Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 01 May 2013, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 10:49:11 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Apr 2013, at 20:58, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book, nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead. The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete color blindness. What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to understanding on any others. I am not sure I can help you. You confuse the levels. You don't really try to understand the point, which would mean that you talk like if you knew that comp is false. I don't expect you to help me, I'm trying to help you. Of course. But what helps me is reasoning, not personal conviction. I don't know that comp is false, but I know that if it isn't it won't be because of the reasons you are suggesting. Comp may be true in theory, but none of the replies to the Chinese room are adequate, or even mildly compelling to me. Searles confuse a program, and a universal program running that program. This page http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ is quite thorough, and lists the most well known Replies, yet it concludes: There continues to be significant disagreement about what processes
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Thursday, May 2, 2013 4:39:43 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 May 2013, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 10:49:11 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Apr 2013, at 20:58, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book, nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead. The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete color blindness. What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to understanding on any others. I am not sure I can help you. You confuse the levels. You don't really try to understand the point, which would mean that you talk like if you knew that comp is false. I don't expect you to help me, I'm trying to help you. Of course. But what helps me is reasoning, not personal conviction. Consciousness cannot be accessed by reasoning, since reason is an experience within human consciousness. I don't know that comp is false, but I know that if it isn't it won't be because of the reasons you are suggesting. Comp may be true in theory, but none of the replies to the Chinese room are adequate, or even mildly compelling to me. Searles confuse a program, and a universal program running that program. Aren't universal programs
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 02 May 2013, at 17:35, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, May 2, 2013 4:39:43 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 May 2013, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 10:49:11 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Apr 2013, at 20:58, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book, nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead. The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete color blindness. What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to understanding on any others. I am not sure I can help you. You confuse the levels. You don't really try to understand the point, which would mean that you talk like if you knew that comp is false. I don't expect you to help me, I'm trying to help you. Of course. But what helps me is reasoning, not personal conviction. Consciousness cannot be accessed by reasoning, since reason is an experience within human consciousness. You are entirely right on this. But to communicate with others, even on consciousness, or on line and points, or galaxies or gods, we can only agree on principles and reason from that. I don't know that comp is false, but I know that if it isn't it won't be because of the reasons you are suggesting.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Thursday, May 2, 2013 11:54:34 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 02 May 2013, at 17:35, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Thursday, May 2, 2013 4:39:43 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 01 May 2013, at 20:09, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 10:49:11 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Apr 2013, at 20:58, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book, nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead. The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete color blindness. What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to understanding on any others. I am not sure I can help you. You confuse the levels. You don't really try to understand the point, which would mean that you talk like if you knew that comp is false. I don't expect you to help me, I'm trying to help you. Of course. But what helps me is reasoning, not personal conviction. Consciousness cannot be accessed by reasoning, since reason is an experience within human consciousness. You are entirely right on this. But to communicate with others, even on consciousness, or on line and points, or galaxies or gods, we can only agree on principles and reason from that. Sure, but we have to
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 30 Apr 2013, at 20:58, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book, nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead. The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete color blindness. What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to understanding on any others. I am not sure I can help you. You confuse the levels. You don't really try to understand the point, which would mean that you talk like if you knew that comp is false. This page http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ is quite thorough, and lists the most well known Replies, yet it concludes: There continues to be significant disagreement about what processes create meaning, understanding, and consciousness, as well as what can be proven a priori by thought experiments. Thought experience are like proofs in math. Some are valid, some are not valid, some are fatally not valid, some can be corrected or made more precise. The debate often focuse on the truth of comp and non- comp, and that involves sometimes opinion. I don't really play that game. Game? All it's saying is that there is no consensus as you claim. The fact that you claim a consensus to me smells like a major insecurity. Very much a 'pay no
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 30 Apr 2013, at 22:10, Craig Weinberg wrote: It seems like there's nothing to bet on though. Comp is not really giving any guidance as to whether Comp itself is valid - it only shows that some machines believe it isn't, and that suggests that it is, and some machines see through that belief, and that somehow suggests that it is also. It's an unfalsifiable ideology. Showing you miss the main point. I have try to explain it more than once, but you repeat over and over your simple negative affirmation, without ever given a clue why you think so, or answering the comments. Some other comments you made contain rhetorical traps. I would lose my and your time in answering them. I will wait for a theory, if ever you try to provide one. Words are not enough. Bruno 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 10:49:11 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Apr 2013, at 20:58, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book, nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead. The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete color blindness. What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to understanding on any others. I am not sure I can help you. You confuse the levels. You don't really try to understand the point, which would mean that you talk like if you knew that comp is false. I don't expect you to help me, I'm trying to help you. I don't know that comp is false, but I know that if it isn't it won't be because of the reasons you are suggesting. Comp may be true in theory, but none of the replies to the Chinese room are adequate, or even mildly compelling to me. This page http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ is quite thorough, and lists the most well known Replies, yet it concludes: There continues to be significant disagreement about what processes create meaning, understanding, and consciousness, as well as what can be proven a priori by thought experiments. Thought experience are like proofs in math. Some are valid, some are not
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:31:44 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. The high level program is just a case-by-case syntactic handler though. It's not high level, it's just a big lookup table. There is no confusion of level. Neither the Chinese Room as whole, the book, nor the guy passing messages and reading the book understand Chinese at all. The person who understood Chinese and wrote the book is dead. The kind of reasoning that you (and Dennett and Hofstadter) are using would say that someone who is color blind is not impaired if they memorize the answers to a color vision test. If I can retake the test as many times as I want, and I can know which answers I get wrong, I don't even need to cheat or get lucky. I can compute the correct answers as if I could see color in spite of my complete color blindness. What you are saying is circular. You assume that the Chinese guy who wrote the book is running on a program, but if you knew that was the case, then there would be no point in the thought experiment. You don't know that at all though, and the Chinese Room shows why computation need only be performed on one level and never leads to understanding on any others. This page http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ is quite thorough, and lists the most well known Replies, yet it concludes: There continues to be significant disagreement about what processes create meaning, understanding, and consciousness, as well as what can be proven a priori by thought experiments. Thought experience are like proofs in math. Some are valid, some are not valid, some are fatally not valid, some can be corrected or made more precise. The debate often focuse on the truth of comp and non-comp, and that involves sometimes opinion. I don't really play that game. Game? All it's saying is that there is no consensus as you claim. The fact that you claim a consensus to me smells like a major insecurity. Very much a 'pay no attention to the man behind the curtain' response. The replies listed are not at all impressive to me, and are all really variations on the same sophistry. Obviously there is a difference between understanding a conversation and
