Re: Two apparently different forms of entropy
On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 2:08 AM, Bruce Kellett bhkell...@optusnet.com.au wrote: meekerdb wrote: ISTM there are two ways of looking at it. In one you say before the event there were several possibilities x,y,z,... with probabilites a,b,c,... and one of them, x, happened. The energy before x was the same as after x, so energy is conserved. In the other you say x happened with probability a in the multiverse, y happened with probability b in the multiverse, z happened with probability c in the multiverse,... And in each of x,y,z energy was conserved and since a+b+c+...=1 energy is conserved in the multiverse. Non-conservation only appears when you use these two pictures inconsistently. This seems to be the same as the renormalization that Wilczek talks about -- you essentially re-weight energies in the same way as you re-weight probabilities. If you mean by re-weighting the energies that the particles in different branches have different energies, then for example if the particle were a photon, each branch would have a photon of a different frequency. That would make MWI chaotic. But if each branch has the same photon at the original frequency, energy is not conserved. OTOH if there is a probability that a branch will not happen, which is always the case with renormalization, then that's pretty close to a wave collapse. With renormalization there is a probability that no branch will happen. That also leads to chaos. Richard From an instrumentalist viewpoint (which I think can be useful) energy is just the conjugate variable of time. We want our theories to apply at all times so we seek formulations of energy and time that do this as simply as possible. Having a conserved quantity called energy is a consequence of having theories that apply uniformly in time. Without local energy conservation QM, on which MWI is based, is in real trouble. Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Dark Energy Gobbling Dark Matter, and Slowing Universe's Expansion?
The article was about the bad fit. On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 5:58 PM, LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: On 25 November 2014 at 11:53, Richard Ruquist yann...@gmail.com wrote: The continuing tests have been done. The results are in. That is what the article is about. I only saw references to a bad fit with CMBR measurements, there was no mention of expanding galaxies. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Two apparently different forms of entropy
On 24 Nov 2014, at 23:07, Bruce Kellett wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Nov 2014, at 11:35, Richard Ruquist wrote: With MWI thinking, every detector will detect a photon at the same energy and frequency as the original photon but in a different world. So the total energy in the multiverse will locally have increased by the number of detectors times the photon energy. The only way to conserve energy is to detect only one photon of the same energy and frequency as the original photon. ... or the conservation of energy is something which has to be accounted in branches, not in the multiverse. I don't think so. The multiverse is described by the SWE, and that is just a unitary transformation in Hilbert space. It satisfies energy conservation by construction (time translation invariance and Noether's theorem). OK. I was wrong. Then energy conservation is true only in the average branches. That might provide a QM explanation why there is a universe with some energy in there. You have to renormalize in each branch to get the observed branch- wise energy conservation -- conservation is automatic only for the multiverse. OK, that confirms my feeling that conservation of probabilities is related to conservation of energy (and information). I took a look on Wilczek, and I think he is right, at least assuming QM is 100% correct (but in that case we can in principle recover whatever fall in a black hole, and GR needs to be changed. Is that not what most people believe?). Bruno Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Two apparently different forms of entropy
On 24 Nov 2014, at 16:58, Richard Ruquist wrote: On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 9:47 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 24 Nov 2014, at 11:35, Richard Ruquist wrote: On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 4:05 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 Nov 2014, at 18:11, Richard Ruquist wrote: Bruno: I doubt a photon needs to double his energy to go through two slits Richard: You should be ashamed That's hardly an argument. Agreed Einstein already understood that if the collapse was a physical phenomenon, and if special relativity was correct, then locality would make a wave possibly collapse on two different eigenvector, like sometimes finding literally the photon going in both hole. In that case, the energy would be double, and the schroedinger diffusion of the wave could be used to ... create energy. A quantum perpetual machine could be constructed, and, pace George Levy, but following John Clark's quote of Eddington, we can stop here ... Yes. I like Einstein's single pinhole thought experiment the best. The incident photon spreads in spherical waves beyond the hole from ray optics. So if waves could carry energy, the energy density would drop by 1/r^2 where r is distance from the hole. If we wrap the experiment with a spherical detector sheet, the energy density