is or is not is a debate for some other time. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/4/2012 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: 2012-09-03, 15:00:45 Subject: 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. -- 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: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
Hi Stephen P. King No, the stuff in our skulls is alive, has intelligence, and a 1p. Computers don't and can't. Big sdifference. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 12:07:19 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On 9/4/2012 11:17 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Jason Resch ? IMHO Not to disparage the superb work that computers can do, but? think that it is a mistake to anthropo-morphise the computer. It has no intelligence, no life, no awareness, there's nothing magic about it. It's just a complex bunch of diodes and transistors. ? ? Hi Roger, ?? Please leave magic out of this, as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The trouble is that the stuff in our skulls does not appear to be that much different from a bunch of diodes and transistors. ?? Our brains obey the very same physical laws! What makes the brain special? I suspect that the brain uses quantum entanglement effects to both synchronize and update sense content in ways that cannot obtain from purely classical physical methods. Our mechanical machines lack the ability to report on their 1p content thus we are using their disability to argue against their possible abilities. A computer that could both generate an internal self-model and report on it would lead us to very different conclusions! -- 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: Re: monads as numbers
Hi Craig Weinberg I obviously misunderstood your point. I still don't. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 14:58:37 Subject: Re: Re: monads as numbers Hi Roger, Not sure what you are getting at. We can't see any usefulness for eating chocolate until the bar is gone, but we still do it. On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 7:56:45 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg I can't see any usefulness for a computer or calculator where the same number is recalculated over and over. Think of a Turing tape running through a processor. Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net 9/4/2012 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: 2012-09-03, 11:12:36 Subject: 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 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
Re: Re: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
Hi Jason Resch There's no ontological difference between a computer and an abacus. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Jason Resch Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-04, 11:49:55 Subject: Re: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer Here is the link I mentioned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdg4mU-wuhI On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Jason Resch ? IMHO Not to disparage the superb work that computers can do, but? think that it is a mistake to anthropo-morphise the computer. It has no intelligence, no life, no awareness, I have given my argument for why computers can be intelligent, aware, etc.? What is your argument that they cannot? ? there's nothing magic about it. So your argument is that they have no magic, but we do?? Why do you believe (only?) we have this magic? ? It's just a complex bunch of diodes and transistors. And life is just a complex bunch of chemicals and solutions. 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. -- 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: Re: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibitintelligence
Hi John Clark God is real but cannot be found within spacetime because he is unextended. So scientific talk about God is meaningless. Actually, all science talk is meaningless if it is scientific. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 12:42:01 Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibitintelligence On Tue, Sep 4, 2012? Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: God created the human race. And when God asks Himself the question Why have I always existed, why haven't I always not existed? what answer in his omniscience does He come up with? ? God is the uncreated infinite intelligence There was once a patent issued for a combination rat trap and potato peeler and people laugh about that, but using the exact same organ for both excretory and reproductive purposes does not seem very intelligent to me either, much less infinitely intelligent. And putting the blood vessels and nerves for the retina of the eye in front not in the back so the light must pass through them to get to the light sensitive cells also does not seem very smart; no engineer in his right mind would place the gears to move the film in a camera so that the light must pass through the gears before hitting the film. That's not the sort of thing you'd expect God to do, but it's exactly what you'd expect Evolution to do. ?ohn 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: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
Hi Jason Resch Sorry. What needs explanation ? Or is that even the right question ? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Jason Resch Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-04, 16:06:02 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 9/4/2012 1:19 PM, Jason Resch wrote: On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 9/4/2012 11:17 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Jason Resch ? IMHO Not to disparage the superb work that computers can do, but? think that it is a mistake to anthropo-morphise the computer. It has no intelligence, no life, no awareness, there's nothing magic about it. It's just a complex bunch of diodes and transistors. ? ? Hi Roger, ?? Please leave magic out of this, as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The trouble is that the stuff in our skulls does not appear to be that much different from a bunch of diodes and transistors. ?? Our brains obey the very same physical laws! What makes the brain special? I agree with what you say above. ? I suspect that the brain uses quantum entanglement effects to both synchronize and update sense content in ways that cannot obtain from purely classical physical methods. What leads you to suspect this? ?? The weird delay effect that Libet et al observed as discussed here. If I understand your point correctly, the phenomenon that needs explanation is the apparent simultaneity of various sensations which tests have indicated take varying amounts of time to process.? Is this right? If so, I don't see how instantaneous communication can solve this problem.? If it takes 100 ms to process auditory sensations, and 200 ms to process visual sensations, then even with some form of instant communication, or synchronization, one element still has to wait for the processing to complete. There are lots of things our brain conveniently covers up.? We have a fairly large blind spot near the middle of our vision, but our brain masks that.? Our blinks periodically pull a dark shroud over our world, but they go unnoticed.? Our eyes and orientation of our heads are constantly changed, but it doesn't feel to us like the world is spinning when we turn our heads.? Our eyes can only focus on a small (perhaps 3 degree) area, but it doesn't feel as though we are peering through a straw.? So I do not find it very surprising that the brain might apply yet another trick on us, making us think different sense data was finished processing at the same time when it was not. Quantum entanglement allows for a variable window of duration via the EPR effect. If we look at a QM system, there is no delay in changes of the state of the system. All of the parts of it operate simultaneously, not matter how far apart them might be when we think of them as distributed in space time. This is the spooky action at a distance that has upset the classical scientists for so long. It has even been shown that one can derive the appearance of classical type signaling from the quantum pseudo-telepathy effect. I don't quite follow how EPR helps in this case.? EPR doesn't communicate any information, and there is no need for FTL spooky action at a distance unless one assumes there can only be a single outcome for a measurement (CI).? Even if FTL is involved in creating an illusion of simultaneity, couldn't light speed be fast enough, or even 200 feet per second of nerve impulses? If one runs an emulation of a mind, it doesn't matter if it takes 500 years to finish the computation, or 500 nanoseconds.? The perceived first person experience of the mind will not differ.? So the difference between delays in processing time and resulting perceptions may be a red herring in the search for theories of the brain's operation. ? ? Our mechanical machines lack the ability to report on their 1p content thus we are using their disability to argue against their possible abilities. A computer that could both generate an internal self-model and report on it would lead us to very different conclusions! I agree. Jason -- ?? The point that I am making is that our brain seems to be continuously generating a virtual reality model of the world that includes our body and what we are conscious of is that model. I like this description of a brain: that of a dreaming / reality creating machine. ? Does a machine made up of gears, springs and levers do this? Could one made of diodes and transistors do it? Maybe... No one has shown me a cogent argument that they could not. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to
Re: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect
Hi John Clark Apparently you fear you will not be able to tell which is true-- and in what cases-- 17th cent philosophical statements or modern science. As a rule of thumb you might be skeptical about some statements of 17th century philosophers on science. But in some other cases one of them is correct. Which group ? Think. Think. Think. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 11:37:36 Subject: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 12:59 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: ? The idea that someone considers the sum total of human thought irrelevant What on earth? are you talking about? The scribblings of Hume and Leibniz were not the sum total of human thought even 300 years ago when they wrote their stuff, much less today. in the face of the achievements of recent physics Yes, the idea that these people could teach a modern physicist anything about the nature of matter is idiotic. Is it possible that the architects of the pyramids might have known something that the architects of large hotels don't? No. And the reasons to build a modern hotel were much much better than the reasons to build a big stone pyramid 4500 years ago were. And the hotels were successful in doing what they were built to do, giving thousands of people shelter when they were in a foreign city; the pyramids were built to protect the body of the Pharaoh for eternity but in every case they were looted by grave robbers within a decade of their completion.? ? ? Could Shakespeare know something about writing in English that J.K. Rowling doesn't? The difference between art and science is that there is only one correct scientific theory, we may not ever find it but over the years we get closer and closer to it, and there is a objective standard to tell the difference between a good theory and a bad one; but in art there is not just one good book and the difference between a good one and a bad one is subjective. Personally I enjoy the writing of J.K. Rowling? more than that of Shakespeare because I don't know Elizabethan English and Shakespeare didn't know modern English, but J.K. Rowling does. But I'm talking about art so that's just my opinion, your mileage may vary. 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. Bullshit, Hume and Leibniz knew nothing about Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, and even if they did I'm quite certain they would not have liked it, but the universe doesn't care what the preferences of 2 members of the species Homo sapiens are, the world just keeps behaving that way anyway and if those people don't like it they can lump it. 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. They were successful in formulating ideas that seemed intuitively true to most people, but unfortunately nature found the ideas much less intuitive than people do. Philosophers churned out ideas that seemed reasonable but it turned out the Universe didn't give a damn about being reasonable or if human beings thought the way it operated was crazy or not. Those philosophers said things that made people comfortable but that's just not the way things are and being fat dumb and happy is no way to live your life. I don't care much for elevating the past either, but the more I see of the originality and vision of philosophers Originality and vision philosophers may have had but they were also dead wrong.? Regardless of how appealing those philosophers ideas were if they don't fit the facts they have to go because just one stubborn fact can destroy even the most beautiful theory. ? 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: Re: Re: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibitintelligence
Hi John Clark There was once a patent issued for a combination rat trap and potato peeler and people laugh about that, but using the exact same organ for both excretory and reproductive purposes does not seem very intelligent to me either, much less infinitely intelligent. And putting the blood vessels and nerves for the retina of the eye in front not in the back so the light must pass through them to get to the light sensitive cells also does not seem very smart; no engineer in his right mind would place the gears to move the film in a camera so that the light must pass through the gears before hitting the film. That's not the sort of thing you'd expect God to do, but it's exactly what you'd expect Evolution to do. Sorry, what is the point of this statement ? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 12:42:01 Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibitintelligence On Tue, Sep 4, 2012? Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: God created the human race. And when God asks Himself the question Why have I always existed, why haven't I always not existed? what answer in his omniscience does He come up with? ? God is the uncreated infinite intelligence There was once a patent issued for a combination rat trap and potato peeler and people laugh about that, but using the exact same organ for both excretory and reproductive purposes does not seem very intelligent to me either, much less infinitely intelligent. And putting the blood vessels and nerves for the retina of the eye in front not in the back so the light must pass through them to get to the light sensitive cells also does not seem very smart; no engineer in his right mind would place the gears to move the film in a camera so that the light must pass through the gears before hitting the film. That's not the sort of thing you'd expect God to do, but it's exactly what you'd expect Evolution to do. ?ohn 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: Fwd: The All
Hi Richard, It occurred to me after I sent the previous that only the Supreme monad can perceive becaise the rest of them can't (they have no windows) yet their perceptioons are continually being updated. I don't usually think in terms of particular monadology statements, Leibniz is perfectly logical. Supposedly you can derive the whole monadology from the fact that there are two classes of logic. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Roger Clough Receiver: Richard Ruquist Time: 2012-09-05, 07:21:20 Subject: Re: Fwd: The All Hi Richard Ruquist I'm too busy to do your homework right now, Richard. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: Bozo TheClown Time: 2012-09-04, 11:25:21 Subject: Fwd: The All Please reference with a link to where Leibniz says that. -- Forwarded message -- From: Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net Date: Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 10:42 AM Subject: The All To: everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com Hi Bruno Marchal According to Leibniz there is only one live perceiver, and that he calls the Supreme Monad. Actually, not the monad itself, but what sees through the monad.Then when we see individually we must see through that one eye. I believe it's Plato's All, or in my terms, Jehovah. Indian philosophy has a similar idea except that one must merge one's consciousness with Brahma or whatever through meditation. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/4/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 10:17:02 Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On 03 Sep 2012, at 21:24, benjayk wrote: 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. But this confirms comp, as comp predicts that material system are not emulable, only simulable. Only digital being can be emulated, and comp assume that we are digital, unlike our bodies. Yes, we simulated some systems, but they couldn't perform the same function. A pump does the function of an heart. We also substituted some parts with non-living matter, but not with a mere computer. Comp does not say that we do that, nor even that we can do that. Only that it can be done in principle. And then another, much bigger step is required in order to say *everything*/everyone/every part can be emulated. Indeed. Comp makes this impossible, as the environment is the result of a comptetion between infinities of universal machine in arithmetic. See my other post to you sent yesterday. 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. Sure. Bruno 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
Re: Sane2004 Step One
On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 07:26:53PM -0700, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 10:09:45 PM UTC-4, Russell Standish wrote: It is the meat of the comp assumption, and spelling it out this way makes it very explicit. Either you agree you can be copied (without feeling a thing), or you don't. If you do, you must face up to the consequences of the argument, if you don't, then you do not accept computationalism, and the consequences of the UDA do not apply to your worldview. If they do not apply to my worldview, then they compete with my worldview, so I am entitled to debunk the premises, if not the consequences of the argument. Good luck with that! Seriously, though, what you need to do is derive some consequences of the premises that contradict observations. Or show the premises to be self-contradictory. It is not enough to show that the premises contradict some other totally random premise, as not everyone is likely to agree that the other premise is self-evident. *Church thesis*: Views computation in isolation, irrespective of resources, supervenience on object-formed computing elements, etc. This is a theoretical theory of computation, completely divorced from realism from the start. What is it that does the computing? How and why does data enter or exit a computation? It is necessarily an abstract mathematical thesis. The latter two questions simply are relevant. That's begging the question. Why are mathematical theses necessarily abstract? Surely that is the point of mathematics! My point is that if we assume abstraction is possible from the start, then physics and subjective realism become irrelevant and redundant appendages. Why? *Arithmetical Realism*: The idea that truth values are self justifying independently of subjectivity or physics is literally a shot in the dark. Like yes, doctor, this is really swallowing the cow whole from the beginning and saying that the internal consistency of arithmetic constitutes universal supremacy without any real indication of that. AR is not just about internal consistency of mathematics, it is an ontological commitment about the natural numbers. Whatever primitive reality is, AR implies that the primitive reality models the natural numbers. What is that implication or commitment based on? Naive preference for logic over sensation? Does it need to be based on anything? In fact, for COMP, and the UDA, Turing completeness of primitive reality is sufficient, but Bruno chose the natural numbers as his base reality because it is more familiar to his correspondents. Wouldn't computers tend to be self-correcting by virtue of the pull toward arithmetic truth within each logic circuit? Where do errors come from? Again, these two questions seem irrelevant. Why? They are counterfactuals for comp. If primitive realism is modeled on natural numbers, why does physically originated noise and entropy distort the execution of arithmetic processes but arithmetic processes do not, by themselves, counter things like signal attenuation? Good programs should heal bad wiring. Erroneous computations are still computations. Are you trying to suggest that the presence of randomness is a counterfactual for COMP perhaps? -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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.