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 27 Apr 2013, at 17:10, John Mikes wrote: Dear Stathis and Bruno, Stathis' reply is commendable, with one excessive word: r e a l . I asked Bruno several times to 'identify' the term 'number' in common-sense language. So far I did not understand such (my mistake?) I still hold 'numbers' as the product of human thinking which cannot be retrospect to the basis of brain-function. (Unless we consider BRAIN as the tissue-organ in our skull, executing technical steps for our mentality - whatever that may be. Well, we usually consider the brain to be the tissue-organ, and in the comp theory, we assume his function can be replaced by a suitable universal machine, that is computer. I am not sure what it is that you don't understand in the notion of number. Usually it means natural numbers, but mathematicians have thousand of generalization of that concept (integer, rational numbers, real nubers, complex numbers, quaternion, octonions, and many others). In common sense language, natural numbers are related to the words zero, one, two, three, etc. I am not sure what problem you have with them. My remark to Bruno: in my (agnostic?) mind 'machine' means a functioning contraption composed of finite parts, OK. And we can be neutral at the start if those part are physically realized or not. The machine I talk about have been defined precisely in math, and can be assumed to be approximated in the physical world (primitive or not). an ascertainable inventory, while 'universal machine' - as I understand(?) the term includes lots of infinite connotations (references). That's right, but they are themselves composed of a finite number of finite parts. So I would be happy to name them something different from 'machine'. On the contrary, the alluring fact about universal machine is that they are machine. They are finite. General purpose computers and programming language interpreters are example of such (physical, virtual) universal machines. I accept 'computation' as not restricted to numerical (math?) calculations although our (embryonic, binary) Touring machine is based on such. With the Church Turing thesis, all computers are equivalent for the computations they can execute. They will differ in the unboundable range of provability, knowability, observability and sensibility though. I am still at a loss to see in extended practice a 'quantum', or a 'molecularly based' computer so often referred to in fictional lit. Yes, we will see, but we already believe (with respect to all current facts and theories of course) that they do not violate the Church Turing thesis. It is a theorem that a quantum computer does not compute more functions than a Turing machine, or than Babbage machine. I know you like Robert Rosen, who asserted that Church Turing thesis is false, but he has not convinced me at all on this. The Universal Computer (Loeb?) It is Turing who discovered it explicitly, but Babbage, Post, Church and others made equivalent discoveries. Gödel and Löb's discoveries concerns notion like truth and provability, which quite typically have no corresponding Church thesis, and there is no notion of universality related to them. On the contrary, we know that provability is constructively NOT universal. We can build a machine contradicting any attempt to find a universal provability predicate. Some machines (the Löbian one) can prove that about themselves. requires better descriptions as to it's qualia to include domains beyond our present knowledge and the infinities. (Maybe humanmind? which is also unidentified). That can depend on the theory that you will assume. With comp, our brain are equivalent to Turing machine, with respect to computations, but not with respect of provability, knowability, sensibility, etc. Bruno JohnM On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 5:40 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:14 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. If it is true that you need real numbers to simulate a brain then since real numbers are not computable the brain is not computable, and hence consciousness is not necessarily computable (although it may still be contingently computable). But what evidence is there that real numbers are needed to simulate the brain? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 02:15:31PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: I know you like Robert Rosen, who asserted that Church Turing thesis is false, but he has not convinced me at all on this. Where did he assert this? Admittedly, I haven't read all his works, mainly just What is life?, but I thought his main thesis was that living systems could be distinguished from computation by virtue of it being closed under efficient causation (which computations aren't). -- 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 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:14 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. If it is true that you need real numbers to simulate a brain then since real numbers are not computable the brain is not computable, and hence consciousness is not necessarily computable (although it may still be contingently computable). But what evidence is there that real numbers are needed to simulate the brain? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 27 Apr 2013, at 11:40, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:14 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. If it is true that you need real numbers to simulate a brain then since real numbers are not computable the brain is not computable, and hence consciousness is not necessarily computable (although it may still be contingently computable). But what evidence is there that real numbers are needed to simulate the brain? Actually there exist notions of computable real numbers, and computable function from R to R. For example the function y = sin(2*PI* x) is intuitively computable, as you can approximate as precisely as you want the input (2 * PI * i) and the corresponding output sin (2 * PI * x). But there is no Church thesis for such notion, and there are many non equivalent definition of computability on the reals. (I could add some nuance, here, but that's for later perhaps). Yet, all analog machines known today, are emulable by digital machines. There would be a problem only if some real number is non computable and used in extenso by some machine. That exists ... mathematically. Some computable function of the reals can have their derivative being non computable. But in those case, the recursion theory is the same as for Turing machine with oracle, and this does not change the logic and the conceptual consequences. Nor is there any evidence that a brain uses such oracle, although it can be said that evolution uses the halting oracle, by selecting out the stopping machines (death). But that is just long term behavior of machines. It does not make us locally non emulable by computer. We already do ourself that selection for computers by buying new one, and throwing out old one ... Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
Dear Stathis and Bruno, Stathis' reply is commendable, with one excessive word: r e a l . I asked Bruno several times to 'identify' the term 'number' in common-sense language. So far I did not understand such (my mistake?) I still hold *'numbers'* as the product of human thinking which cannot be retrospect to the basis of brain-function. (Unless we consider BRAIN as the tissue-organ in our skull, executing technical steps for our *mentality - *whatever that may be. My remark to Bruno: in my (agnostic?) mind 'machine' means a functioning contraption composed of finite parts, an ascertainable inventory, while 'universal machine' - as I understand(?) the term includes lots of infinite connotations (references). So I would be happy to name them something different from 'machine'. I accept 'computation' as not restricted to numerical (math?) calculations although our (embryonic, binary) Touring machine is based on such. I am still at a loss to see in extended practice a 'quantum', or a 'molecularly based' computer so often referred to in fictional lit. The Universal Computer (Loeb?) requires better descriptions as to it's qualia to include domains beyond our present knowledge and the infinities. (Maybe humanmind? which is also unidentified). JohnM On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 5:40 AM, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.comwrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:14 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. If it is true that you need real numbers to simulate a brain then since real numbers are not computable the brain is not computable, and hence consciousness is not necessarily computable (although it may still be contingently computable). But what evidence is there that real numbers are needed to simulate the brain? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Saturday, April 27, 2013 5:40:18 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:14 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. If it is true that you need real numbers to simulate a brain then since real numbers are not computable the brain is not computable, and hence consciousness is not necessarily computable (although it may still be contingently computable). But what evidence is there that real numbers are needed to simulate the brain? Since we ourselves can easily conceive of real numbers without converting them from floating point decimals in our conscious mind, and since we are talking as if the mind supervenes on the brain locally, then we would have to explain where this faculty comes from. Whether it is the brain or the mind which we are talking about emulating with Comp, the final result must include a capacity to conceive of real numbers directly, which we have no reason to assume will ever be possible with a Turing based digital machine. Besides that, it should be pretty clear that the world of classical physics is quite enamored with real-number type relations rather than decimal. Even at the microcosmic levels, where we find discrete states rather than continuous, it is not at all clear that this is a true reflection of nature or a local reflection of our instrumental approach. The digital approach is always an amputation and an approximation. Not a bad thing when we are talking about sending videos and text across the world, but not necessarily a good thing for building a working brain from scratch. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 28/04/2013, at 3:31 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: On Saturday, April 27, 2013 5:40:18 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:14 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. If it is true that you need real numbers to simulate a brain then since real numbers are not computable the brain is not computable, and hence consciousness is not necessarily computable (although it may still be contingently computable). But what evidence is there that real numbers are needed to simulate the brain? Since we ourselves can easily conceive of real numbers without converting them from floating point decimals in our conscious mind, and since we are talking as if the mind supervenes on the brain locally, then we would have to explain where this faculty comes from. Whether it is the brain or the mind which we are talking about emulating with Comp, the final result must include a capacity to conceive of real numbers directly, which we have no reason to assume will ever be possible with a Turing based digital machine. Can you conceive of a real number? I can't. It's like conceiving of infinity - you can say it but I don't think you can really do it. But that is beside the point: if you can conceive of something why should that mean that it is true or, even worse, that there is a little bit of that something in your brain? Besides that, it should be pretty clear that the world of classical physics is quite enamored with real-number type relations rather than decimal. Even at the microcosmic levels, where we find discrete states rather than continuous, it is not at all clear that this is a true reflection of nature or a local reflection of our instrumental approach. The digital approach is always an amputation and an approximation. Not a bad thing when we are talking about sending videos and text across the world, but not necessarily a good thing for building a working brain from scratch. We can simulate any classical system with discrete arithmetic. If we could not then computers would be useless for many of the things they are actually used for. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Saturday, April 27, 2013 2:20:20 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On 28/04/2013, at 3:31 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Saturday, April 27, 2013 5:40:18 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:14 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. If it is true that you need real numbers to simulate a brain then since real numbers are not computable the brain is not computable, and hence consciousness is not necessarily computable (although it may still be contingently computable). But what evidence is there that real numbers are needed to simulate the brain? Since we ourselves can easily conceive of real numbers without converting them from floating point decimals in our conscious mind, and since we are talking as if the mind supervenes on the brain locally, then we would have to explain where this faculty comes from. Whether it is the brain or the mind which we are talking about emulating with Comp, the final result must include a capacity to conceive of real numbers directly, which we have no reason to assume will ever be possible with a Turing based digital machine. Can you conceive of a real number? I can't. It's like conceiving of infinity - you can say it but I don't think you can really do it. Sure I can. It's easy because I'm not trying to conceive of it literally like a computer, but figuratively as an idea. Pi, as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius, can be understood in radians or just geometrically by visual feel. Pi falls out of the aesthetics of circularity itself, and it need not be enumerated abstractly. But that is beside the point: if you can conceive of something why should that mean that it is true or, even worse, that there is a little bit of that something in your brain? You can either say that it is in your brain or that it isn't, but either way, the thing that Comp claims to be able to emulate does something which Comp cannot do now, and which gives us no reason to expect that it will ever do. Besides that, it should be pretty clear that the world of classical physics is quite enamored with real-number type relations rather than decimal. Even at the microcosmic levels, where we find discrete states rather than continuous, it is not at all clear that this is a true reflection of nature or a local reflection of our instrumental approach. The digital approach is always an amputation and an approximation. Not a bad thing when we are talking about sending videos and text across the world, but not necessarily a good thing for building a working brain from scratch. We can simulate any classical system with discrete arithmetic. If we could not then computers would be useless for many of the things they are actually used for. Inspecting a classical system from some arbitrary level of substitution is different than being a proprietary system which is by definition unique. The very kinds of things which machines fail at are the things which are most essential to consciousness. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 24 Apr 2013, at 23:54, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote: Perhaps one should define things such that it can be impolemented by any arbitrary finite state machine, no mater how large. Then, while there may not be a limit to the capacity of finite state machines, each such machine has a finite capacity, and therefore in none of these machines can one implement the Peano axiom that every integer has a successor. Number(0) Number(s(x)) := Number(x) This implements (in PROLOG) the Peano axiom that every number has a successor What you say is that the existential query Number(x)? will lead the PROLOG machine into a non terminating computation. It will generates 0, s(0), s(s(0)), s(s(s(0))), s(s(s(s(0, Similarly, you can implement a universal machine in a finite code. But then the machine will ask sometimes for more memory space, like us. But some other properties of integers are valid if they are valid in every finite state machine that implement arithmetic modulo prime numbers. Not the fundamental recursion properties. If you fix the prime number, you will stay in an ultrafinistic setting, without recursion, without universal machine, without any fertile theorems of computer science which makes sense even if it means that the machines, when implemented in a limited environment will complain, write on the walls, or will build a rocket to explore space and expand their memory by themselves. I'm not into the foundations of math, I'll leave that to Bruno :) . But since we are machines with a finite brain capacity, In the long run, it is a growing one. And we have infinite capacities relatively to our neighborhood. We don't stop to expand ourselves. and even the entire visible universe has only a finite information content, If the physical universe is finite, but very big, we are still universal machine. But doomed for some long run. No worry if comp is true, as comp precludes a finite physical universe. we should be able to replace real analysis with discrete analysis as explained by Doron. That can makes sense for some application, but would contradict comp for the theoretical consequences. Bruno Saibal Citeren Brian Tenneson tenn...@gmail.com: Interesting read. The problem I have with this is that in set theory, there are several examples of sets who owe their existence to axioms alone. In other words, there is an axiom that states there is a set X such that (blah, blah, blah). How are we to know which sets/notions are meaningless concepts? Because to me, it sounds like Doron's personal opinion that some concepts are meaningless while other concepts like huge, unknowable, and tiny are not meaningless. Is there anything that would remove the opinion portion of this? How is the second axiom an improvement while containing words like huge, unknowable, and tiny?? quote So I deny even the existence of the Peano axiom that every integer has a successor. Eventually we would get an overflow error in the big computer in the sky, and the sum and product of any two integers is well-defined only if the result is less than p, or if one wishes, one can compute them modulo p. Since p is so large, this is not a practical problem, since the overflow in our earthly computers comes so much sooner than the overflow errors in the big computer in the sky. end quote What if the big computer in the sky is infinite? Or if all computers are finite in capacity yet there is no largest computer? What if NO computer activity is relevant to the set of numbers that exist mathematically? On Monday, April 22, 2013 11:28:46 AM UTC-7, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote: See here: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimPDF/real.pdf Saibal To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript:. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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- l...