incident on the sheet would be a constant across the spherical sheet and the amount incident on any detector would be a fraction of the photon energy. So there is not enough energy incident on any detector to make a photon of the original energy. That's classical thinking and it is wrong. With MWI thinking, every detector will detect a photon at the same energy and frequency as the original photon but in a different world. So the total energy in the multiverse will locally have increased by the number of detectors times the photon energy. The only way to conserve energy is to detect only one photon of the same energy and frequency as the original photon. ... or the conservation of energy is something which has to be accounted in branches, not in the multiverse. Fine as long as the input energy in each branch is normalized by the quantum probabilities No, the conservation of energy is global, and should be statistically verified in the normal (non Harry-Potter-like) branches. But the collapse is not physical, it belongs to the mind of the people, fungible and then differentiated, in the infinite tensor product, which, with computationalism, should be a mirror of the fact that we are indeterminate on infinitely many sigma_1 sentences, where the ortholattice structure is determined by the logic of self-reference. My opinion is that collapse is what makes objects physical. That is my opinion too. But the collapse is a psychological phenomenon, making directly the physical into something psychological. Fine as long the process uses the correct initial conditions for each branch ? Everything else is just math (and deterministic.) So everything that could possibly happen can be computed ahead of time in a block 4 dimensional muliverse that I call the Math Space With collapse, the physical space becomes lines in the Math Space. That is not an argument. It is just how I see reality. OK. For a computationalist (who thinks), the collapse is not real, but the wave is not real too. It is itself the product of a Moiré effect on all computations. I agree. With computationalism nothing is real except the math. All is illusion- maya. So comp must have the support of Hinduism and Buddhism. And christianism before the 5th century, and judaism and Islam, before the 11th century. The obsession with matter came later. I find this weird, because there are no evidence for it. I'll take your word for it. So its not in history books? I think it is well known, at least by the scholars. I agree that I am a bit oversimplifying, by lack of time. The fact is that is that until Maimonides, there were as much platonist and aristotelian among the religious people. Religion, in a wide sense, are platonist at the start. What we see is not the real or the whole thing. Thus comes the idea of God, as the reason *behind* what we see, and the idea of science: let us find what really is. But Aristotelianism, which is very natural from the first person view (the brain is programmed to take seriously what we see), has made the human forgetting that science (including theology) comes from askeptical attitude with the idea that we are directly related to what we can measure and observe. I prefer to think that both quantum waves and particles are real, but that waves are math objects and particles are physical objects. Again that is not an argument.. My argument is that the block multiverse, if it were to become entirely physical as MWI poses, Not necessarily. In fact comp offers a
Re: Edge: Myth of A.I.
On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 , LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: If intelligent behavior is not a test for consciousness then how do you know that such machines are not conscious? For that matter how do you know that a rock is not conscious but your fellow human beings are conscious when they're not sleeping or under anesthesia or dead? I have no doubt that you believe that your fellow human beings are conscious when they are not in certain states, such as the state of being asleep or the state of being under anesthesia, or the state of being dead. I also have no doubt you believe rocks are not conscious in every state they are capable of being in. My question to you is if intelligent behavior is not a test for consciousness then how did you make this determination? On the balance of probabilities, however, I would say that rocks most likely aren't conscious, and that people probably are (when not asleep etc). I believe that too, but then I think that intelligent behavior is the test for consciousness, it's not a perfect test but it's the only test we have. But never mind me, I want to know why you believe it. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Edge: Myth of A.I.
On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I don't think John's post implied that conscious was another word for intelligence. I think his position is that a being could be conscious without being intelligent (which would be consistent with aware of one's self and surroundings), but not vice versa. Exactly. I don't think being conscious is a simple unitary attribute. I think there are different kinds of being conscious Yes and I have rock solid, I would even go so far as to call it perfect, evidence that the above is true; but unfortunately that evidence is available only to me. You may have a corresponding sort of evidence, I strongly suspect that you do, but I don't know it for a fact. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Edge: Myth of A.I.