The morality of capitalism
Hi Richard Ruquist Capitalism is not a form of morality unless you consider expanding the wealth of an entire nation to be moral. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 16:23:46 Subject: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect What struck me is that the the USERS of wealth in directing the life of the country. seem to be exporting jobs overseas and hiding their money there as well. Richard On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 4:12 PM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: First to Bruno's response to (R):3) It's also probably why taxing the rich ultimately doesn''t work, it lowers every body'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. It is a 'trap' to falsify the adequate taxing of the 'rich' as a leftist attempt to distributing richness. It does not include more than a requirement for THEM to pay their FAIR share - maybe more than the not-so-rich layers (e.g. higher use of transportation, foreign connections, financial means, etc. - all costing money to the country) in spite of their lower share in the present unjust taxation-scheme. The rest of your reply is appreciable, however the 'crumbling' down may only follow a total disaster for the not-so-rich people. The said 'taxing' is not a 'trickle down' trick, it is providing the (missing) means to society to stay healthy and sane. (JM) Now to Brent's addendum: I agree - although Brent, too, has fallen into the trap of a misidentified problem-view: the equalization of wealth, a 200 year obsolete idea that cannot work for several reasons. Socialism (not to even mentioning communism) are never realized (realizable?) dreams of idealists (calling themselves materialists). Then again I would not identify 'the rich' as ...people who live comfortably solely on their investments... which may not be objectionable (ppensioners, etc.) but the USERS of wealth in directing the life of the country. Though they may do so, they should contribute from their share of fortune to the expenses. And PLEASE, Brent, do not even utter in econo-political discussion the word FAIRNESS! John M On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 3:29 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: 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. -- 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
Re: Sane2004 Step One
On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 12:37:22AM -0400, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi Russel, In Craig's defense. When did ontological considerations become a matter of contingency? You cannot Choose what is Real! That is the entire point of Reality. It is not up to the choice of any one. It is that which is incontrovertible for All of us. The Moon does not vanish when you stop looking at it, simply because you're not its only onlooker! I don't think I ever suggested that reality was an arbitrary choice. But whilst that reality is unknown, it seems quite reasonable to suppose it is this or that, and to see whether the consequences of that assumption match up with observations. It is how science is done, after all. For certain choices of this or that, the ultimate reality is actually unknowable. For instance, the choice of a Turing complete basis means that the hardware running the computations is completely unknowable to the denizens of that computation. This is a consequence of the Church thesis. *Church thesis*: Views computation in isolation, irrespective of resources, supervenience on object-formed computing elements, etc. This is a theoretical theory of computation, completely divorced from realism from the start. What is it that does the computing? How and why does data enter or exit a computation? It is necessarily an abstract mathematical thesis. The latter two questions simply are relevant. The issue of I/O is not irrelevant. How? *Arithmetical Realism*: The idea that truth values are self justifying independently of subjectivity or physics is literally a shot in the dark. Like yes, doctor, this is really swallowing the cow whole from the beginning and saying that the internal consistency of arithmetic constitutes universal supremacy without any real indication of that. AR is not just about internal consistency of mathematics, it is an ontological commitment about the natural numbers. Whatever primitive reality is, AR implies that the primitive reality models the natural numbers. Note quite. AR is the stipulation that primitive reality = the natural numbers. The idea has been around for a long time. We silly I assume by your comment you mean nothing buttery. If everything about the observed universe can be explained by the properties of the natural numbers, then it matters not whether the primitive reality _is_ the natural numbers (nothing but), or simply models it (has all the properties of the natural numbers, but may have other, unspecified and unobservered, properties). humans simply cannot wrap our minds around the possibility that more exists than we can count! We must be able to count what we can communicate about in the context of any one message, but this does not place an upper finite bound on the host of possible messages. Countability is not normally considered to be a finite property, unless you're an ultrafinitist. In fact, for COMP, and the UDA, Turing completeness of primitive reality is sufficient, but Bruno chose the natural numbers as his base reality because it is more familiar to his correspondents. Sure, but this results in a consistent solipsism of a single mind. It is a prison of reflections of itself, over and over, a Ground Hog Day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_yDWQsrajA where there is no possible escape. I am interested in a non-prison version of comp. I don't really buy this statement. I get the impression that the debates flowing around on this topic on this list are being conducted by people who don't know what they're talking about (whether pro or con). Or at least, I don't know what is being talked about, which is why I usually prefer to remain silent... Wouldn't computers tend to be self-correcting by virtue of the pull toward arithmetic truth within each logic circuit? Where do errors come from? Again, these two questions seem irrelevant. No, you just don't understand him. I'm sure that is true too. Unfortunately, he has a habit of stating something completely distant from the topic being responded to, which doesn't help that understanding. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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.
Time travel and eternal life
Hi Craig Weinberg Speaking of teleportation, if that means time travel, I find it strangely comforting that my parents are actually, really alive back there in 1950. So in effect, you never die, you just get time-shifted. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 02:20:22 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 11:59:55 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/4/2012 9:48 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Taking another look at Sane2004. This isn't so much as a challenge to Bruno, just sharing my notes of why I disagree. Not sure how far I will get this time, but here are my objections to the first step and the stipulated assumptions of comp. I understand that the point is to accept the given definition of comp, and in that respect, I have no reason to doubt that Bruno has accomplished what he sets out to as far as making a good theory within comp, and if he has not, I wouldn't be qualified to comment on it anyhow. From my perspective however, this is all beside the point, since the only point that matters is the actual truth of what consciousness actually is, and what is it's actual relation to physics and information. Given the fragile and precious nature of our own survival, I think that implications for teleportation and AI simulation/personhood which are derived from pure theory rather than thorough consideration of realism would be reckless to say the least. Hi Craig, Excellent post! Thanks Stephen! Step one talks about teleportation in terms of being reconstructed with ambient organic materials. If comp were true though, no organic materials or reconstructions would be necessary. The scanning into a universal machine would be sufficient. Yep, the assumption is that the function that gives rise to Sense is exactly representable as countable and recursively enumerable functions. The trick is finding the machine configuration that matches each of these. That's where the engineers come in and the theorists go out the door. That seems to be the hypocrisy of comp - it assumes that function is enough, that all-but-computation is epiphenomena, but then wants to bring it back home to the material universe to claim the prize. It makes me think of the self-help guru who preaches that money doesn't make you happy in a best-selling book. Taking this to the China Brain level, the universal machine could be a trillion people with notebooks, pencils, paper, and erasers, talking to each other over cell phones. This activity would have to collectively result in the teleported person now being conjured as if by incantation as a consequence of...what? The writing and erasing on paper? The calling and speaking on cell phones? Where does the experience of the now disembodied person come in? The person rides the computation, it is not located any particular place. But all this is predicated on the condition that consciousness is, at its more rubimentary level, nothing but countable and recursively enumerable functions. THe real question that we need to ask is: Might there be a point where we no longer are dealing with countable and recursively enumerable functions? What about countable and recursively enumerable functions that are coding for other countable and recursively enumerable functions? Are those still computable? So far the answer seems to be: Yes, they are. But what about the truth of the statements that those countable and recursively enumerable functions encode? Are they countable and recursively enumerable functions? Nope! Those are something else entirely! Right. Something about microelectronics and neurology though that blinds us to the chasm between the map and the territory. This kind of example with pencil and paper helps me see how really bizarre it is to expect a conscious experience to arise out of mechanism. I guess it's just Leibniz millhouse but really...say we have the code for the experience of the memory of the smell of pancakes. We have a trillion people furiously scribbling on notepads, talking to other scribblers on the phone, passing information, calculating stuff. We introduce this pancake code by calling 350,000 of them on the phone and issuing this code, and they all write it down, add it to the other numbers and addresses and whatnot, make thousands of phonecalls to other people who are also writing this stuff down and adding numbers with their special decoder rings, etc. So why and how does this pancake smell come into play? If we assume that this is possible that the pancake smell is actually conjured in some way for some reason we can't imagine, then doesn't it open the doorway to disembodied spirits everywhere? We wouldn't need a whole Boltzmann brain to conjure a
Re: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
Hi Craig Weinberg IMHO the burden to show that computers are alive and have intelligence lies on the scientists. I see no evidence of life or real intelligence in computers. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 20:39:55 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 4:06:06 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: The point that I am making is that our brain seems to be continuously generating a virtual reality model of the world that includes our body and what we are conscious of is that model. I like this description of a brain: that of a dreaming / reality creating machine. What is it the brain creating this dream/reality out of? Non-reality? Intangible mathematical essences? The problem with representational qualia is that in order to represent something, there has to be something there to begin with to represent. Why would the brain need to represent the data that it already has to itself in some fictional layer of abstraction? Why convert the quantitative data of the universe into made up qualities and then hide that conversion process from itself? Does a machine made up of gears, springs and levers do this? Could one made of diodes and transistors do it? Maybe... No one has shown me a cogent argument that they could not. They question isn't why they could, it is why they would. What possible function would be served by a cuckoo clock having an experience of being a flying turnip? 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/-/gsHN6DCowPUJ. 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: consciousness as the experiencre of time
Hi Craig Weinberg Exactly. There may a problem with this, but its seems that if mind is everywhere (is inextended, so space is irrelevant), I am always part of the mind of God. So saying that- when I look out of my eyes, that is actually God looking out- which sounds of course weird. Or that there is only one perceiver, that being the Supreme Monad, is not illogical. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 20:50:39 Subject: Re: consciousness as the experiencre of time That's what I'm saying. You can have ideal consciousness without space. On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 7:56:36 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg The experience of time is called consciousness, the simplest kind. Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net 9/4/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 00:48:59 Subject: 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 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
Re: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect
Hi Craig Weinberg Lord of the Flies is basically the conservative view put forth by Hobbes (and Paul). At root we are criminals. Welfare is essentially the leftist view put forth by Rousseau. At root we are saints. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 00:40:00 Subject: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 11:14:17 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/4/2012 9:07 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 8:49:45 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/4/2012 4:23 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote: What struck me is that the the USERS of wealth in directing the life of the country. seem to be exporting jobs overseas and hiding their money there as well. Richard OK, let us confiscate all capital and distribute it evenly to every one. Then what? then we have democracy? No, because people always congregate into groups, it is their nature. And from there it is Lord of the Flies all over. It has happened many times before. Why do we never learn? I think that's why Jefferson was keen on periodic revolutions. If inequality is inevitable though, it makes sense to mediate that tendency to some extent if we can, rather than giving carte blanche to the winning savages. It's like saying we should learn that there is always crime so why bother with police. Isn't civilization based upon the effort to tame our innate tendencies toward self interest? Or at least to agree to conspire against the barbarians outside of the walls. wouldn't even need to confiscate all capital, and I don't think that anyone is suggesting that. Just make hoarding wealth more expensive. Sure! A tax credit for investing. Oh way, that already exists! It is why the investment tax is so low as it is! Investing in guaranteed payouts is what makes hoarding of wealth possible. Why would we want to give tax breaks for the wealthy to find ways of taking more money out of the economy faster? At the plutocrat level, you should be rewarded only for investing in non-profit enterprises that lose money. Being able to invest huge amounts of money, especially unearned money from a dynastic fortune, is a privilege that should be taxed, not rewarded. Maybe follow the Scandinavian model on a trial basis for 20 years in a handful of cities. Scandinavia is a bad place to build a model because it has a homogeneous population. Such populations behave, on average, very different from highly diverse populations. Segregation into polarized groups happens much slower in homogenous populations. You might check out the meme flow in such conditions, its amazing. If by homogeneous you mean financially homogeneous, then a plan which tilts the economy in favor of the middle class should by definition make any place into a more homogeneous society - in which case the Scandinavian model would be expected to perform as it does for them now. If you are talking about anything else, then I suspect it's just a coded racism. This country was built in large part by slaves. We exploit poor migrant workers. There may not be a choice ultimately for us but to choose whether to become slaves and disposable workers ourselves (assuming we are not already) in a feudal plantation-prison society or to settle the score and go after those who continue to benefit the most from the system as it is. In any case, there is no reason to think that experimenting with a Scandinavian type system, or even Canadian, British, etc, when it comes to health care would not be better than what we have now. The biggest problem is that our political assumptions are unfalsifiable. No matter how far our standard of living plummets and how the far-too-rich get richer at everyone else's expense, it can always be suggested that it could be worse had we not done what we did. Only through experimentation in a scientific way will we ever learn anything. Craig Craig -- -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/TCkITfdw-KcJ. 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
Re: Re: Sane2004 Step One
Hi Craig Weinberg I don't like the word existence as it carries so much baggage with it. What you describe below is physical existence. That is a property of extended entities. Inextended entities such as mind and 1p and thouights and feelings would be mentally existent. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 02:35:23 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 12:48:09 AM UTC-4, Brent wrote: So you think somebody has to be looking at the Moon for it to exist? What is existence other than the capacity to be detected in some way by some thing (itself if nothing else)? What would be the difference between a moon that has no possibility of being detected in any way by any thing and nothingness? 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/-/ZNIa3HI9ZkwJ. 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: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