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 25 Apr 2013, at 00:47, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:49:00 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:07, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 5:11:06 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 22 Apr 2013, at 19:14, Craig Weinberg wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. You can represent many real numbers by the program computing their approximation. You can fan constructively on all real numbers (like the UD does notably). Only if a brain uses some non computable real number as an oracle, with all decimals given in one strike, then we cannot simulate it with Turing machine, but this needs to make the mind actually infinite. If the mind is what is real, then there are no decimals. But there are decimal, and so if you are correct, the mind is not real. But the mind is real, so you are not correct. How do you know that the mind uses decimals? I just said that decimal exists. Then the mind of mathematician uses decimal because they are handy. It seems that our natural understanding is primarily in ratios and real number type concepts. Real numbers can be seen as a terrible simplification of reality. Decimals could be a notion derived from stepping down experience through the body, but the native experiential fabric of all has no decimal content. I can agree. With comp you don't need to put real numbers and decimals in the ontology. The brain is the public representation of the history, and as such, it can only be observed from the reduced 3p set of qualia. The 3p reduction may rationalize the appearance. From an absolute perspective, all phenomena are temporary partitions within the one strike of eternity. OK. So the statement above is just a statement of non-comp, not an argument for non comp, as it fails to give us what is that non computable real playing a role in cognition. What does the machine say when we ask it why it can't understand pi without approximating it? One machine can answer It seems that I can understand PI without approximating it. PI is the ratio of the length of a circle divided by its perimeter, and a circle is the locus of the point in a plane which share the same distance with respect to some point. Then the machine drew a circle on the ground and said, look, it seems PI is about a tiny bigger than 3. Are there any machines that do as we do, and say 'pi is the unchanging ratio between the distance across the circle compared to the distance around it, and a circle is self evident pattern which manifests literally as [circle shape] and figuratively as any pattern of returning to the starting point repeatedly. Yes. You. (I *assume* comp). For man made machine, it is far too early. I would say that PA could say that, but it might be long and tedious to prove, and you would be able to say she does not really meant what she says, so you would not been convinced. You argument will conflate knowledge and knowledge theory, so I will not try. But there is something correct. A computer, nor a brain, can simulate consciousness. Nor can a computer simlulate the number one, or the number two. It has to borrow them from arithmetical truth. Then why would your son in law's computer brain provide him with consciousness? It is not the computer brain which provides him consciousness. The computer brain provides him a way to manifest his consciousness in your restaurant, and to get pleasant qualia of some good food (I hope). What provides the consciousness is God, or (arithmetical) truth. Nobody can program that, in the same sense than nobody can program the number one. But we can write program making possible to manifest the number one, or to make some consciousness manifest relatively to you. Ok, but why assume that it is arithmetical truth which is God rather than feeling? To avoid solipsism, and be able to believe in other people's feeling. Feeling and being are an Art. Doing and knowing are a science. Science makes sense as a derivative of art, Hmm... Why not. It is a bit vague. My agreement is by default. but art makes no sense as a function of science. Why? Without some amount of science, you have no art. It isn't necessary, and arithmetic truth is about the necessary. Arithmetic truth is beyond the necessary. Far beyond. And its internal views define necessities and contingencies. Even if we say that arithmetic truth is art, it is certainly only one kind of art among many. If I'm right, and I think I have every reason to guess that I am, then
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Thursday, April 25, 2013 6:04:55 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 25 Apr 2013, at 00:47, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:49:00 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:07, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 5:11:06 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 22 Apr 2013, at 19:14, Craig Weinberg wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. You can represent many real numbers by the program computing their approximation. You can fan constructively on all real numbers (like the UD does notably). Only if a brain uses some non computable real number as an oracle, with all decimals given in one strike, then we cannot simulate it with Turing machine, but this needs to make the mind actually infinite. If the mind is what is real, then there are no decimals. But there are decimal, and so if you are correct, the mind is not real. But the mind is real, so you are not correct. How do you know that the mind uses decimals? I just said that decimal exists. Then the mind of mathematician uses decimal because they are handy. Right, but that doesn't mean that beneath their conscious threshold, their mind actually runs on decimal computations. It seems that our natural understanding is primarily in ratios and real number type concepts. Real numbers can be seen as a terrible simplification of reality. Why is an immediate understanding of a conceptual ratio more terrible than an infinite computation of approximate figures? Decimals could be a notion derived from stepping down experience through the body, but the native experiential fabric of all has no decimal content. I can agree. With comp you don't need to put real numbers and decimals in the ontology. Interesting. Do you see both reals and decimals as distortions/reductions/masks of the universal numbers? If so, that leaves us with arithmetic truth as a pure abstract essence with only potential forms and functions. Meta-Platonic? Even so, to me it's still sensory-motor experience. There is no urge or expectation except for one which is experienced. The brain is the public representation of the history, and as such, it can only be observed from the reduced 3p set of qualia. The 3p reduction may rationalize the appearance. From an absolute perspective, all phenomena are temporary partitions within the one strike of eternity. OK. So the statement above is just a statement of non-comp, not an argument for non comp, as it fails to give us what is that non computable real playing a role in cognition. What does the machine say when we ask it why it can't understand pi without approximating it? One machine can answer It seems that I can understand PI without approximating it. PI is the ratio of the length of a circle divided by its perimeter, and a circle is the locus of the point in a plane which share the same distance with respect to some point. Then the machine drew a circle on the ground and said, look, it seems PI is about a tiny bigger than 3. Are there any machines that do as we do, and say 'pi is the unchanging ratio between the distance across the circle compared to the distance around it, and a circle is self evident pattern which manifests literally as [circle shape] and figuratively as any pattern of returning to the starting point repeatedly. Yes. You. (I *assume* comp). For man made machine, it is far too early. I would say that PA could say that, but it might be long and tedious to prove, and you would be able to say she does not really meant what she says, so you would not been convinced. You argument will conflate knowledge and knowledge theory, so I will not try. All that would be required is to walk a person off of their brain onto a machine and back. If that works, then we could assume that comp is correct enough to rely on. What if it turns out never to work though? Is comp falsifiable? How many centuries of failure until we can begin to doubt the underpinnings of comp? I think that the reals vs rationals issue another obvious clue, along with the geometry issue, the hard problem, the explanatory gap, the metaphorical residue in language (is there any language in the world where machines are associated with warmth and love rather than unfeeling or unconsciousness?), that Comp is a very hard sell to match with the universe we actually live in. It's a great theory, with a great vantage point provided by the kind of anti-world perspective of mathematics on top, but if we really want to understand the nature of experience and awareness,