On Tuesday, November 25, 2014 3:27:35 PM UTC, John Clark wrote: On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 , LizR liz...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: If intelligent behavior is not a test for consciousness then how do you know that such machines are not conscious? For that matter how do you know that a rock is not conscious but your fellow human beings are conscious when they're not sleeping or under anesthesia or dead? I have no doubt that you believe that your fellow human beings are conscious when they are not in certain states, such as the state of being asleep or the state of being under anesthesia, or the state of being dead. I also have no doubt you believe rocks are not conscious in every state they are capable of being in. My question to you is if intelligent behavior is not a test for consciousness then how did you make this determination? On the balance of probabilities, however, I would say that rocks most likely aren't conscious, and that people probably are (when not asleep etc). I believe that too, but then I think that intelligent behavior is the test for consciousness, it's not a perfect test but it's the only test we have. Is that more accurate than saying we do not have a test for consciousness ? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Edge: Myth of A.I.
On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 zibb...@gmail.com wrote: I believe that too, but then I think that intelligent behavior is the test for consciousness, it's not a perfect test but it's the only test we have. Is that more accurate than saying we do not have a test for consciousness ? No, a test need not be perfect to be useful; in the real world almost none of our information is perfect, but we manage to make decisions nevertheless. I couldn't function if I believed I was the only conscious thing in the universe, and I couldn't function if I believed that everything was conscious, so the intelligent behavior test is very useful. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Two apparently different forms of entropy
On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 7:17 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 24 Nov 2014, at 16:58, Richard Ruquist wrote: On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 9:47 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 24 Nov 2014, at 11:35, Richard Ruquist wrote: On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 4:05 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: On 23 Nov 2014, at 18:11, Richard Ruquist wrote: Bruno: I doubt a photon needs to double his energy to go through two slits Richard: You should be ashamed That's hardly an argument. Agreed Einstein already understood that if the collapse was a physical phenomenon, and if special relativity was correct, then locality would make a wave possibly collapse on two different eigenvector, like sometimes finding literally the photon going in both hole. In that case, the energy would be double, and the schroedinger diffusion of the wave could be used to ... create energy. A quantum perpetual machine could be constructed, and, pace George Levy, but following John Clark's quote of Eddington, we can stop here ... Yes. I like Einstein's single pinhole thought experiment the best. The incident photon spreads in spherical waves beyond the hole from ray optics. So if waves could carry energy, the energy density would drop by 1/r^2 where r is distance from the hole. If we wrap the experiment with a spherical detector sheet, the energy density incident on the sheet would be a constant across the spherical sheet and the amount incident on any detector would be a fraction of the photon energy. So there is not enough energy incident on any detector to make a photon of the original energy. That's classical thinking and it is wrong. With MWI thinking, every detector will detect a photon at the same energy and frequency as the original photon but in a different world. So the total energy in the multiverse will locally have increased by the number of detectors times the photon energy. The only way to conserve energy is to detect only one photon of the same energy and frequency as the original photon. ... or the conservation of energy is something which has to be accounted in branches, not in the multiverse. Fine as long as the input energy in each branch is normalized by the quantum probabilities No, the conservation of energy is global, and should be statistically verified in the normal (non Harry-Potter-like) branches. But the collapse is not physical, it belongs to the mind of the people, fungible and then differentiated, in the infinite tensor product, which, with computationalism, should be a mirror of the fact that we are indeterminate on infinitely many sigma_1 sentences, where the ortholattice structure is determined by the logic of self-reference. My opinion is that collapse is what makes objects physical. That is my opinion too. But the collapse is a psychological phenomenon, making directly the physical into something psychological. Fine as long the process uses the correct initial conditions for each branch ? Everything else is just math (and deterministic.) So everything that could possibly happen can be computed ahead of time in a block 4 dimensional muliverse that I call the Math Space With collapse, the physical space becomes lines in the Math Space. That is not an argument. It is just how I see reality. OK. For a computationalist (who thinks), the collapse is not real, but the wave is not real too. It is itself the product of a Moiré effect on all computations. I agree. With computationalism nothing is real except the math. All is illusion- maya. So comp must have the support of Hinduism and Buddhism. And christianism before the 5th century, and judaism and Islam, before the 11th century. The obsession with matter came later. I find this weird, because there are no evidence for it. I'll take your word for it. So its not in history books? I think it is well known, at least by the scholars. I agree that I am a bit oversimplifying, by lack of time. The fact is that is that until Maimonides, there were as much platonist and aristotelian among the religious people. Religion, in a wide sense, are platonist at the start. What we see is not the real or the whole thing. Thus comes the idea of God, as the reason *behind* what we see, and the idea of science: let us find what really is. But Aristotelianism, which is very natural from the first person view (the brain is programmed to take seriously what we see), has made the human forgetting that science (including theology) comes from askeptical attitude with the idea that we are directly related to what we can measure and observe. I prefer to think that both quantum waves and particles are real, but that waves are math objects and particles are physical objects. Again that is not an argument.. My argument is that the block multiverse, if it were to become entirely physical as MWI poses, Not
My latest crossword
http://mayaofauckland.wordpress.com/2014/11/25/do-quantum-mechanics-overcharge-not-after-renormalisation/ In case anyone out there is into cryptic crosswords. This has a bit of a science theme :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Is Dark Energy Gobbling Dark Matter, and Slowing Universe's Expansion?