Hi Jason Resch What you call a virtual world, Kant and Leibniz call the phenomenal world. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Jason Resch Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-04, 21:44:02 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 7:39 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 4:06:06 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: ?? The point that I am making is that our brain seems to be continuously generating a virtual reality model of the world that includes our body and what we are conscious of is that model. I like this description of a brain: that of a dreaming / reality creating machine. What is it the brain creating this dream/reality out of? Non-reality? Intangible mathematical essences? You may be misinterpreting what I mean.? The reality is created in the sense of the experience of reality.? Each person on earth in some sense has their own conception of the world (reality) even though there is only one real planet.? I don't mean to suggest that the brain exists disembodied. ? The problem with representational qualia is that in order to represent something, there has to be something there to begin with to represent. When we dream, we have experiences and qualia without the represented thing have any existence outside the mind.? Blind people can dream in color (if they had sight at some point in their lives).? Where does the color of red come from in a blind person's dream? ? Why would the brain need to represent the data that it already has to itself in some fictional layer of abstraction? Why convert the quantitative data of the universe into made up qualities and then hide that conversion process from itself? ? ? Does a machine made up of gears, springs and levers do this? Could one made of diodes and transistors do it? Maybe... No one has shown me a cogent argument that they could not. They question isn't why they could, it is why they would. We will make these machines and transfer our minds on to them for the same reason we transfer our photographs off the digital camera that took them. ? What possible function would be served by a cuckoo clock having an experience of being a flying turnip? We won't transfer our minds to cuckoo clocks (maybe you will to prove me wrong ;-) ) but to machines that are more resilient, efficient, faster, and more reliable. 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. -- 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 All
On 04 Sep 2012, at 16:42, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal According to Leibniz there is only one live perceiver, and that he calls the Supreme Monad. Actually, not the monad itself, but what sees through the monad.Then when we see individually we must see through that one eye. I believe it's Plato's All, or in my terms, Jehovah. Indian philosophy has a similar idea except that one must merge one's consciousness with Brahma or whatever through meditation. No deep problem with this, except perhaps on vocabulary. But saying this kind of thing, and then adding that the supreme monad cannot see through a body which has undergone a digital transplant, is really like saying I am closer to God that this or that entity, and this seems to me to be a form of racism. Computer science and the antic definition of knowledge and 1p, attribute self and 1p to a vast class of machines. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/4/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 10:17:02 Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On 03 Sep 2012, at 21:24, benjayk wrote: 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. But this confirms comp, as comp predicts that material system are not emulable, only simulable. Only digital being can be emulated, and comp assume that we are digital, unlike our bodies. Yes, we simulated some systems, but they couldn't perform the same function. A pump does the function of an heart. We also substituted some parts with non-living matter, but not with a mere computer. Comp does not say that we do that, nor even that we can do that. Only that it can be done in principle. And then another, much bigger step is required in order to say *everything*/everyone/every part can be emulated. Indeed. Comp makes this impossible, as the environment is the result of a comptetion between infinities of universal machine in arithmetic. See my other post to you sent yesterday. 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. Sure. Bruno 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
Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect
On 04 Sep 2012, at 16:49, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal IMHO God is the All, or better said, the uncreated intelligence behind all creation. With the comp assumption, this sentence makes clear that Arithmetical Truth, a strongly non computational reality, and which is uncreated and behind everything any machine can conceive (including the real numbers), is a good candidate for the big thing without name. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/4/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 10:28:05 Subject: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect On 03 Sep 2012, at 18:22, John Mikes wrote: 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'? Hmm... OK. (- 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. That was not the goal. Bruno 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- l...@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- l...@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
Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers
On 04 Sep 2012, at 17:48, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/4/2012 10:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Aug 2012, at 12:04, benjayk wrote: 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. Yes. Hi Bruno, So do you agree that the 3-p point of view is just an abstraction (a simulation even!) of a 1-p? This would make the 1p fundamental. This would make vain the search for explanation of mind, so this does not satisfy me. With comp mind is the result of the working of a universal number relatively to infinities of other universal number, so we need to start from the numbers (or anything Turing-equivalent). So the 3p can be abstract, but it is not part of the mind, like 1+1=2 remains true in absence of any thinker. It seems to me that this would similar to having a model S that is part of a theory T such that T would change its beliefs as X - X' changes, all while preserving the Bpp term, p would be a variable of or in X, X', ... . A model cannot be a part of a theory. I guess you mean a theory which is part of the theory, and then I mainly agree with your sentence. We can build theories which are part of themselves, like we can make machine which can access any part of their 3p description, by using the Dx=xx method (or Kleene second recursion theorem). Bruno -- 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 . 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: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
On Sep 5, 2012, at 7:45 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Jason Resch What you call a virtual world, Kant and Leibniz call the phenomenal world. Where did I use the term virtual world? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Jason Resch Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-04, 21:44:02 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 7:39 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 4:06:06 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: 牋� The point that I am making is that our brain seems to be continuously generating a virtual reality model of the world that in cludes our body and what we are conscious of is that model. I like this description of a brain: that of a dreaming / reality creating machine. What is it the brain creating this dream/reality out of? Non- reality? Intangible mathematical essences? You may be misinterpreting what I mean.� The reality is created in t he sense of the experience of reality.� Each person on earth in some sense has their own conception of the world (reality) even though t here is only one real planet.� I don't mean to suggest that the brai n exists disembodied. � The problem with representational qualia is that in order to represent something, there has to be something there to begin with to represent. When we dream, we have experiences and qualia without the represented thing have any existence outside the mind.� Blind people can dream in color (if they had sight at some point in their lives) .� Where does the color of red come from in a blind person's dream? � Why would the brain need to represent the data that it already has to itself in some fictional layer of abstraction? Why convert the quantitative data of the universe into made up qualities and then hide that conversion process from itself? � � Does a machine made up of gears, springs and levers do this? Could one made of diodes and transistors do it? Maybe... No one has shown me a cogent argument that they could not. They question isn't why they could, it is why they would. We will make these machines and transfer our minds on to them for the same reason we transfer our photographs off the digital camera that took them. � What possible function would be served by a cuckoo clock having an experience of being a flying turnip? We won't transfer our minds to cuckoo clocks (maybe you will to prove me wrong ;-) ) but to machines that are more resilient, efficient, faster, and more reliable. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email toeverything-list@googlegroups.com . To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group athttp://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: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers
On 04 Sep 2012, at 22:40, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: 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. Why? No system can reason as if it did not exist, because to be coherent it would than have to cease to reason. Why? You just seem to reason that if you don't exist you would cease to reason. But I don't see the relevance of this to what I said. If PA realizes that RA is enough, then this can only mean that RA + its own realization about RA is enough. Yes, that is why PA can believe that RA is it ontological source, despite being much epistemologically much stronger than RA. Bruno Marchal wrote: 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. For the ontology. Yes. I honestly never understood what you mean by ontology and epistemology. Ontology is what we take as existing at the base level. In my favorite theory what exist is simply 0, s(0), etc. And nothing else. Put it differently, it is what the variable used in the theory represent. ExP(x) means that there is some number verifying P. Epistemological existence is about the memory content of such numbers, resulting from their complex interaction with other numbers. In the math part, they are handle by prefixing modalities, and have shape like []Ex[]P(x), or []Ex []P(x) and more complex one. Note that those are still arithmetical sentences as all modalities used here admit purely arithmetical intepretations. For me it seems that it is exactly backwards. We need the 1-p as the ontology, because it is what necessarily primitively exists from the 1-p view. ... from the 1p views. But when we search a scientific theory we bet on some sharable reality beyond the 1p view, be it a physical universe or an arithmetical one. Arithmetic is one possible epistemology. And assuming comp, it is one possible epistemology. I don't even get what it could mean that numbers are ontologically real, as we know them only as abstractions (so they are epistemology). If we try to talk as if numbers are fundamentally real - independent of things - we can't even make sense of numbers. ? I can. One number, two numbers, three numbers, etc. What is the abstract difference between 1 and 2 for example. 1 :) What is the difference between 0s and 0ss? 0s What's the difference between the true statement that 1+1=2 and the false statement that 1+2=2? You just named it. The first is true, the second is false. How is any of it more meaningful than any other abitrary string of symbols? T#gtti Hyz# 8P^ii ? We can only make sense of them as we see that they refer to numbers *of objects* (like for example the string s). OK. If we don't do that we could as well embrace axioms like 1=2 or 1+1+1=1 or 1+9=2343-23 or 1+3=*?ABC or whatever else. OK. Bruno Marchal wrote: 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. Yes. If this is true, how does it make sense to think of the abstraction as ontologically real and the non-abstraction as mere empistemology? It seems like total nonsense to me (sorry). Because the abstraction provides a way to make sense of how 3p numbers get 1p views and abstract their own idea of what numbers are. NUMBERS CONSCIOUSNESS PHYSICAL REALM HUMAN HUMAN'S CONCEPTION OF NUMBERS Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: With comp, to make things simple, we are high level programs. Their doing is 100* emulable by any computer, by definition of programs and computers. OK, but in this discussion we can't assume COMP. I understand that you take it for granted when discussing your paper (because it only makes sense in that context), but I don't take it for granted, and I don't consider it plausible, or honestly even meaningful. Then you have to tell me what is not Turing emulable in the functioning of the brain. *everything*! You point here on their material constitution. That begs the question. Rather show me *what is* turing emulable in the brain. The chemical reactions, the neuronal processing, etc. Anything described in any book on brain. Even according to COMP, nothing is, since the brain is material and matter is not emulable. Right. But that matter exists only in the 1p plural view, not in the ontology. As I see it, the brain as such has nothing to do with emulability. We can do simulations,
Re: Sane2004 Step One
On 05 Sep 2012, at 03:48, Craig Weinberg wrote: Taking another look at Sane2004. This isn't so much as a challenge to Bruno, just sharing my notes of why I disagree. Not sure how far I will get this time, but here are my objections to the first step and the stipulated assumptions of comp. I understand that the point is to accept the given definition of comp, and in that respect, I have no reason to doubt that Bruno has accomplished what he sets out to as far as making a good theory within comp, and if he has not, I wouldn't be qualified to comment on it anyhow. From my perspective however, this is all beside the point, since the only point that matters is the actual truth of what consciousness actually is, and what is it's actual relation to physics and information. Given the fragile and precious nature of our own survival, I think that implications for teleportation and AI simulation/personhood which are derived from pure theory rather than thorough consideration of realism would be reckless to say the least. Step one talks about teleportation in terms of being reconstructed with ambient organic materials. If comp were true though, no organic materials or reconstructions would be necessary. The scanning into a universal machine would be sufficient. That is step 6. Taking this to the China Brain level, the universal machine could be a trillion people with notebooks, pencils, paper, and erasers, talking to each other over cell phones. This activity would have to collectively result in the teleported person now being conjured as if by incantation as a consequence of...what? The writing and erasing on paper? The calling and speaking on cell phones? Where does the experience of the now disembodied person come in? As you illustrate here, plausibly not on the physical means used by the brain. Step 8 shows that indeed the physical has nothing to do with consciousness, except as a content of consciousness. Keeping comp here, we associate consciousness with the logical abstract computations. Step one talks about annihilation as well, but it is not clear what role this actually plays in the process, except to make it seem more like teleportation and less like what it actually would be, which is duplication. If I scan an original document and email the scan, I have sent a duplicate, not teleported the original. Right. Classical teleportation = duplication + annihilation of the original. That's step 5, precisely. You understand the reasoning very well, but we know that the problem for you is in the assumption. I have problems with all three of the comp assumptions: yes, doctor: This is really the sleight of hand that props up the entire thought experiment. If you agree that you are nothing but your brain function and that your brain function can be replaced by the functioning of non-brain devices, then you have already agreed that human individuality is a universal commodity. Why? A program or piece of information is not nothing. It asks works, can be paid for, can be precious and rare, etc. Church thesis: Views computation in isolation, irrespective of resources, supervenience on object-formed computing elements, etc. This is a theoretical theory of computation, completely divorced from realism from the start. What is it that does the computing? How and why does data enter or exit a computation? It is a discovery by mathematicians. Arithmetical Realism: The idea that truth values are self justifying independently of subjectivity or physics is literally a shot in the dark. Like yes, doctor, this is really swallowing the cow whole from the beginning and saying that the internal consistency of arithmetic constitutes universal supremacy without any real indication of that. Wouldn't computers tend to be self-correcting by virtue of the pull toward arithmetic truth within each logic circuit? Where do errors come from? They come from the inadequacy between belief and truth. Incompleteness makes this unavoidable at the root, and that is why the logic of Bp p is different from the logic of Bp, despite G* proves Bp - p. G does not prove it, so correct machine already knows that they might be incorrect soon enough. Your last paragraph confirms you are still thinking of machines and numbers in a pre-Godelian or pre-Löbian way, I think. 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: Sane2004 Step One