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 11:37:14 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: You keep claiming that we understand this and that or know this and that. And, yes, saying something along the lines of we know we understand because we care about what we understand *is* circular. No, it's not. I'm saying that it is impossible to doubt we understand. It's just playing with words. My point about caring is that it makes it clear that we intuitively make a distinction between merely being aware of something and understanding it. I'll try to explain how we know we understand because we care about what we understand is circular. Note the use of the word understand towards the left edge of the statement in quotes followed by another instance of the word understand. This is analogous to saying We are Unicorns because care about Unicorns. Doesn't prove unicorns exist; doesn't prove understanding exists (i.e., that any human understands anything). If this is all sophistry then it should be easily dismissible. And yes, playing with words is what people normally do, wittingly or unwittingly, and that lends more evidence to the notion that we are processors in a Chinese room. Still doesn't rule out the possibility that we are in a Chinese room right now, manipulating symbols without really understanding what's going on but able to adeptly shuffle the symbols around fast enough to appear functional. Why not? If we were manipulating symbols, why would we care about them. What you're saying doesn't even make sense. We are having a conversation. We care about the conversation because we understand it. If I was being dictated to write in another language instead, I would not care about the conversation. Are you claiming that there is no difference between having a conversation in English and dictating text in a language you don't understand? We care about the symbols because working through the symbols in our brains is what leads to food, shelter, sex, and all the things animals want. Or we care about the symbols because they further enrich our lives. The symbols in this corner of the internet (barring my contributions of course) are examples of that. Regarding the world, would you say there is more that we (i.e., at least one human) understand or more that we don't? I would vote 'don't' and that leads me also to suspect we are in a chinese room right now. Your coupling of caring and understanding is somewhat arbitrary. You seem to be saying we care because we understand and we understand because we care. But it is the case that even if we do understand something, we don't have to care about it. And understanding because we care doesn't follow either: I care a great deal about science, 20-21st stuff mainly, but I understand almost nothing of it. Would you say we live in a world where we are confronted daily with numerous events; are you claiming you understand most or all of these events? The less you understand the greater the chances of being in a Chinese room. We know that we're not the center of the universe or even the solar system. We know that space is almost unfathomably vast. We know humans are fallible, even when it comes time to do some math and science. So why be so shocked that we are in a Chinese room, lacking understanding of the texts? -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 4:31:55 AM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 11:37:14 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: You keep claiming that we understand this and that or know this and that. And, yes, saying something along the lines of we know we understand because we care about what we understand *is* circular. No, it's not. I'm saying that it is impossible to doubt we understand. It's just playing with words. My point about caring is that it makes it clear that we intuitively make a distinction between merely being aware of something and understanding it. I'll try to explain how we know we understand because we care about what we understand is circular. Note the use of the word understand towards the left edge of the statement in quotes followed by another instance of the word understand. You should read it as we know we understand because we care about X. My only intention in repeating the word was to make it clear that the thing that we care about is the thing that we understand. It is the caring which is a symptom of understanding. The absence of that symptom of caring in a machine indicates to me that there is a lack of understanding. Things which understand can care, but things that cannot care cannot understand. This is analogous to saying We are Unicorns because care about Unicorns. No, this is analogous to you not understanding what I mean and unintentionally making a straw man of my argument. Doesn't prove unicorns exist; doesn't prove understanding exists (i.e., that any human understands anything). If this is all sophistry then it should be easily dismissible. And yes, playing with words is what people normally do, wittingly or unwittingly, and that lends more evidence to the notion that we are processors in a Chinese room. The position that we only think we understand or that consciousness is an illusion is, in my view, the desperate act of a stubborn mind. Truly, you are sawing off the branch that you are sitting on to suggest that we are incapable of understanding the very conversation that we are having. Still doesn't rule out the possibility that we are in a Chinese room right now, manipulating symbols without really understanding what's going on but able to adeptly shuffle the symbols around fast enough to appear functional. Why not? If we were manipulating symbols, why would we care about them. What you're saying doesn't even make sense. We are having a conversation. We care about the conversation because we understand it. If I was being dictated to write in another language instead, I would not care about the conversation. Are you claiming that there is no difference between having a conversation in English and dictating text in a language you don't understand? We care about the symbols because working through the symbols in our brains is what leads to food, shelter, sex, and all the things animals want. First of all, there are no symbols in our brains, unless you think that serotonin or ATP is a symbol. Secondly, the fact that species have needs does not imply any sort of caring at all. A car needs fuel and oil but it doesn't care about them. When the fuel light comes up on your dashboard, that is for you to care about your car, not a sign that the car is anxious. Instead of a light on the dashboard, a more intelligently designed car could proceed to the filling station and dock at a smart pump, or it could use geological measurements and drill out its own petroleum to refine...all without the slightest bit of caring or understanding. Or we care about the symbols because they further enrich our lives. That's circular. Why do we care about enriching our lives? Because we care about our lives and richness. We don't have to though in theory, and a machine never can. The symbols in this corner of the internet (barring my contributions of course) are examples of that. Regarding the world, would you say there is more that we (i.e., at least one human) understand or more that we don't? I would vote 'don't' and that leads me also to suspect we are in a chinese room right now. I don't know where we are in the extent of our understanding, but there is some understanding, while the man in the Chinese room has no understanding. Your coupling of caring and understanding is somewhat arbitrary. No, it is supported by the English language: http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-synonyms/understanding accepting, compassionate, considerate, discerning, forbearing, forgiving, kind, kindly, patient, perceptive, responsive, sensitive, sympathetic, tolerant Your discoupling of caring and understanding is intentionally fabricated and incorrect. You seem to be saying we care because we understand and we understand because we care.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:07, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 5:11:06 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 22 Apr 2013, at 19:14, Craig Weinberg wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. You can represent many real numbers by the program computing their approximation. You can fan constructively on all real numbers (like the UD does notably). Only if a brain uses some non computable real number as an oracle, with all decimals given in one strike, then we cannot simulate it with Turing machine, but this needs to make the mind actually infinite. If the mind is what is real, then there are no decimals. But there are decimal, and so if you are correct, the mind is not real. But the mind is real, so you are not correct. The brain is the public representation of the history, and as such, it can only be observed from the reduced 3p set of qualia. The 3p reduction may rationalize the appearance. From an absolute perspective, all phenomena are temporary partitions within the one strike of eternity. OK. So the statement above is just a statement of non-comp, not an argument for non comp, as it fails to give us what is that non computable real playing a role in cognition. What does the machine say when we ask it why it can't understand pi without approximating it? One machine can answer It seems that I can understand PI without approximating it. PI is the ratio of the length of a circle divided by its perimeter, and a circle is the locus of the point in a plane which share the same distance with respect to some point. Then the machine drew a circle on the ground and said, look, it seems PI is about a tiny bigger than 3. But there is something correct. A computer, nor a brain, can simulate consciousness. Nor can a computer simlulate the number one, or the number two. It has to borrow them from arithmetical truth. Then why would your son in law's computer brain provide him with consciousness? It is not the computer brain which provides him consciousness. The computer brain provides him a way to manifest his consciousness in your restaurant, and to get pleasant qualia of some good food (I hope). What provides the consciousness is God, or (arithmetical) truth. Nobody can program that, in the same sense than nobody can program the number one. But we can write program making possible to manifest the number one, or to make some consciousness manifest relatively to you. Bruno Craig Bruno -- 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-li...