And I said that it seemed to me that if dark matter was being destroyed galaxies should be expanding, and asked if there was any observational evidence to support this. On 25 November 2014 at 23:44, Richard Ruquist yann...@gmail.com wrote: The article was about the bad fit. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Edge: Myth of A.I.
I don´t though it very much. But it is applicable to any imaginable goal. Since certain self interests will go against any collective interest that we can imagine. And the best way to advance self interest is indeed to use ideology to hide deleterious self interests behind any true or false good or bad collective interest already existent or promoted as such. 2014-11-24 13:01 GMT+01:00 Telmo Menezes te...@telmomenezes.com: Hi Alberto, You talk of advancement of society, so this implies some collective goal. What is the goal, in your view? Cheers Telmo. On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 9:14 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com wrote: I laugh at the anthropological optimists that are confident that humans will be like gods for the same reason that I laugh loudly at cibernetical optimists. most of the effort of inteligent people is devoted to lie themselves and other in order to gain power and enslave people, at least, to seduce other in his sophisticated lies. The more inteligence, the more chance for creation and destruction. On the average, intelligence alone contribute zero to the advancement of society and thus contributes nothing to the advancement of anything. It is often the case that dumb people are wiser than intelligent people from Harvard of Yale staturated by ideology (self-profitable ideology, I could say). To have intelligent machines either autonomous or not don´t change that they could be used for good or for evil contributing nothing, not even to the progress of machines. 2014-11-24 7:45 GMT+01:00 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com: A.I. is no closer than it was 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. Of one thing I am certain, someday computers will become more intelligent than any human who ever lived using any measure of intelligence you care to name. And I am even more certain that we are 20 years closer to that day than we were 20 years ago. But what is new and big is Big Data. But Big Data does not involve theories of A.I. nor efforts. it's about taking very large sets of paired data and converging by some basic rule to a single thing. This is how translation services work. Well... Big Data computers are artificial and good translation requires intelligence, so why in the world isn't that AI. Big Data does not involve theories of A.I I think it very unlikely that the secret to intelligence is some grand equation you could put on a teashirt, it's probably 1001 little hacks and kludges that all add up to something big. It's very large sets of translations of sentences, and sentence components, simply rehashed for best fit Simply? Is convoluted better than simple? Are you saying that if we can explain how it works then it can't be intelligent? It actually works fairly adequately for most translation needs. Which would be great, except this: The Big Data system is not independent at any point. Every day there needs to be a huge scrape of the translations performed by human translators. And human beings move from being mediocre translators to being very good translators by observing how great translators do it. Human translation professions are in a state of freefall. There used to be a career structure with rising income and security and status. Now there isn't. Translation certainly won't be the last profession where machines become better at there job than any human; and I predict that the next time it happens somebody will try to find a excuse for it just like you did and say Yes a machine is a better poet or surgeon or joke writer or physicists than I am but it doesn't really count because (insert lame excuse here). John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options,
Re: Edge: Myth of A.I.
On 26 November 2014 at 04:27, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 , LizR lizj...@gmail.com wrote: If intelligent behavior is not a test for consciousness then how do you know that such machines are not conscious? For that matter how do you know that a rock is not conscious but your fellow human beings are conscious when they're not sleeping or under anesthesia or dead? I have no doubt that you believe that your fellow human beings are conscious when they are not in certain states, such as the state of being asleep or the state of being under anesthesia, or the state of being dead. I also have no doubt you believe rocks are not conscious in every state they are capable of being in. My question to you is if intelligent behavior is not a test for consciousness then how did you make this determination? Via behaviour (which may or may not be classed as intelligent). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Edge: Myth of A.I.