On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 8:18:07 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 4:27 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: We knew you didn't accept this, so the rest of the argument is irrelevant to you. However, I'm still not sure despite multiple posts what your position is on how much of your brain function could be replaced by an appropriate machine. Presumably you agree that some of it can. For example, if your job is to repeatedly push a button then a computer could easily control a robot to perform this function. And this behaviour could be made incrementally more complicated, so that for example the robot would press the button faster if it heard the command faster, if that were also part of your job. With a good enough computer, good enough I/O devices and good enough programming the robot could perform very complex tasks. You would say it still does only what it's programmed to do, but how far do you think given the most advanced technology it could get slotting into human society and fooling everyone into believing that it is human? What test would you devise in order to prove that it was not? I think it would progress just like dementia or brain cancer as far as the subject is concerned. They would experience increasing alienation from their mind and body as more of their brain was converted to an automated processing and control system. The extent to which that would translate into behavior that doctors, family, and friends would notice depends entirely on the quality of the technology used to destroy and replace the person. The test that I would use would be, as I have mentioned, to have someone be walked off of their brain one hemisphere at a time, and then walked back on. Ideally this process would be repeated several times for different durations. That is the only test that could possibly work as far as I can tell - of course it wouldn't prove success or failure beyond any theoretical doubt, but it would be a pretty good indicator. I'm not talking about gradual brain replacement specifically but replacement of the whole person with an AI controlling a robot. We assume the machine is very technologically advanced. Progress in AI may have been slow over the past few decades but extrapolate that slow pace of change a thousand years into the future. Do you think you would still be able to distinguish the robot from the human, and if so what test would you use? The ability to test depends entirely on my familiarity with the human and how good the technology is. Can I touch them, smell them? If so, then I would be surprised if I could be fooled by an inorganic body. Has there ever been one synthetic imitation of a natural biological product that can withstand even moderate examination? If you limit the channel of my interaction with the robot however, I stand much less of a chance of being able to tell the difference. A video conference with the robot only requires that they look convincing on camera. We can't tell the difference between a live performance and a taped performance unless there is some clue in the content. That is because we aren't literally present so we are only dealing with a narrow channel of sense experience to begin with. In any case, what does being able to tell from the outside have to do with whether or not the thing feels? If it is designed by experts to fool other people into thinking that it is alive, then so what if it succeeds at fooling everyone? Something can't fool itself into thinking that it is alive. 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/-/0RjjHKGsZ6MJ. 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 05 Sep 2012, at 06:14, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 7:19 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 06:48:58PM -0700, Craig Weinberg wrote: I have problems with all three of the comp assumptions: *yes, doctor*: This is really the sleight of hand that props up the entire thought experiment. If you agree that you are nothing but your brain function and that your brain function can be replaced by the functioning of non-brain devices, then you have already agreed that human individuality is a universal commodity. Calling it a sleight of hand is a bit rough. It is the meat of the comp assumption, and spelling it out this way makes it very explicit. Either you agree you can be copied (without feeling a thing), or you don't. If you do, you must face up to the consequences of the argument, if you don't, then you do not accept computationalism, and the consequences of the UDA do not apply to your worldview. I suppose I can be copied. But does it follow that I am just the computations in my brain. It seems likely that I also require an outside environment/world with which I interact in order to remain conscious. Bruno passes this off by saying it's just a matter of the level of substitution, perhaps your local environment or even the whole galaxy must be replaced by a digital representation in order to maintain your consciousness unchanged. But this bothers me. Suppose it is the whole galaxy, or the whole observed universe. Does it really mean anything then to say your brain has been replaced ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE? It's just the assertion that everything is computable. That's a good argument for saying that the level of substitution is not that low. But the reasoning would still go through, and we would lead to a unique computable universe. That is the only way to make a digital physics consistent (as I forget to say sometimes). Then you get a more complex other mind problem, and something like David Nyman- Hoyle beam would be needed, and would need to be separate from the physical reality, making the big physical whole incomplete, etc. yes this bothers me too. Needless to say, I tend to believe that if comp is true, the level is much higher. *Church thesis*: Views computation in isolation, irrespective of resources, supervenience on object-formed computing elements, etc. This is a theoretical theory of computation, completely divorced from realism from the start. What is it that does the computing? How and why does data enter or exit a computation? It is necessarily an abstract mathematical thesis. The latter two questions simply are relevant. *Arithmetical Realism*: The idea that truth values are self justifying independently of subjectivity or physics is literally a shot in the dark. Like yes, doctor, this is really swallowing the cow whole from the beginning and saying that the internal consistency of arithmetic constitutes universal supremacy without any real indication of that. AR is not just about internal consistency of mathematics, it is an ontological commitment about the natural numbers. Whatever primitive reality is, AR implies that the primitive reality models the natural numbers. ISTM that Bruno rejects any reality behind the natural numbers (or other system of computation). If often argues that the natural numbers exist, because they satisfy true propositions: There exists a prime number between 1 and 3, therefore 2 exists. This assumes a Platonist view of mathematical objects, which Peter D. Jones has argued against. ? I would say that the contrary is true. It is because natural numbers exists, and seems to obeys laws like addition and multiplication that true propositions can be made on them. 2 exists, and only 1 and 2 divides 2, so 2 is prime, and thus prime numbers exists. 2 itself exists just because Ex(x = s(s(0))) is true. Indeed take x = s(s(0)), and the proposition follows from s(s(0)) = s(s(0)). Bruno Brent In fact, for COMP, and the UDA, Turing completeness of primitive reality is sufficient, but Bruno chose the natural numbers as his base reality because it is more familiar to his correspondents. Wouldn't computers tend to be self-correcting by virtue of the pull toward arithmetic truth within each logic circuit? Where do errors come from? Again, these two questions seem irrelevant. 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/-/Pc173EEJR4IJ . 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
Re: Re: Sane2004 Step One
On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 8:43:35 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg I don't like the word existence as it carries so much baggage with it. What you describe below is physical existence. That is a property of extended entities. I agree, existence means different things in different contexts. Inextended entities such as mind and 1p and thouights and feelings would be mentally existent. I try to avoid that confusion by using the word 'insist' and 'insistence' instead of exist when I am talking about the private half of the cosmos. 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/-/rvrZdJNK-JQJ. 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 05 Sep 2012, at 06:48, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/5/2012 12:14 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 7:19 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 06:48:58PM -0700, Craig Weinberg wrote: I have problems with all three of the comp assumptions: *yes, doctor*: This is really the sleight of hand that props up the entire thought experiment. If you agree that you are nothing but your brain function and that your brain function can be replaced by the functioning of non-brain devices, then you have already agreed that human individuality is a universal commodity. Calling it a sleight of hand is a bit rough. It is the meat of the comp assumption, and spelling it out this way makes it very explicit. Either you agree you can be copied (without feeling a thing), or you don't. If you do, you must face up to the consequences of the argument, if you don't, then you do not accept computationalism, and the consequences of the UDA do not apply to your worldview. I suppose I can be copied. But does it follow that I am just the computations in my brain. It seems likely that I also require an outside environment/world with which I interact in order to remain conscious. Bruno passes this off by saying it's just a matter of the level of substitution, perhaps your local environment or even the whole galaxy must be replaced by a digital representation in order to maintain your consciousness unchanged. But this bothers me. Suppose it is the whole galaxy, or the whole observed universe. Does it really mean anything then to say your brain has been replaced ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE? It's just the assertion that everything is computable. Hear Hear! And if it is computable then it is nothing but countable and recursively enumerable functions. But can functions generate I/O from themselves? You lost me. Functions are set of I/O. We see nice examples of entire computable universes in MMORP games that have many people addicted to them. One thing about them, we require resources to be run. Nothing happens if you don't pay the fee. *Church thesis*: Views computation in isolation, irrespective of resources, supervenience on object-formed computing elements, etc. This is a theoretical theory of computation, completely divorced from realism from the start. What is it that does the computing? How and why does data enter or exit a computation? It is necessarily an abstract mathematical thesis. The latter two questions simply are relevant. *Arithmetical Realism*: The idea that truth values are self justifying independently of subjectivity or physics is literally a shot in the dark. Like yes, doctor, this is really swallowing the cow whole from the beginning and saying that the internal consistency of arithmetic constitutes universal supremacy without any real indication of that. AR is not just about internal consistency of mathematics, it is an ontological commitment about the natural numbers. Whatever primitive reality is, AR implies that the primitive reality models the natural numbers. ISTM that Bruno rejects any reality behind the natural numbers (or other system of computation). If often argues that the natural numbers exist, because they satisfy true propositions: There exists a prime number between 1 and 3, therefore 2 exists. This assumes a Platonist view of mathematical objects, which Peter D. Jones has argued against. Platonism fails because it cannot explain how many minds interact. It is a wonderful ontology theory of a single mind, but not of many differing minds. I don't see this at all. many minds comes from the fact that universal machine can interact. That the easy thing to explain, seen also by Schmidhuber and Tegmark, but as Deustch argued, this explains to much. Yet Deustch critics either assumes non comp, or is inconsistent, as comp implies the realities used by Schmidhuber and Tegmark. What the three of them ignores is that this entails also the first person indeterminacy, and this makes the idea of interaction or physics entirely and necessarily retrievable from self-reference, and this works well until now. Then we have the Solovay gift, the splitting between provable and true-but-non-provable, whose intensional variants explains completely the quanta/qualia divergence. You keep saying that interaction is not explained by comp, but this makes no sense, as a computation, even in arithmetic, is only a matter of local interactions. It is the essence of computability to reduce activity into local tiny elementary interactions. Then physical-like interaction must be recovered at the more holistic level of the machine's epistemological person views. 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
Re: Re: consciousness as the experiencre of time
On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 8:11:39 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Exactly. There may a problem with this, but its seems that if mind is everywhere (is inextended, so space is irrelevant), I am always part of the mind of God. So saying that- when I look out of my eyes, that is actually God looking out- which sounds of course weird. Or that there is only one perceiver, that being the Supreme Monad, is not illogical. I don't think that it sounds any weirder to say that then to say that when we look out of our eyes, we can see is the dust from the Big Bang. We are the totality-singularity (Supreme Monad or everythingness, etc) subdivided as reflected capacities to experience. The universe is nothing but a capacity to experience and to juxtapose that capacity with itself (which is what experience actually is). Craig Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net javascript: 9/5/2012 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:* 2012-09-04, 20:50:39 *Subject:* Re: consciousness as the experiencre of time That's what I'm saying. You can have ideal consciousness without space. On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 7:56:36 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg The experience of time is called consciousness, the simplest kind. Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net 9/4/2012 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:* 2012-09-04, 00:48:59 *Subject:* 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 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
Re: Re: Re: monads as numbers
On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 6:45:06 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg I obviously misunderstood your point. I still don't. If there's something in particular I can clarify, let me know and I'll try my best. Craig Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net javascript: 9/5/2012 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:* 2012-09-04, 14:58:37 *Subject:* Re: Re: monads as numbers Hi Roger, Not sure what you are getting at. We can't see any usefulness for eating chocolate until the bar is gone, but we still do it. On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 7:56:45 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg I can't see any usefulness for a computer or calculator where the same number is recalculated over and over. Think of a Turing tape running through a processor. Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net 9/4/2012 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:* 2012-09-03, 11:12:36 *Subject:* 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 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
Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
On 05 Sep 2012, at 14:45, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Jason Resch What you call a virtual world, Kant and Leibniz call the phenomenal world. Hmm.. You simplify too much. Virtual means simulated or emulated by a universal machine, and this is a 3p notion. The 1p is the phenomenal reality, and as such typically not emulable, as being statistically distributed on the whole universal dovetailling. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Jason Resch Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-04, 21:44:02 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 7:39 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 4:06:06 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: 牋� The point that I am making is that our brain seems to be continuously generating a virtual reality model of the world that includes our body and what we are conscious of is that model. I like this description of a brain: that of a dreaming / reality creating machine. What is it the brain creating this dream/reality out of? Non- reality? Intangible mathematical essences? You may be misinterpreting what I mean.� The reality is created in the sense of the experience of reality.� Each person on earth in some sense has their own conception of the world (reality) even though there is only one real planet.� I don't mean to suggest that the brain exists disembodied. � The problem with representational qualia is that in order to represent something, there has to be something there to begin with to represent. When we dream, we have experiences and qualia without the represented thing have any existence outside the mind.� Blind people can dream in color (if they had sight at some point in their lives).� Where does the color of red come from in a blind person's dream? � Why would the brain need to represent the data that it already has to itself in some fictional layer of abstraction? Why convert the quantitative data of the universe into made up qualities and then hide that conversion process from itself? � � Does a machine made up of gears, springs and levers do this? Could one made of diodes and transistors do it? Maybe... No one has shown me a cogent argument that they could not. They question isn't why they could, it is why they would. We will make these machines and transfer our minds on to them for the same reason we transfer our photographs off the digital camera that took them. � What possible function would be served by a cuckoo clock having an experience of being a flying turnip? We won't transfer our minds to cuckoo clocks (maybe you will to prove me wrong ;-) ) but to machines that are more resilient, efficient, faster, and more reliable. 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 . -- 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: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 6:38:07 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King No, the stuff in our skulls is alive, has intelligence, and a 1p. Computers don't and can't. Big sdifference. Hi Roger, 锟斤拷� Please leave magic out of this, as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magichttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws. The trouble is that the stuff in our skulls does not appear to be that much different from a bunch of diodes and transistors. 锟斤拷� Our brains obey the very same physical laws! What makes the brain special? I suspect that the brain uses quantum entanglement effects to both synchronize and update sense content in ways that cannot obtain from purely classical physical methods. Our mechanical machines lack the ability to report on their 1p content thus we are using their disability to argue against their possible abilities. A computer that could both generate an internal self-model and report on it would lead us to very different conclusions! I think you are both right. Computers qua computers don't feel anything because they aren't anything. The physical material that you are using to execute computations on does however have experiences - just not experiences that we associated with our own. There is a concrete experience associated with the production of these pixels on your screen - many experiences on many levels, of molecules that make up the wires etc., but those experiences don't seem to lead to anything we would consider significant. It's pretty straightforward to me. A stuffed animal that looks like a bear is not a bear. A picture of a person is not a person, even if it is a fancy interactive picture. 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/-/jQeAlMze5jAJ. 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: The morality of capitalism