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. Bruno Craig Jason -- 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? This page http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ is quite thorough, and lists the most well known Replies, yet it concludes: There continues to be significant disagreement about what processes create meaning, understanding, and consciousness, as well as what can be proven a priori by thought experiments. The replies listed are not at all impressive to me, and are all really variations on the same sophistry. Obviously there is a difference between understanding a conversation and simply copying a conversation in another language. There is a difference between painting a masterpiece and doing a paint by numbers or spraypainting through a stencil. This is what computers and machines are for - to free us from having to work and think ourselves. If the machine had to think and feel that it was working like a person does, then it would want servants also. Machines don't want servants though, because they don't know that they are working, and they function without having to think or exert effort. Craig Bruno Craig Jason -- 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 4:46 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 4:31:55 AM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 11:37:14 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: You keep claiming that we understand this and that or know this and that. And, yes, saying something along the lines of we know we understand because we care about what we understand *is* circular. No, it's not. I'm saying that it is impossible to doubt we understand. It's just playing with words. My point about caring is that it makes it clear that we intuitively make a distinction between merely being aware of something and understanding it. I'll try to explain how we know we understand because we care about what we understand is circular. Note the use of the word understand towards the left edge of the statement in quotes followed by another instance of the word understand. You should read it as we know we understand because we care about X. My only intention in repeating the word was to make it clear that the thing that we care about is the thing that we understand. It is the caring which is a symptom of understanding. The absence of that symptom of caring in a machine indicates to me that there is a lack of understanding. Things which understand can care, but things that cannot care cannot understand. Now that isn't circular but that's a poor sign of understanding. I care very much for women but I can't say that I understand them. I understand the rules of English grammar and punctuation but care little of it. I'm sure you can think of examples. So the two are not correlated, caring and understanding. Caring is not something that can really be measured in humans while caring can be measured in machines/computers. For example, one might define caring about something means it is thinking a lot about it, where a lot means some threshold like over 50% resources are dedicated to think about something for a while (a nonzero, finite span of time). These days, we can multitask and look up the resource monitor to see what the CPU cares about, if anything. If it doesn't care about anything, it uses close to 0% and is called idle. But if I am running an intensive computation while typing this and look at my resource monitor, I can see measurements indicating that my CPU cares much more about the intensive computation rather than what I am typing. Does that mean the CPU understands what it is doing? No. Likewise with human brains: we can care a lot about something but have little to no understanding of it. This is analogous to saying We are Unicorns because care about Unicorns. No, this is analogous to you not understanding what I mean and unintentionally making a straw man of my argument. Well, be honest here, you changed a phrasing. You went from (paraphrasing) we know we understand because we care that we understand to You know we understand because we care about X. Correct me if I'm wrong. The first phrasing is meaningless because of the second use of the word understand (so you might as well be talking about unicorns). The first phrasing gives no insight into what understanding is and why we have it but computers can't. The problem with your new and improved phrasing is that it's a doctored definition of caring; you pick a definition related to understanding such that it (the definition of 'caring') will *automatically*fail for anything other than a non-apathetic human, in essence, assuming computers don't care about anything when, in fact, doing what they are programmed to do (much like a human, I might add) is the machine-equivalent of them caring about what they are told to do. Doesn't prove unicorns exist; doesn't prove understanding exists (i.e., that any human understands anything). If this is all sophistry then it should be easily dismissible. And yes, playing with words is what people normally do, wittingly or unwittingly, and that lends more evidence to the notion that we are processors in a Chinese room. The position that we only think we understand or that consciousness is an illusion is, in my view, the desperate act of a stubborn mind. Truly, you are sawing off the branch that you are sitting on to suggest that we are incapable of understanding the very conversation that we are having. Well calling a conclusion the desperate act of a stubborn mind, rather than supply some decent rejoinder, is also the desperate act of a stubborn mind, wouldn't you say? While sawing off the branch you are sitting on is a very clever arrangement of letters (can I use it in a future poem?), it falls short of being an argument at all or even persuasive. We can get along just fine by thinking that we understand this conversation. But knowing that we understand this conversation? I'd like to see that proved. Until then, I will continue to think that
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 23 Apr 2013, at 21:29, Brian Tenneson wrote: Interesting read. The problem I have with this is that in set theory, there are several examples of sets who owe their existence to axioms alone. In other words, there is an axiom that states there is a set X such that (blah, blah, blah). How are we to know which sets/notions are meaningless concepts? Because to me, it sounds like Doron's personal opinion that some concepts are meaningless while other concepts like huge, unknowable, and tiny are not meaningless. Is there anything that would remove the opinion portion of this? How is the second axiom an improvement while containing words like huge, unknowable, and tiny?? quote So I deny even the existence of the Peano axiom that every integer has a successor. I guess the author means that he denies the truth of the axiom of the Peano axiom. Eventually we would get an overflow error in the big computer in the sky, and the sum and product of any two integers is well-defined only if the result is less than p, or if one wishes, one can compute them modulo p. Since p is so large, this is not a practical problem, since the overflow in our earthly computers comes so much sooner than the overflow errors in the big computer in the sky. end quote What if the big computer in the sky is infinite? Indeed. Or if all computers are finite in capacity yet there is no largest computer? Indeed. What if NO computer activity is relevant to the set of numbers that exist mathematically? Indeed. Eventually it depends on the theory we start from. But to start the reasoning in comp, we have to assume at least one universal system (in the Church-Turing sense). If not, we don't get it. It remains a logical possibility of using some physicalist ultrafinitism, but this is heavy to only drop an explanation of the origin of consciousness/ physical--realities coupling. And by MGA + occam, unless there is flaw, this cannot work with comp. Bruno On Monday, April 22, 2013 11:28:46 AM UTC-7, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote: See here: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimPDF/real.pdf Saibal To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 24 Apr 2013, at 15:40, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:50:07 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:26, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many. I'm surprised that you would try to pass that off as truth Bruno. You have so much tolerance for doubt and uncertainty, yet you claim that it has been shown invalid. In whose opinion? It is not an opinion, it is a fact that you can verify if patient enough. The refutation is already in Dennet and Hofstadter Mind's I book. Searle concludes that the man in the room is not understanding chinese, and that is right, but that can not refute comp, as the man in the room plays the role of a CPU, and not of the high level program on which the consciousness of the chinese guy supervene. It is a simple confusion of level. This page http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ is quite thorough, and lists the most well known Replies, yet it concludes: There continues to be significant disagreement about what processes create meaning, understanding, and consciousness, as well as what can be proven a priori by thought experiments. Thought experience are like proofs in math. Some are valid, some are not valid, some are fatally not valid, some can be corrected or made more precise. The debate often focuse on the truth of comp and non- comp, and that involves sometimes opinion. I don't really play that game. The replies listed are not at all impressive to me, and are all really variations on the same sophistry. Obviously there is a difference between understanding a conversation and simply copying a conversation in another language. There is a difference between painting a masterpiece and doing a paint by numbers or spraypainting through a stencil. This is what computers and machines are for - to free us from having to work and think ourselves. If the machine had to think and feel that it was working like a person does, then it would want servants also. Machines don't want servants though, because they don't know that they are working, and they function without having to think or exert effort. And this is begging the question. Bruno Craig Bruno Craig Jason -- 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-li...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. 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