On 26 November 2014 at 04:38, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I don't think John's post implied that conscious was another word for intelligence. I think his position is that a being could be conscious without being intelligent (which would be consistent with aware of one's self and surroundings), but not vice versa. Exactly. Ah, well that is a matter of opinion. It would mean that all the tests so far devised for intelligence that have been passed by computers, including some versions of the Turing test, may not in fact detect intelligence after all, if those machines aren't actually conscious, which they may well not be. This seems to me to be redefining intelligence (and perhaps consciousness). Personally, I think machines can behave in an intelligent manner without being conscious - or at least in a manner than most people not used to computers would consider intelligent (e.g. performing huge mathematical calculations very fast would be considered intelligent by most people before the advent of computers, as would winning the world chess championship). But this is getting very semantic-quibbly. If you guys want to redefine intelligence as being something that only conscious beings have, then fine, as long as you make it clear that's what you're doing I have no objection. We'll find another word for what machines (and unconscious parts of the brain) can do that merely looks intelligent. I don't think being conscious is a simple unitary attribute. I think there are different kinds of being conscious Yes and I have rock solid, I would even go so far as to call it perfect, evidence that the above is true; but unfortunately that evidence is available only to me. You may have a corresponding sort of evidence, I strongly suspect that you do, but I don't know it for a fact. This is also a matter of opinion. Some would say that one is either conscious or not, although what one is conscious *of* can vary a lot. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: Edge: Myth of A.I.
On 11/25/2014 2:00 PM, LizR wrote: On 26 November 2014 at 04:38, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net mailto:meeke...@verizon.net wrote: I don't think John's post implied that conscious was another word for intelligence. I think his position is that a being could be conscious without being intelligent (which would be consistent with aware of one's self and surroundings), but not vice versa. Exactly. Ah, well that is a matter of opinion. It would mean that all the tests so far devised for intelligence that have been passed by computers, including some versions of the Turing test, may not in fact detect intelligence after all, if those machines aren't actually conscious, which they may well not be. Intelligent behavior is observable, so it doesn't make sense to say maybe it isn't really intelligence because there's a missing but unobservable property consciousness. Since the consciousness is unobservable the more sensible assumption would be that the machines are conscious. However, I don't agree with John that intelligence is necessarily accompanied by human-like consciousness. His argument is based on evolution, i.e. that if intelligence could exist without consciousness then it would evolved that way. But evolution can be driven by historical accident. So I think his argument only shows that intelligence as it developed in humans is necessarily accompanied by human-like consciousness that includes an inner narrtive. Julian Jaynes has a theory about how this happened. But I think there can be different kinds of consciousness; so I think that there could be intelligence which is not associated with human-like inner narrative for example. John recognizes that the human brain has multiple modules which may compete in deciding actions. Watson, which has a certain intelligence, probably doesn't have this kind of modular competition and so would have a different kind of consciousness. This seems to me to be redefining intelligence (and perhaps consciousness). Personally, I think machines can behave in an intelligent manner without being conscious - or at least in a manner than most people not used to computers would consider intelligent (e.g. performing huge mathematical calculations very fast would be considered intelligent by most people before the advent of computers, as would winning the world chess championship). I agree, except to qualify that as without being conscious the way people are with an inner narrative. I think any intelligent being must have a world-model which includes itself. But this is getting very semantic-quibbly. If you guys want to redefine intelligence as being something that only conscious beings have, then fine, as long as you make it clear that's what you're doing I have no objection. We'll find another word for what machines (and unconscious parts of the brain) can do that merely looks intelligent. I don't think being conscious is a simple unitary attribute. I think there are different kinds of being conscious Yes and I have rock solid, I would even go so far as to call it perfect, evidence that the above is true; but unfortunately that evidence is available only to me. You may have a corresponding sort of evidence, I strongly suspect that you do, but I don't know it for a fact. This is also a matter of opinion. Some would say that one is either conscious or not, although what one is conscious /of/ can vary a lot. Yes, that's Bruno's idea. But he supports it by taking a very weak definition of consciousness so that it is essentially just awareness of self as distinct from environment. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