Hi Richard Ruquist It is immoral to you, but the stockholders love it. And so do the consumers of the company's products. In my personal ethics, what is moral enhances life. the immoral diminishes life. If anything, as observed above, the company is creating wealth and so enhancing life. What is moral to you ? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 07:47:58 Subject: Re: The morality of capitalism Roger, That is exactly my point: if the USERS of wealth in directing the life of the country. export jobs overseas and hide their money there as well, they are immoral. Richard On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 7:40 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Richard Ruquist Capitalism is not a form of morality unless you consider expanding the wealth of an entire nation to be moral. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 16:23:46 Subject: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect What struck me is that the the USERS of wealth in directing the life of the country. seem to be exporting jobs overseas and hiding their money there as well. Richard On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 4:12 PM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: First to Bruno's response to (R):3) It's also probably why taxing the rich ultimately doesn''t work, it lowers every body'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. It is a 'trap' to falsify the adequate taxing of the 'rich' as a leftist attempt to distributing richness. It does not include more than a requirement for THEM to pay their FAIR share - maybe more than the not-so-rich layers (e.g. higher use of transportation, foreign connections, financial means, etc. - all costing money to the country) in spite of their lower share in the present unjust taxation-scheme. The rest of your reply is appreciable, however the 'crumbling' down may only follow a total disaster for the not-so-rich people. The said 'taxing' is not a 'trickle down' trick, it is providing the (missing) means to society to stay healthy and sane. (JM) Now to Brent's addendum: I agree - although Brent, too, has fallen into the trap of a misidentified problem-view: the equalization of wealth, a 200 year obsolete idea that cannot work for several reasons. Socialism (not to even mentioning communism) are never realized (realizable?) dreams of idealists (calling themselves materialists). Then again I would not identify 'the rich' as ...people who live comfortably solely on their investments... which may not be objectionable (ppensioners, etc.) but the USERS of wealth in directing the life of the country. Though they may do so, they should contribute from their share of fortune to the expenses. And PLEASE, Brent, do not even utter in econo-political discussion the word FAIRNESS! John M On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 3:29 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: 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
Re: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
Hi Bruno Marchal I've been defending cosmic intelligence (CI) or Cosmic Mind, of Life , not the christian God, not the whole shebang, the Trinity. But actually I think they're probably all the same. CI was there before the world was created-- for sure, else the world could not have been created. But since CI created time and space the argument is irrevant. And I don't know what God can think, that much is Christian. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 09:51:40 Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On 04 Sep 2012, at 18:42, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: God created the human race. And when God asks Himself the question Why have I always existed, why haven't I always not existed? what answer in his omniscience does He come up with? The neoplatonist conception of God does not allow It to ask such a question. Nor does Arithmetical Truth. God has no self-reference power at all, as this would make it inconsistent. Still defending the Christian God, aren't you? Bruno God is the uncreated infinite intelligence There was once a patent issued for a combination rat trap and potato peeler and people laugh about that, but using the exact same organ for both excretory and reproductive purposes does not seem very intelligent to me either, much less infinitely intelligent. And putting the blood vessels and nerves for the retina of the eye in front not in the back so the light must pass through them to get to the light sensitive cells also does not seem very smart; no engineer in his right mind would place the gears to move the film in a camera so that the light must pass through the gears before hitting the film. That's not the sort of thing you'd expect God to do, but it's exactly what you'd expect Evolution to do. 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. 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: Re: Sane2004 Step One
I don't think that life or mind or intelligence can be teleported. Especially since nobody knows what they are. I also don't believe that you can download the contents of somebody's brain. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 11:04:53 Subject: Re: Sane2004 Step One On 05 Sep 2012, at 06:14, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 7:19 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 06:48:58PM -0700, Craig Weinberg wrote: I have problems with all three of the comp assumptions: *yes, doctor*: This is really the sleight of hand that props up the entire thought experiment. If you agree that you are nothing but your brain function and that your brain function can be replaced by the functioning of non-brain devices, then you have already agreed that human individuality is a universal commodity. Calling it a sleight of hand is a bit rough. It is the meat of the comp assumption, and spelling it out this way makes it very explicit. Either you agree you can be copied (without feeling a thing), or you don't. If you do, you must face up to the consequences of the argument, if you don't, then you do not accept computationalism, and the consequences of the UDA do not apply to your worldview. I suppose I can be copied. But does it follow that I am just the computations in my brain. It seems likely that I also require an outside environment/world with which I interact in order to remain conscious. Bruno passes this off by saying it's just a matter of the level of substitution, perhaps your local environment or even the whole galaxy must be replaced by a digital representation in order to maintain your consciousness unchanged. But this bothers me. Suppose it is the whole galaxy, or the whole observed universe. Does it really mean anything then to say your brain has been replaced ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE? It's just the assertion that everything is computable. That's a good argument for saying that the level of substitution is not that low. But the reasoning would still go through, and we would lead to a unique computable universe. That is the only way to make a digital physics consistent (as I forget to say sometimes). Then you get a more complex other mind problem, and something like David Nyman- Hoyle beam would be needed, and would need to be separate from the physical reality, making the big physical whole incomplete, etc. yes this bothers me too. Needless to say, I tend to believe that if comp is true, the level is much higher. *Church thesis*: Views computation in isolation, irrespective of resources, supervenience on object-formed computing elements, etc. This is a theoretical theory of computation, completely divorced from realism from the start. What is it that does the computing? How and why does data enter or exit a computation? It is necessarily an abstract mathematical thesis. The latter two questions simply are relevant. *Arithmetical Realism*: The idea that truth values are self justifying independently of subjectivity or physics is literally a shot in the dark. Like yes, doctor, this is really swallowing the cow whole from the beginning and saying that the internal consistency of arithmetic constitutes universal supremacy without any real indication of that. AR is not just about internal consistency of mathematics, it is an ontological commitment about the natural numbers. Whatever primitive reality is, AR implies that the primitive reality models the natural numbers. ISTM that Bruno rejects any reality behind the natural numbers (or other system of computation). If often argues that the natural numbers exist, because they satisfy true propositions: There exists a prime number between 1 and 3, therefore 2 exists. This assumes a Platonist view of mathematical objects, which Peter D. Jones has argued against. ? I would say that the contrary is true. It is because natural numbers exists, and seems to obeys laws like addition and multiplication that true propositions can be made on them. 2 exists, and only 1 and 2 divides 2, so 2 is prime, and thus prime numbers exists. 2 itself exists just because Ex(x = s(s(0))) is true. Indeed take x = s(s(0)), and the proposition follows from s(s(0)) = s(s(0)). Bruno Brent In fact, for COMP, and the UDA, Turing completeness of primitive reality is sufficient, but Bruno chose the natural numbers as his base reality because it is more familiar to his correspondents. Wouldn't computers tend to be self-correcting by virtue of the pull toward arithmetic truth within each logic circuit? Where do errors come from? Again, these two questions seem irrelevant. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Re: The All
Hi Roger, On 05 Sep 2012, at 17:23, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal No, the supreme Monad can see everything even though the monads have no windows. Also the closeness to God issue depends on your clarity of vision and feeling. And perhaps appetites. So everybody's different. I agree. But my point was that everybody includes possibly machines, and that we are not supposed to dictate God which creatures he can look through. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 09:25:11 Subject: Re: The All On 04 Sep 2012, at 16:42, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal According to Leibniz there is only one live perceiver, and that he calls the Supreme Monad. Actually, not the monad itself, but what sees through the monad.Then when we see individually we must see through that one eye. I believe it's Plato's All, or in my terms, Jehovah. Indian philosophy has a similar idea except that one must merge one's consciousness with Brahma or whatever through meditation. No deep problem with this, except perhaps on vocabulary. But saying this kind of thing, and then adding that the supreme monad cannot see through a body which has undergone a digital transplant, is really like saying I am closer to God that this or that entity, and this seems to me to be a form of racism. Computer science and the antic definition of knowledge and 1p, attribute self and 1p to a vast class of machines. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/4/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 10:17:02 Subject: Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence On 03 Sep 2012, at 21:24, benjayk wrote: 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. But this confirms comp, as comp predicts that material system are not emulable, only simulable. Only digital being can be emulated, and comp assume that we are digital, unlike our bodies. Yes, we simulated some systems, but they couldn't perform the same function. A pump does the function of an heart. We also substituted some parts with non-living matter, but not with a mere computer. Comp does not say that we do that, nor even that we can do that. Only that it can be done in principle. And then another, much bigger step is required in order to say *everything*/everyone/every part can be emulated. Indeed. Comp makes this impossible, as the environment is the result of a comptetion between infinities of universal machine in arithmetic. See my other post to you sent yesterday. 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. Sure. Bruno 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
Re: Re: The morality of capitalism
It is immoral to cause a recession that puts many out of work and subsequently loss of home via foreclosure. Bank of America is actually giving away some of the homes they have foreclosed. On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Richard Ruquist It is immoral to you, but the stockholders love it. And so do the consumers of the company's products. In my personal ethics, what is moral enhances life. the immoral diminishes life. If anything, as observed above, the company is creating wealth and so enhancing life. What is moral to you ? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 07:47:58 Subject: Re: The morality of capitalism Roger, That is exactly my point: if the USERS of wealth in directing the life of the country. export jobs overseas and hide their money there as well, they are immoral. Richard On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 7:40 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Richard Ruquist Capitalism is not a form of morality unless you consider expanding the wealth of an entire nation to be moral. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-04, 16:23:46 Subject: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect What struck me is that the the USERS of wealth in directing the life of the country. seem to be exporting jobs overseas and hiding their money there as well. Richard On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 4:12 PM, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote: First to Bruno's response to (R):3) It's also probably why taxing the rich ultimately doesn''t work, it lowers every body'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. It is a 'trap' to falsify the adequate taxing of the 'rich' as a leftist attempt to distributing richness. It does not include more than a requirement for THEM to pay their FAIR share - maybe more than the not-so-rich layers (e.g. higher use of transportation, foreign connections, financial means, etc. - all costing money to the country) in spite of their lower share in the present unjust taxation-scheme. The rest of your reply is appreciable, however the 'crumbling' down may only follow a total disaster for the not-so-rich people. The said 'taxing' is not a 'trickle down' trick, it is providing the (missing) means to society to stay healthy and sane. (JM) Now to Brent's addendum: I agree - although Brent, too, has fallen into the trap of a misidentified problem-view: the equalization of wealth, a 200 year obsolete idea that cannot work for several reasons. Socialism (not to even mentioning communism) are never realized (realizable?) dreams of idealists (calling themselves materialists). Then again I would not identify 'the rich' as ...people who live comfortably solely on their investments... which may not be objectionable (ppensioners, etc.) but the USERS of wealth in directing the life of the country. Though they may do so, they should contribute from their share of fortune to the expenses. And PLEASE, Brent, do not even utter in econo-political discussion the word FAIRNESS! John M On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 3:29 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: 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
Re: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
Hi Bruno Marchal Perhaps wrongly, I think of the world of monads as the virtual world. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 11:42:39 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On 05 Sep 2012, at 14:45, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Jason Resch What you call a virtual world, Kant and Leibniz call the phenomenal world. Hmm.. You simplify too much. Virtual means simulated or emulated by a universal machine, and this is a 3p notion. The 1p is the phenomenal reality, and as such typically not emulable, as being statistically distributed on the whole universal dovetailling. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Jason Resch Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-04, 21:44:02 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 7:39 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 4:06:06 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: ? The point that I am making is that our brain seems to be continuously generating a virtual reality model of the world that includes our body and what we are conscious of is that model. I like this description of a brain: that of a dreaming / reality creating machine. What is it the brain creating this dream/reality out of? Non-reality? Intangible mathematical essences? You may be misinterpreting what I mean. The reality is created in the sense of the experience of reality. Each person on earth in some sense has their own conception of the world (reality) even though there is only one real planet. I don't mean to suggest that the brain exists disembodied. The problem with representational qualia is that in order to represent something, there has to be something there to begin with to represent. When we dream, we have experiences and qualia without the represented thing have any existence outside the mind. Blind people can dream in color (if they had sight at some point in their lives). Where does the color of red come from in a blind person's dream? Why would the brain need to represent the data that it already has to itself in some fictional layer of abstraction? Why convert the quantitative data of the universe into made up qualities and then hide that conversion process from itself? Does a machine made up of gears, springs and levers do this? Could one made of diodes and transistors do it? Maybe... No one has shown me a cogent argument that they could not. They question isn't why they could, it is why they would. We will make these machines and transfer our minds on to them for the same reason we transfer our photographs off the digital camera that took them. What possible function would be served by a cuckoo clock having an experience of being a flying turnip? We won't transfer our minds to cuckoo clocks (maybe you will to prove me wrong ;-) ) but to machines that are more resilient, efficient, faster, and more reliable. 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. -- 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: Re: Re: Sane2004 Step One
Hi Craig Weinberg Insist. Interesting idea. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 11:07:00 Subject: Re: Re: Sane2004 Step One On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 8:43:35 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg I don't like the word existence as it carries so much baggage with it. What you describe below is physical existence. That is a property of extended entities. I agree, existence means different things in different contexts. Inextended entities such as mind and 1p and thouights and feelings would be mentally existent. I try to avoid that confusion by using the word 'insist' and 'insistence' instead of exist when I am talking about the private half of the cosmos. 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/-/rvrZdJNK-JQJ. 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.