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:09:44 AM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 4:46 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 4:31:55 AM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 11:37:14 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: You keep claiming that we understand this and that or know this and that. And, yes, saying something along the lines of we know we understand because we care about what we understand *is* circular. No, it's not. I'm saying that it is impossible to doubt we understand. It's just playing with words. My point about caring is that it makes it clear that we intuitively make a distinction between merely being aware of something and understanding it. I'll try to explain how we know we understand because we care about what we understand is circular. Note the use of the word understand towards the left edge of the statement in quotes followed by another instance of the word understand. You should read it as we know we understand because we care about X. My only intention in repeating the word was to make it clear that the thing that we care about is the thing that we understand. It is the caring which is a symptom of understanding. The absence of that symptom of caring in a machine indicates to me that there is a lack of understanding. Things which understand can care, but things that cannot care cannot understand. Now that isn't circular but that's a poor sign of understanding. I care very much for women but I can't say that I understand them. That's a cliche. You may not be able to understand women completely, but you are not likely to confuse them with a sack of potatoes in a dress. With a computer, the dress might be all that a security camera search engine might look for, and may very well categorize a sack of potatoes as a woman if it happens to be wearing a dress. I understand the rules of English grammar and punctuation but care little of it. Yes, you don't have to care about it, but you can care about it if you want to. A machine does not have that option. It can't try harder to follow proper grammar, it can only assign a priority to the task. It has no feeling for which tasks are assigned which priority, which is the entire utility of machines. I'm sure you can think of examples. So the two are not correlated, caring and understanding. Can you explain why the word understanding is a synonym for kindness and caring? A coincidence? Caring is not something that can really be measured in humans while caring can be measured in machines/computers. Give me a break. For example, one might define caring about something means it is thinking a lot about it You might define warm feelings by the onset of influenza but that is a false equivalence. , where a lot means some threshold like over 50% resources are dedicated to think about something for a while (a nonzero, finite span of time). These days, we can multitask and look up the resource monitor to see what the CPU cares about, if anything. That has nothing whatsover to do with caring. Does the amount of money in your wallet tell you how much your wallet values money? If it doesn't care about anything, it uses close to 0% and is called idle. Next you are going to tell me that when a stuffed animal doesn't eat anything it must be because it is full - but we have no way of knowing if we are hungry ourselves. But if I am running an intensive computation while typing this and look at my resource monitor, I can see measurements indicating that my CPU cares much more about the intensive computation rather than what I am typing. Does that mean the CPU understands what it is doing? No. Likewise with human brains: we can care a lot about something but have little to no understanding of it. Your entire argument is a defense of the Pathetic fallacy. Nothing you have said could not apply to any inanimate object, cartoon, abstract concept etc. Anyone can say 'you can't prove ice cream isn't melting because it's sad'. It's ridiculous. Find the universe. It is more interesting than making up stories about CPUs cares, kindnesses, and understanding. This is analogous to saying We are Unicorns because care about Unicorns. No, this is analogous to you not understanding what I mean and unintentionally making a straw man of my argument. Well, be honest here, you changed a phrasing. You went from (paraphrasing) we know we understand because we care that we understand to You know we understand because we care about X. Correct me if I'm wrong. Correcting you. You're wrong. What I said was Because we care about what we understand, and we identify with it personally. You misinterpreted it, then accuse me of meaning what you said,
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
I probably shouldn't be talking to someone who thinks distinguishing a sack of potatoes from a woman means understanding women. News flash: understand tacitly implies understand completely. On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 8:37 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:09:44 AM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 4:46 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 4:31:55 AM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 11:37:14 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: You keep claiming that we understand this and that or know this and that. And, yes, saying something along the lines of we know we understand because we care about what we understand *is* circular. No, it's not. I'm saying that it is impossible to doubt we understand. It's just playing with words. My point about caring is that it makes it clear that we intuitively make a distinction between merely being aware of something and understanding it. I'll try to explain how we know we understand because we care about what we understand is circular. Note the use of the word understand towards the left edge of the statement in quotes followed by another instance of the word understand. You should read it as we know we understand because we care about X. My only intention in repeating the word was to make it clear that the thing that we care about is the thing that we understand. It is the caring which is a symptom of understanding. The absence of that symptom of caring in a machine indicates to me that there is a lack of understanding. Things which understand can care, but things that cannot care cannot understand. Now that isn't circular but that's a poor sign of understanding. I care very much for women but I can't say that I understand them. That's a cliche. You may not be able to understand women completely, but you are not likely to confuse them with a sack of potatoes in a dress. With a computer, the dress might be all that a security camera search engine might look for, and may very well categorize a sack of potatoes as a woman if it happens to be wearing a dress. I understand the rules of English grammar and punctuation but care little of it. Yes, you don't have to care about it, but you can care about it if you want to. A machine does not have that option. It can't try harder to follow proper grammar, it can only assign a priority to the task. It has no feeling for which tasks are assigned which priority, which is the entire utility of machines. I'm sure you can think of examples. So the two are not correlated, caring and understanding. Can you explain why the word understanding is a synonym for kindness and caring? A coincidence? Caring is not something that can really be measured in humans while caring can be measured in machines/computers. Give me a break. For example, one might define caring about something means it is thinking a lot about it You might define warm feelings by the onset of influenza but that is a false equivalence. , where a lot means some threshold like over 50% resources are dedicated to think about something for a while (a nonzero, finite span of time). These days, we can multitask and look up the resource monitor to see what the CPU cares about, if anything. That has nothing whatsover to do with caring. Does the amount of money in your wallet tell you how much your wallet values money? If it doesn't care about anything, it uses close to 0% and is called idle. Next you are going to tell me that when a stuffed animal doesn't eat anything it must be because it is full - but we have no way of knowing if we are hungry ourselves. But if I am running an intensive computation while typing this and look at my resource monitor, I can see measurements indicating that my CPU cares much more about the intensive computation rather than what I am typing. Does that mean the CPU understands what it is doing? No. Likewise with human brains: we can care a lot about something but have little to no understanding of it. Your entire argument is a defense of the Pathetic fallacy. Nothing you have said could not apply to any inanimate object, cartoon, abstract concept etc. Anyone can say 'you can't prove ice cream isn't melting because it's sad'. It's ridiculous. Find the universe. It is more interesting than making up stories about CPUs cares, kindnesses, and understanding. This is analogous to saying We are Unicorns because care about Unicorns. No, this is analogous to you not understanding what I mean and unintentionally making a straw man of my argument. Well, be honest here, you changed a phrasing. You went from (paraphrasing) we know we understand because we care that we understand to You know we understand because we care about X. Correct