The two tribes
Hi Craig Weinberg In politics there are thus two tribes (always have been, always will be: a) Lord of the Flies is basically the conservative view put forth by Hobbes (and Paul). At root we are savages. b) Welfare is essentially the leftist view put forth by Rousseau. At root we are saints. I believe these have to do with the two halves of the brain. The tribes do not trust the other tribe and will not communicate very well if at all. Hatred and warfare are just below the surface. Since identifying with a tribe of some sort is how people define who they are, violating the tribal laws above would threaten your identiy and thus would be a capital crime. Somehow some of us have switched tribes. I used to be a liberal. After learning about the two tribes from many fruitless political scrabbles, I tend these days (but not always) to not join in political debates. I will still vote republican in november however. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 11:31:26 Subject: Re: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 8:18:44 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Lord of the Flies is basically the conservative view put forth by Hobbes (and Paul). At root we are criminals. Welfare is essentially the leftist view put forth by Rousseau. At root we are saints. I think that most people are neither criminals nor saints. This quote I think sums up my view of economics: Money is like manure. If you spread it around it does a lot of good. But if you pile it up in one place it stinks like hell. Craig Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 00:40:00 Subject: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 11:14:17 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/4/2012 9:07 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 8:49:45 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/4/2012 4:23 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote: What struck me is that the the USERS of wealth in directing the life of the country. seem to be exporting jobs overseas and hiding their money there as well. Richard OK, let us confiscate all capital and distribute it evenly to every one. Then what? then we have democracy? No, because people always congregate into groups, it is their nature. And from there it is Lord of the Flies all over. It has happened many times before. Why do we never learn? I think that's why Jefferson was keen on periodic revolutions. If inequality is inevitable though, it makes sense to mediate that tendency to some extent if we can, rather than giving carte blanche to the winning savages. It's like saying we should learn that there is always crime so why bother with police. Isn't civilization based upon the effort to tame our innate tendencies toward self interest? Or at least to agree to conspire against the barbarians outside of the walls. wouldn't even need to confiscate all capital, and I don't think that anyone is suggesting that. Just make hoarding wealth more expensive. Sure! A tax credit for investing. Oh way, that already exists! It is why the investment tax is so low as it is! Investing in guaranteed payouts is what makes hoarding of wealth possible. Why would we want to give tax breaks for the wealthy to find ways of taking more money out of the economy faster? At the plutocrat level, you should be rewarded only for investing in non-profit enterprises that lose money. Being able to invest huge amounts of money, especially unearned money from a dynastic fortune, is a privilege that should be taxed, not rewarded. Maybe follow the Scandinavian model on a trial basis for 20 years in a handful of cities. Scandinavia is a bad place to build a model because it has a homogeneous population. Such populations behave, on average, very different from highly diverse populations. Segregation into polarized groups happens much slower in homogenous populations. You might check out the meme flow in such conditions, its amazing. If by homogeneous you mean financially homogeneous, then a plan which tilts the economy in favor of the middle class should by definition make any place into a more homogeneous society - in which case the Scandinavian model would be expected to perform as it does for them now. If you are talking about anything else, then I suspect it's just a coded racism. This country was built in large part by slaves. We exploit poor migrant workers. There may not be a choice ultimately for us but to choose whether to become slaves
Reality
Leibniz, my mentor, believed that reality (being mental) consists of an infinite collection of (inextended) mathematical points called monads. These can never be created or destroyed. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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 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: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
Hi Craig Weinberg Leibniz's universe is completely alive, as was Whitehead's. Whitehead in particular spoke of events (as I recall) as occasions of experience. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 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: 2012-09-05, 11:50:33 Subject: Re: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 6:38:07 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Stephen P. King No, the stuff in our skulls is alive, has intelligence, and a 1p. Computers don't and can't. Big sdifference. Hi Roger, ??? Please leave magic out of this, as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The trouble is that the stuff in our skulls does not appear to be that much different from a bunch of diodes and transistors. ??? Our brains obey the very same physical laws! What makes the brain special? I suspect that the brain uses quantum entanglement effects to both synchronize and update sense content in ways that cannot obtain from purely classical physical methods. Our mechanical machines lack the ability to report on their 1p content thus we are using their disability to argue against their possible abilities. A computer that could both generate an internal self-model and report on it would lead us to very different conclusions! I think you are both right. Computers qua computers don't feel anything because they aren't anything. The physical material that you are using to execute computations on does however have experiences - just not experiences that we associated with our own. There is a concrete experience associated with the production of these pixels on your screen - many experiences on many levels, of molecules that make up the wires etc., but those experiences don't seem to lead to anything we would consider significant. It's pretty straightforward to me. A stuffed animal that looks like a bear is not a bear. A picture of a person is not a person, even if it is a fancy interactive picture. 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/-/jQeAlMze5jAJ. 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: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer
Hi Jason Resch virtual reality model Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Jason Resch Receiver: everything-list@googlegroups.com Time: 2012-09-05, 10:27:22 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On Sep 5, 2012, at 7:45 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Jason Resch What you call a virtual world, Kant and Leibniz call the phenomenal world. Where did I use the term virtual world? Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/5/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Jason Resch Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-04, 21:44:02 Subject: Re: Why a bacterium has more intelligence than a computer On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 7:39 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Tuesday, September 4, 2012 4:06:06 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: ? The point that I am making is that our brain seems to be continuously generating a virtual reality model of the world that includes our body and what we are conscious of is that model. I like this description of a brain: that of a dreaming / reality creating machine. What is it the brain creating this dream/reality out of? Non-reality? Intangible mathematical essences? You may be misinterpreting what I mean. The reality is created in the sense of the experience of reality. Each person on earth in some sense has their own conception of the world (reality) even though there is only one real planet. I don't mean to suggest that the brain exists disembodied. The problem with representational qualia is that in order to represent something, there has to be something there to begin with to represent. When we dream, we have experiences and qualia without the represented thing have any existence outside the mind. Blind people can dream in color (if they had sight at some point in their lives). Where does the color of red come from in a blind person's dream? Why would the brain need to represent the data that it already has to itself in some fictional layer of abstraction? Why convert the quantitative data of the universe into made up qualities and then hide that conversion process from itself? Does a machine made up of gears, springs and levers do this? Could one made of diodes and transistors do it? Maybe... No one has shown me a cogent argument that they could not. They question isn't why they could, it is why they would. We will make these machines and transfer our minds on to them for the same reason we transfer our photographs off the digital camera that took them. What possible function would be served by a cuckoo clock having an experience of being a flying turnip? We won't transfer our minds to cuckoo clocks (maybe you will to prove me wrong ;-) ) but to machines that are more resilient, efficient, faster, and more reliable. 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. -- 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 Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 2:37 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Let's see, average survival of a Las Vegas hotel is what, 30 years? Then they blow them up. Yes, after that time a Las Vegas hotel no longer serves a function. The Egyptian pyramids are quite different in that respect, they NEVER had a function. The pyramids of Egypt have been a wonder of the world for 45 centuries, The pyramids of Egypt have been monuments to human folly for 45 centuries. The first large engineering projects that actually had a point were made 2 thousand years later by the Romans with their aqueducts and roads; before that it was all tombs temples palaces and fixed fortifications that didn't work very well. attracting tourism I'm sure the common people of Egypt who broke their backs building the damn things would be happy if they knew that in 4500 years their efforts would be vindicated by those big stone tetrahedrons becoming tourist traps that can compete with alligator farms, Dollywood and Graceland. and representing one of the most ostentatious achievements of the history of the human species. Ostentatious is a very good word to describe it. It doesn't mean that Donald Trump knows how to build a pyramid Donald Trump is a pompous idiot, but modern engineers certainly know how to build a big dumb stone tetrahedron, but they can't think of a good reason for doing so and neither can I. We are talking about defining cause and effect, not Relativity or QM. If you don't know anything about Relativity or QM then anything you have to say about cause and effect or physics in general is just pointless philosophical gas. Philosophical ideas are a dime a dozen, philosophical ideas that have some correspondence to the way the universe operates are astronomically less common and more difficult to come up with. Somebody 300 years ago farted out some philosophy and you think today the physicists at CERN would benefit if they took note of the smell. I think not. Have a look at these estimates of the IQ of historical figures ( http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/cox300.aspx) Note: Goethe: 210. Leibniz: 205...down much farther...Darwin: 165 Actually Leibniz got a 183 not 205 in this very dubious 1926 study if you correct for the Flynn effect, the fact that IQ scores keep going up and up over the years. However that's not very important because IQ scores much higher than 130 tend not to mean much, probably because the people who make IQ tests, including Catharine Cox who did the study of the IQ of historical figures, tend to have IQ's a lot less than 130. When the great physicist Richard Feynman was in high school he had an IQ test and all he got was a mediocre 125. The best definition of intelligence that I can think of is the sort of thing that Richard Feynman did therefore it is not Feynman but the advocates of the test who should feel embarrassed by this. Meanwhile I seem to remember reading that one of the highest ranked Mensa members of all time with an IQ north of 200 worked as a bouncer in a bar. I would find it mind boggling astounding if intelligence, the most complex thing in the universe, could be described by a simple scalar. At the very least I think you'd need a vector, something with both a magnitude and a direction, and you'd probably need more than that, at least a tensor of somewhat less than trivial intricacy. Had Leibniz been born in the 20th century, he would, by these estimates, have run circles around any living physicist. So you think that Leibniz had more genius genes that any living physicist, I think that most unlikely. There are about 10 times as many people on earth today as their were in Leibniz's day and there must be at least a 1000 times as many people with access to enough education to have even the option of becoming physicists. You really imagine that you happened to be born during the generation where all of the current science happens to be correct? I imagine that all established scientific theories are closer to the truth than the theories that preceded them. That's the difference between art and science, I don't imagine that all current novels are better than older novels. Leibniz and Newton invented calculus. You act as if they were bumbling rhetoricians No, considering where they started from they did amazing and brilliant things, but the starting point has changed and the fact remains that any sophomore math student knows more calculus than Leibniz and Newton put together. 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: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers
On 9/5/2012 9:37 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 04 Sep 2012, at 17:48, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/4/2012 10:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Aug 2012, at 12:04, benjayk wrote: 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. Yes. Hi Bruno, So do you agree that the 3-p point of view is just an abstraction (a simulation even!) of a 1-p? This would make the 1p fundamental. This would make vain the search for explanation of mind, so this does not satisfy me. Dear Bruno, In the context of a theoretical framework it does, but that is not a contradiction of my claim. We are talking about representations of 1p not the content of the 1p itself. There are situations when the map is not the territory... With comp mind is the result of the working of a universal number relatively to infinities of other universal number, so we need to start from the numbers (or anything Turing-equivalent). But you are assuming that numbers can do the work. I beg to differ! Number can represent anything but can they do work? No, they do not do anything at all. There is no action in numbers. To represent action we need at least functions to map some object to some other different object. So the 3p can be abstract, but it is not part of the mind, like 1+1=2 remains true in absence of any thinker. But does the Truth value have any meaning in a world where it cannot be known in any way? I can only make sense of your claim here if I stipulate that you think that the truth of a statement is a proxy for the content of the statement; such that if the statement is true then it does not matter at all what the sentence is. I still do not grasp how you go from claim that necessitate instantiations of properties such as the particular property of the sentence 1+1=2 to the truth of the intention of the sentence. How is the sentence #8$% not equally true in the absence of any thinker and have the same meaning as 1+1=2? What is making the difference? You seem to be assuming that there is something above that some how can see the truth of 1+1=2 and know that it is a true sentence and that it is completely immaterial and not a thinker. Plato was a bit more circumspect about assuming such things, I hope! It seems to me that this would similar to having a model S that is part of a theory T such that T would change its beliefs as X - X' changes, all while preserving the Bpp term, p would be a variable of or in X, X', ... . A model cannot be a part of a theory. I guess you mean a theory which is part of the theory, and then I mainly agree with your sentence. Does not a true theory require that a model of it exist? Model-less theories? Are they even possible? We can build theories which are part of themselves, like we can make machine which can access any part of their 3p description, by using the Dx=xx method (or Kleene second recursion theorem). Sure, but that is a separate issue. The 3p description of a machine is, in your sentence here, taken from the intentional stance (or point of view) of another entity (that is not the machine in question), so that makes it bisimilar to the 1p of a separate entity. Where is the contradiction to my claim? -- 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: God has no self-reference power at all
On 9/5/2012 9:51 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: The neoplatonist conception of God does not allow It to ask such a question. Nor does Arithmetical Truth. God has no self-reference power at all, as this would make it inconsistent. Dear Bruno, Might it be agreeable to you to stipulate the possibility that God (as you are defining it) does indeed have self-referential powers and the inconsistency that this generates is not a problem but a solution to the body problem? Hitoshi Kitada's work shows exactly how we can recover a notion of action from the inconsistency at infinity. The key is to never allow the inconsistency pollute the local logic. We see good examples of this in the concept of omega-inconsistent theories. -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 11:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Sep 2012, at 06:48, Stephen P. King wrote: On 9/5/2012 12:14 AM, meekerdb wrote: On 9/4/2012 7:19 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 06:48:58PM -0700, Craig Weinberg wrote: I have problems with all three of the comp assumptions: *yes, doctor*: This is really the sleight of hand that props up the entire thought experiment. If you agree that you are nothing but your brain function and that your brain function can be replaced by the functioning of non-brain devices, then you have already agreed that human individuality is a universal commodity. Calling it a sleight of hand is a bit rough. It is the meat of the comp assumption, and spelling it out this way makes it very explicit. Either you agree you can be copied (without feeling a thing), or you don't. If you do, you must face up to the consequences of the argument, if you don't, then you do not accept computationalism, and the consequences of the UDA do not apply to your worldview. I suppose I can be copied. But does it follow that I am just the computations in my brain. It seems likely that I also require an outside environment/world with which I interact in order to remain conscious. Bruno passes this off by saying it's just a matter of the level of substitution, perhaps your local environment or even the whole galaxy must be replaced by a digital representation in order to maintain your consciousness unchanged. But this bothers me. Suppose it is the whole galaxy, or the whole observed universe. Does it really mean anything then to say your brain has been replaced ALONG WITH EVERYTHING ELSE? It's just the assertion that everything is computable. Hear Hear! And if it is computable then it is nothing but countable and recursively enumerable functions. But can functions generate I/O from themselves? You lost me. Functions are set of I/O. Input/Output is interfacing, it is at least a second-order function. More on this soon. We see nice examples of entire computable universes in MMORP games that have many people addicted to them. One thing about them, we require resources to be run. Nothing happens if you don't pay the fee. *Church thesis*: Views computation in isolation, irrespective of resources, supervenience on object-formed computing elements, etc. This is a theoretical theory of computation, completely divorced from realism from the start. What is it that does the computing? How and why does data enter or exit a computation? It is necessarily an abstract mathematical thesis. The latter two questions simply are relevant. *Arithmetical Realism*: The idea that truth values are self justifying independently of subjectivity or physics is literally a shot in the dark. Like yes, doctor, this is really swallowing the cow whole from the beginning and saying that the internal consistency of arithmetic constitutes universal supremacy without any real indication of that. AR is not just about internal consistency of mathematics, it is an ontological commitment about the natural numbers. Whatever primitive reality is, AR implies that the primitive reality models the natural numbers. ISTM that Bruno rejects any reality behind the natural numbers (or other system of computation). If often argues that the natural numbers exist, because they satisfy true propositions: There exists a prime number between 1 and 3, therefore 2 exists. This assumes a Platonist view of mathematical objects, which Peter D. Jones has argued against. Platonism fails because it cannot explain how many minds interact. It is a wonderful ontology theory of a single mind, but not of many differing minds. I don't see this at all. many minds comes from the fact that universal machine can interact. With what? Itself? That the easy thing to explain, seen also by Schmidhuber and Tegmark, but as Deustch argued, this explains to much. Yet Deustch critics either assumes non comp, or is inconsistent, as comp implies the realities used by Schmidhuber and Tegmark. What the three of them ignores is that this entails also the first person indeterminacy, and this makes the idea of interaction or physics entirely and necessarily retrievable from self-reference, and this works well until now. Then we have the Solovay gift, the splitting between provable and true-but-non-provable, whose intensional variants explains completely the quanta/qualia divergence. Deutsch. Tegmark and Schmidhuber do not explicitly consider the interaction question and so miss the point. They seem to just assume the equivalent to 1p indeterminacy via local individuation. You keep saying that interaction is not explained by comp, but this makes no sense, as a computation, even in arithmetic, is only a matter of local interactions. How is locality explained by COMP? Locality induces the ability to distinguish what is otherwise indistinguishable. If
Re: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 5:17 AM, Craig wrote: The test that I would use would be, as I have mentioned, to have someone be walked off of their brain one hemisphere at a time, and then walked back on. Ideally this process would be repeated several times for different durations. That is the only test that could possibly work as far as I can tell - of course it wouldn't prove success or failure beyond any theoretical doubt, but it would be a pretty good indicator. How would that work? The person would always respond to questions, like, Do you feel any different? in exactly the same way. How would you tell whether they really felt the same or just said they did? 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 8:37 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: Put in another way: there is no ontological hardware. The hardware and wetware are emergent on the digital basic ontology (which can be described by numbers or combinators as they describe the same computations and the same object: you can prove the existence of combinators in arithmetic, I don't think I understand that remark. Doesn't arithmetic *assume* combinators, i.e. + and * ? Brent and you can prove the existence of numbers from the combinator S and K. So the basic ontology is really the same and we can know it (betting on comp). It is really like the choice of a base in a linear space. -- 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 9/5/2012 1:40 PM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Leibniz's universe is completely alive, as was Whitehead's. Whitehead in particular spoke of events (as I recall) as occasions of experience. Hi Roger, A.N.Whitehead's idea is similar to a version of Craig's sense idea made in a discrete or piece-wise sense. In Craig's model, if I understand it correctly, sense flows continuously. -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 11:37 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Sep 2012, at 14:01, Russell Standish wrote: For certain choices of this or that, the ultimate reality is actually unknowable. For instance, the choice of a Turing complete basis means that the hardware running the computations is completely unknowable to the denizens of that computation. Not really. With comp we know that the *physical* bottom is the result of the competition among all universal machines, (by UD-7 or 8) and this leads to (re)define physics by such a competition/measure on all computations. The initial base ontology is really irrelevant, and it makes no sense to choose one or another, except for technical commodities. Dear Bruno, I am trying hard to be sure that I understand your ideas here. Could you specify the cardinality of all universal machines? How many of them possibly exist? Put in another way: there is no ontological hardware. The hardware and wetware are emergent on the digital basic ontology (which can be described by numbers or combinators as they describe the same computations and the same object: you can prove the existence of combinators in arithmetic, and you can prove the existence of numbers from the combinator S and K. So the basic ontology is really the same and we can know it (betting on comp). It is really like the choice of a base in a linear space. So is there or is there not something that corresponds to resources (such as memory) for the Universal machines in your thought? -- 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.
maudlin's paper
Hi Folks, I started reading the new Maudlin paper Time and the Geometry of the Universe. I got it and started reading. I stopped dead when I read the following: Empirical considerations cannot establish the existence of such point events, but the geometrical tools discussed herein presuppose them. It would be pleasant to construct mathematical tools of geometrical analysis that do not rest on this presupposition, but that is work for another time. So what is the point of this paper? The author explicitly jettisons empirical considerations. How is there any hope for falsification of anything in it? I will continue reading but I am sad. :_( AH! Maybe this remark only applies to the discussion of Newtonian Time -- 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: maudlin's paper
I think he was just saying that point events do not exist. On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 6:23 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi Folks, I started reading the new Maudlin paper Time and the Geometry of the Universe. I got it and started reading. I stopped dead when I read the following: Empirical considerations cannot establish the existence of such point events, but the geometrical tools discussed herein presuppose them. It would be pleasant to construct mathematical tools of geometrical analysis that do not rest on this presupposition, but that is work for another time. So what is the point of this paper? The author explicitly jettisons empirical considerations. How is there any hope for falsification of anything in it? I will continue reading but I am sad. :_( AH! Maybe this remark only applies to the discussion of Newtonian Time -- 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: maudlin's paper
On 9/5/2012 6:52 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote: I think he was just saying that point events do not exist. So why discuss them? On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 6:23 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: Hi Folks, I started reading the new Maudlin paper Time and the Geometry of the Universe. I got it and started reading. I stopped dead when I read the following: Empirical considerations cannot establish the existence of such point events, but the geometrical tools discussed herein presuppose them. It would be pleasant to construct mathematical tools of geometrical analysis that do not rest on this presupposition, but that is work for another time. So what is the point of this paper? The author explicitly jettisons empirical considerations. How is there any hope for falsification of anything in it? I will continue reading but I am sad. :_( AH! Maybe this remark only applies to the discussion of Newtonian Time -- 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. -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 1:04 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: The ability to test depends entirely on my familiarity with the human and how good the technology is. Can I touch them, smell them? If so, then I would be surprised if I could be fooled by an inorganic body. Has there ever been one synthetic imitation of a natural biological product that can withstand even moderate examination? If you limit the channel of my interaction with the robot however, I stand much less of a chance of being able to tell the difference. A video conference with the robot only requires that they look convincing on camera. We can't tell the difference between a live performance and a taped performance unless there is some clue in the content. That is because we aren't literally present so we are only dealing with a narrow channel of sense experience to begin with. In any case, what does being able to tell from the outside have to do with whether or not the thing feels? If it is designed by experts to fool other people into thinking that it is alive, then so what if it succeeds at fooling everyone? Something can't fool itself into thinking that it is alive. A film is nor a good example because you can't interact with it. The point is that if it is possible to make a robot that fools everyone then this is ipso facto a philosophical zombie. It doesn't feel but it pretends to feel. A corollary of this is that a philosophical zombie could display all the behaviour of a living being. So how can you be sure that living beings other than you are not zombies? Also, what is the evolutionary utility of consciousness if the same results could have in principle been obtained without it? -- 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.
Re: maudlin's paper
On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 06:23:57PM -0400, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi Folks, I started reading the new Maudlin paper Time and the Geometry of the Universe. I got it and started reading. I stopped dead when I read the following: Empirical considerations cannot establish the existence of such point events, but the geometrical tools discussed herein presuppose them. It would be pleasant to construct mathematical tools of geometrical analysis that do not rest on this presupposition, but that is work for another time. So what is the point of this paper? The author explicitly jettisons empirical considerations. How is there any hope for falsification of anything in it? I will continue reading but I am sad. :_( AH! Maybe this remark only applies to the discussion of Newtonian Time Contrary to Richard's comment, I think he is saying there currently is not the technology to experimentally test the theory. As such, it is in good company. Most string theory is like that. As to whether the paper is worth reading, that is a personal taste. So long as it is possible to test experimentally, or provides a satisfactory explanation (ie non-instrumental) for existing phenomena that does not have that, it is not a waste of time. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 05:37:18PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 05 Sep 2012, at 14:01, Russell Standish wrote: For certain choices of this or that, the ultimate reality is actually unknowable. For instance, the choice of a Turing complete basis means that the hardware running the computations is completely unknowable to the denizens of that computation. Not really. With comp we know that the *physical* bottom is the result of the competition among all universal machines, (by UD-7 or 8) and this leads to (re)define physics by such a competition/measure on all computations. The initial base ontology is really irrelevant, and it makes no sense to choose one or another, except for technical commodities. Put in another way: there is no ontological hardware. The hardware and wetware are emergent on the digital basic ontology (which can be described by numbers or combinators as they describe the same computations and the same object: you can prove the existence of combinators in arithmetic, and you can prove the existence of numbers from the combinator S and K. So the basic ontology is really the same and we can know it (betting on comp). It is really like the choice of a base in a linear space. Bruno We're in perfect agreement here, actually, just expressing it differently! -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 3:13:05 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 9/5/2012 5:17 AM, Craig wrote: The test that I would use would be, as I have mentioned, to have someone be walked off of their brain one hemisphere at a time, and then walked back on. Ideally this process would be repeated several times for different durations. That is the only test that could possibly work as far as I can tell - of course it wouldn't prove success or failure beyond any theoretical doubt, but it would be a pretty good indicator. How would that work? The person would always respond to questions, like, Do you feel any different? in exactly the same way. How would you tell whether they really felt the same or just said they did? It would work because the person responding to the questions would be you. You would know what the experience of surviving the brain transfer was like. That is how you can tell whether you really felt the same is by actually feeling the same. 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/-/VtFe7kfeGMQJ. 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: Sane2004 Step One
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 3:13:05 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 9/5/2012 5:17 AM, Craig wrote: The test that I would use would be, as I have mentioned, to have someone be walked off of their brain one hemisphere at a time, and then walked back on. Ideally this process would be repeated several times for different durations. That is the only test that could possibly work as far as I can tell - of course it wouldn't prove success or failure beyond any theoretical doubt, but it would be a pretty good indicator. How would that work? The person would always respond to questions, like, Do you feel any different? in exactly the same way. How would you tell whether they really felt the same or just said they did? It would work because the person responding to the questions would be you. You would know what the experience of surviving the brain transfer was like. That is how you can tell whether you really felt the same is by actually feeling the same. But you couldn't realise you felt different if the part of your brain responsible for realising were receiving exactly the same inputs from the rest of the brain. So you could feel different, or feel nothing, but maintain the delusional belief that nothing had changed. -- 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.
Re: maudlin's paper
On 9/5/2012 9:18 PM, Russell Standish wrote: On Wed, Sep 05, 2012 at 06:23:57PM -0400, Stephen P. King wrote: Hi Folks, I started reading the new Maudlin paper Time and the Geometry of the Universe. I got it and started reading. I stopped dead when I read the following: Empirical considerations cannot establish the existence of such point events, but the geometrical tools discussed herein presuppose them. It would be pleasant to construct mathematical tools of geometrical analysis that do not rest on this presupposition, but that is work for another time. So what is the point of this paper? The author explicitly jettisons empirical considerations. How is there any hope for falsification of anything in it? I will continue reading but I am sad. :_( AH! Maybe this remark only applies to the discussion of Newtonian Time Contrary to Richard's comment, I think he is saying there currently is not the technology to experimentally test the theory. As such, it is in good company. Most string theory is like that. As to whether the paper is worth reading, that is a personal taste. So long as it is possible to test experimentally, or provides a satisfactory explanation (ie non-instrumental) for existing phenomena that does not have that, it is not a waste of time. Hi Russel, I agree with your comment. -- 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: Digest for everything-list@googlegroups.com - 25 Messages in 6 Topics
Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net Sep 05 07:06PM -0400 On 9/5/2012 6:52 PM, Richard Ruquist wrote: I think he was just saying that point events do not exist. So why discuss them? Yes, what's the point? :-) -- 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: Sane2004 Step One
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:32 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I agree with all you say, except the implication of the last sentence: that evolution would never produce results with some inessential side effect. First, evolution has to produce things by evolving - not starting from a clean sheet. In the case of consciousness I think it quite likely that this happened. Conscious thinking is similar to talking-to-yourself because evolution happened to take advantage of auditory processing of language to internalize symbolic cogitation. Second, even though the same result might be obtained in some other way, it might be less efficient in some sense to do so. We might conceivably make a human-acting robot that cogitated using a computer separate from the one used for processing language and while I think it would be conscious, it would be conscious in a different way. The most plausible explanation is that consciousness is a necessary side-effect of the type of information processing that goes at its simplest stimulus-response-behaviour modification. -- 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.
Re: Sane2004 Step One
On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 9:21:34 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 3:13:05 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 9/5/2012 5:17 AM, Craig wrote: The test that I would use would be, as I have mentioned, to have someone be walked off of their brain one hemisphere at a time, and then walked back on. Ideally this process would be repeated several times for different durations. That is the only test that could possibly work as far as I can tell - of course it wouldn't prove success or failure beyond any theoretical doubt, but it would be a pretty good indicator. How would that work? The person would always respond to questions, like, Do you feel any different? in exactly the same way. How would you tell whether they really felt the same or just said they did? It would work because the person responding to the questions would be you. You would know what the experience of surviving the brain transfer was like. That is how you can tell whether you really felt the same is by actually feeling the same. But you couldn't realise you felt different if the part of your brain responsible for realising were receiving exactly the same inputs from the rest of the brain. So you could feel different, or feel nothing, but maintain the delusional belief that nothing had changed. That's begging the question. You are assuming that the brain is a machine which produces consciousness. I think that the brain is the three dimensional shadow of many levels of experience and it produces nothing but neurochemistry and alterations in our ability to access an individual set of human experiences. The brain does not produce consciousness, it defines the form of many conscious relations. If you have one hemisphere of your brain downloaded into a computer, and then live in the computer for a while and then upload it back into your brain - if that were feasible then you would theoretically retain some of the memory of your experience. You could then judge whether you remember it as being unpleasant or different in some way, or if it was like Spock's brain and you suddenly became a large facility without it really being an issue. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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/-/e2o77ucwaaMJ. 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: Sane2004 Step One
On Wednesday, September 5, 2012 11:26:43 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:32 AM, meekerdb meek...@verizon.netjavascript: wrote: I agree with all you say, except the implication of the last sentence: that evolution would never produce results with some inessential side effect. First, evolution has to produce things by evolving - not starting from a clean sheet. In the case of consciousness I think it quite likely that this happened. Conscious thinking is similar to talking-to-yourself because evolution happened to take advantage of auditory processing of language to internalize symbolic cogitation. Second, even though the same result might be obtained in some other way, it might be less efficient in some sense to do so. We might conceivably make a human-acting robot that cogitated using a computer separate from the one used for processing language and while I think it would be conscious, it would be conscious in a different way. The most plausible explanation is that consciousness is a necessary side-effect of the type of information processing that goes at its simplest stimulus-response-behaviour modification. I find that the least plausible explanation. It means that if a billion people talk to each other and give each other information, that some kind of consciousness must necessarily arise as a side-effect. You could say that it might arise, but the idea that such a side effect is somehow necessary as to accomplish certain kinds of information processing is laughably romantic to my mind. If I recruit people to recruit people to all do math together, then a magical genie will appear. Necessarily. Because of behavior modification. Mm. Yeah. No ghost in the machine, but machine that runs on ghost power...because...why? Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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/-/g28MxofJyqQJ. 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: Sane2004 Step One
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: But you couldn't realise you felt different if the part of your brain responsible for realising were receiving exactly the same inputs from the rest of the brain. So you could feel different, or feel nothing, but maintain the delusional belief that nothing had changed. That's begging the question. You are assuming that the brain is a machine which produces consciousness. I think that the brain is the three dimensional shadow of many levels of experience and it produces nothing but neurochemistry and alterations in our ability to access an individual set of human experiences. The brain does not produce consciousness, it defines the form of many conscious relations. But you believe that the neurochemicals do things contrary to what chemists would predict, for example an ion channel opening or closing without any cause such as a change in transmembrane potential or ligand concentration. We've talked about this before and it just isn't consistent with any scientific evidence. You interpret the existence spontaneous neural activity as meaning that something magical like this happens, but it doesn't mean that at all. -- 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.
Re: Sane2004 Step One
On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: I find that the least plausible explanation. It means that if a billion people talk to each other and give each other information, that some kind of consciousness must necessarily arise as a side-effect. You could say that it might arise, but the idea that such a side effect is somehow necessary as to accomplish certain kinds of information processing is laughably romantic to my mind. If I recruit people to recruit people to all do math together, then a magical genie will appear. Necessarily. Because of behavior modification. Mm. Yeah. No ghost in the machine, but machine that runs on ghost power...because...why? No, it doesn't mean that at all. If the billion people interact so as to mimic the behaviour of the neurons in a brain, resulting in the ability to (for example) converse in natural language, then the idea is that the billion-person brain would have consciousness. This consciousness would have nothing to do with the consciousness of the billion people producing it; I don't know what my neurons are doing and my neurons individually certainly don't know what I am doing. -- 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.
Re: Sane2004 Step One
On Thursday, September 6, 2012 1:32:21 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: I find that the least plausible explanation. It means that if a billion people talk to each other and give each other information, that some kind of consciousness must necessarily arise as a side-effect. You could say that it might arise, but the idea that such a side effect is somehow necessary as to accomplish certain kinds of information processing is laughably romantic to my mind. If I recruit people to recruit people to all do math together, then a magical genie will appear. Necessarily. Because of behavior modification. Mm. Yeah. No ghost in the machine, but machine that runs on ghost power...because...why? No, it doesn't mean that at all. If the billion people interact so as to mimic the behaviour of the neurons in a brain, resulting in the ability to (for example) converse in natural language, then the idea is that the billion-person brain would have consciousness. This consciousness would have nothing to do with the consciousness of the billion people producing it; I don't know what my neurons are doing and my neurons individually certainly don't know what I am doing. You are confirming what I have said. You are saying that a billion people doing the appropriate computations on paper with pencils and erasers and telephones to talk to each other would create a magical personality that nobody would know about but nonetheless would be born into the universe as a thinking, feeling, eating, crapping being. This being is literally made out of nothing at all except the fact of these computations taking place somewhere...but where? You say not in the consciousness of the brains of the people, so where? In the lead of the pencils on paper? In the signals of the telephone calls? Why is this new being local to this process? How is it attached to the computation-ness? Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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/-/7rqbFgCu5SAJ. 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 10:39 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, September 6, 2012 1:25:02 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:34 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: But you couldn't realise you felt different if the part of your brain responsible for realising were receiving exactly the same inputs from the rest of the brain. So you could feel different, or feel nothing, but maintain the delusional belief that nothing had changed. That's begging the question. You are assuming that the brain is a machine which produces consciousness. I think that the brain is the three dimensional shadow of many levels of experience and it produces nothing but neurochemistry and alterations in our ability to access an individual set of human experiences. The brain does not produce consciousness, it defines the form of many conscious relations. But you believe that the neurochemicals do things contrary to what chemists would predict, for example an ion channel opening or closing without any cause such as a change in transmembrane potential or ligand concentration. No, I only say that a thought can be generated from the top down, and that event is manifested in the brain as whatever changes in transmembrane potentials, ligand concentrations or ion channel status are appropriate. I can notice that I am breathing, or I can take a deep breath. Either way, there are similar neural pathways and mechanisms involved. Without knowing about free will, we could never tell the difference between the neurology of the voluntary act and the involuntary or semi-voluntary act. They would all appear not to contradict what chemists would predict, because their predictions don't specify when or where spontaneous brain activity will occur. We've talked about this before and it just isn't consistent with any scientific evidence. Your existence isn't consistent with any scientific evidence either. Science looks at objects. Consciousness is a subject. As long as science defines itself in that way, it is not possible for it to explain consciousness in any meaningful way. You interpret the existence spontaneous neural activity as meaning that something magical like this happens, but it doesn't mean that at all. Spontaneous is just that, spontaneous. It isn't magical. It is quite ordinary. I could do the usual things I do, or I could spontaneously decide to invent something new to do or think about. This is what living organisms do but computers don't. Your theory is like the denial of evolution because those genetic variations might have been spontaneous (intentional) instead of random. But the point is that there is no need to hypothesize non-random, non-caused events in the brain. The randomness of thermodynamics, quantum radioactive decay, and external influences are plenty to account for the unpredictability you call spontaneous. There is no need hypothesize any extra 'magic'. 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: Sane2004 Step One
On 9/5/2012 10:44 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, September 6, 2012 1:32:21 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: I find that the least plausible explanation. It means that if a billion people talk to each other and give each other information, that some kind of consciousness must necessarily arise as a side-effect. You could say that it might arise, but the idea that such a side effect is somehow necessary as to accomplish certain kinds of information processing is laughably romantic to my mind. If I recruit people to recruit people to all do math together, then a magical genie will appear. Necessarily. Because of behavior modification. Mm. Yeah. No ghost in the machine, but machine that runs on ghost power...because...why? No, it doesn't mean that at all. If the billion people interact so as to mimic the behaviour of the neurons in a brain, resulting in the ability to (for example) converse in natural language, then the idea is that the billion-person brain would have consciousness. This consciousness would have nothing to do with the consciousness of the billion people producing it; I don't know what my neurons are doing and my neurons individually certainly don't know what I am doing. You are confirming what I have said. You are saying that a billion people doing the appropriate computations on paper with pencils and erasers and telephones to talk to each other would create a magical personality that nobody would know about but nonetheless would be born into the universe as a thinking, feeling, eating, crapping being. That's where the hypothetical breaks down. The BPB would not have a body to control or a world to interact with. Could it have dream? Maybe - but it would need a simulated world to interact with in order to have human-like consciousness. 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.