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 11:58:08 AM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: I probably shouldn't be talking to someone who thinks distinguishing a sack of potatoes from a woman means understanding women. News flash: understand tacitly implies understand completely. If you define complete understanding as impossible a priori, and you insist that understanding must be complete, then you have just removed the word from the English language. On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 8:37 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:09:44 AM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 4:46 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 4:31:55 AM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 11:37:14 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: You keep claiming that we understand this and that or know this and that. And, yes, saying something along the lines of we know we understand because we care about what we understand *is* circular. No, it's not. I'm saying that it is impossible to doubt we understand. It's just playing with words. My point about caring is that it makes it clear that we intuitively make a distinction between merely being aware of something and understanding it. I'll try to explain how we know we understand because we care about what we understand is circular. Note the use of the word understand towards the left edge of the statement in quotes followed by another instance of the word understand. You should read it as we know we understand because we care about X. My only intention in repeating the word was to make it clear that the thing that we care about is the thing that we understand. It is the caring which is a symptom of understanding. The absence of that symptom of caring in a machine indicates to me that there is a lack of understanding. Things which understand can care, but things that cannot care cannot understand. Now that isn't circular but that's a poor sign of understanding. I care very much for women but I can't say that I understand them. That's a cliche. You may not be able to understand women completely, but you are not likely to confuse them with a sack of potatoes in a dress. With a computer, the dress might be all that a security camera search engine might look for, and may very well categorize a sack of potatoes as a woman if it happens to be wearing a dress. I understand the rules of English grammar and punctuation but care little of it. Yes, you don't have to care about it, but you can care about it if you want to. A machine does not have that option. It can't try harder to follow proper grammar, it can only assign a priority to the task. It has no feeling for which tasks are assigned which priority, which is the entire utility of machines. I'm sure you can think of examples. So the two are not correlated, caring and understanding. Can you explain why the word understanding is a synonym for kindness and caring? A coincidence? Caring is not something that can really be measured in humans while caring can be measured in machines/computers. Give me a break. For example, one might define caring about something means it is thinking a lot about it You might define warm feelings by the onset of influenza but that is a false equivalence. , where a lot means some threshold like over 50% resources are dedicated to think about something for a while (a nonzero, finite span of time). These days, we can multitask and look up the resource monitor to see what the CPU cares about, if anything. That has nothing whatsover to do with caring. Does the amount of money in your wallet tell you how much your wallet values money? If it doesn't care about anything, it uses close to 0% and is called idle. Next you are going to tell me that when a stuffed animal doesn't eat anything it must be because it is full - but we have no way of knowing if we are hungry ourselves. But if I am running an intensive computation while typing this and look at my resource monitor, I can see measurements indicating that my CPU cares much more about the intensive computation rather than what I am typing. Does that mean the CPU understands what it is doing? No. Likewise with human brains: we can care a lot about something but have little to no understanding of it. Your entire argument is a defense of the Pathetic fallacy. Nothing you have said could not apply to any inanimate object, cartoon, abstract concept etc. Anyone can say 'you can't prove ice cream isn't melting because it's sad'. It's ridiculous. Find the universe. It is more interesting than making up stories about CPUs cares, kindnesses, and understanding. This is analogous to saying We
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
Perhaps one should define things such that it can be impolemented by any arbitrary finite state machine, no mater how large. Then, while there may not be a limit to the capacity of finite state machines, each such machine has a finite capacity, and therefore in none of these machines can one implement the Peano axiom that every integer has a successor. But some other properties of integers are valid if they are valid in every finite state machine that implement arithmetic modulo prime numbers. I'm not into the foundations of math, I'll leave that to Bruno :) . But since we are machines with a finite brain capacity, and even the entire visible universe has only a finite information content, we should be able to replace real analysis with discrete analysis as explained by Doron. Saibal Citeren Brian Tenneson tenn...@gmail.com: Interesting read. The problem I have with this is that in set theory, there are several examples of sets who owe their existence to axioms alone. In other words, there is an axiom that states there is a set X such that (blah, blah, blah). How are we to know which sets/notions are meaningless concepts? Because to me, it sounds like Doron's personal opinion that some concepts are meaningless while other concepts like huge, unknowable, and tiny are not meaningless. Is there anything that would remove the opinion portion of this? How is the second axiom an improvement while containing words like huge, unknowable, and tiny?? quote So I deny even the existence of the Peano axiom that every integer has a successor. Eventually we would get an overflow error in the big computer in the sky, and the sum and product of any two integers is well-defined only if the result is less than p, or if one wishes, one can compute them modulo p. Since p is so large, this is not a practical problem, since the overflow in our earthly computers comes so much sooner than the overflow errors in the big computer in the sky. end quote What if the big computer in the sky is infinite? Or if all computers are finite in capacity yet there is no largest computer? What if NO computer activity is relevant to the set of numbers that exist mathematically? On Monday, April 22, 2013 11:28:46 AM UTC-7, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote: See here: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimPDF/real.pdf Saibal To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript:. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Wednesday, April 24, 2013 8:49:00 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 23 Apr 2013, at 22:07, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 5:11:06 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 22 Apr 2013, at 19:14, Craig Weinberg wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. You can represent many real numbers by the program computing their approximation. You can fan constructively on all real numbers (like the UD does notably). Only if a brain uses some non computable real number as an oracle, with all decimals given in one strike, then we cannot simulate it with Turing machine, but this needs to make the mind actually infinite. If the mind is what is real, then there are no decimals. But there are decimal, and so if you are correct, the mind is not real. But the mind is real, so you are not correct. How do you know that the mind uses decimals? It seems that our natural understanding is primarily in ratios and real number type concepts. Decimals could be a notion derived from stepping down experience through the body, but the native experiential fabric of all has no decimal content. The brain is the public representation of the history, and as such, it can only be observed from the reduced 3p set of qualia. The 3p reduction may rationalize the appearance. From an absolute perspective, all phenomena are temporary partitions within the one strike of eternity. OK. So the statement above is just a statement of non-comp, not an argument for non comp, as it fails to give us what is that non computable real playing a role in cognition. What does the machine say when we ask it why it can't understand pi without approximating it? One machine can answer It seems that I can understand PI without approximating it. PI is the ratio of the length of a circle divided by its perimeter, and a circle is the locus of the point in a plane which share the same distance with respect to some point. Then the machine drew a circle on the ground and said, look, it seems PI is about a tiny bigger than 3. Are there any machines that do as we do, and say 'pi is the unchanging ratio between the distance across the circle compared to the distance around it, and a circle is self evident pattern which manifests literally as [circle shape] and figuratively as any pattern of returning to the starting point repeatedly. But there is something correct. A computer, nor a brain, can simulate consciousness. Nor can a computer simlulate the number one, or the number two. It has to borrow them from arithmetical truth. Then why would your son in law's computer brain provide him with consciousness? It is not the computer brain which provides him consciousness. The computer brain provides him a way to manifest his consciousness in your restaurant, and to get pleasant qualia of some good food (I hope). What provides the consciousness is God, or (arithmetical) truth. Nobody can program that, in the same sense than nobody can program the number one. But we can write program making possible to manifest the number one, or to make some consciousness manifest relatively to you. Ok, but why assume that it is arithmetical truth which is God rather than feeling? Feeling and being are an Art. Doing and knowing are a science. Science makes sense as a derivative of art, but art makes no sense as a function of science. It isn't necessary, and arithmetic truth is about the necessary. Even if we say that arithmetic truth is art, it is certainly only one kind of art among many. If I'm right, and I think I have every reason to guess that I am, then arithmetic is a feeling about doing which is one step removed from both feeling and moving - a step which can provides a clarity and universality that is unavailable in any other form of understanding, but it is precisely that precision, that clarity and universality which comes at the cost of intimacy with all that feels and does. Arithmetic is detachment from physics and psyche, not the source. Multisense realism is the idea that your view, the Platonic view, which places arithmetic at the top, or the Idealist view which places psyche at the top, or the Materialist view are all three valid almost entirely, and that through each of them, a self-consistent truthful view of the universe can be validated. Any of these three views can be used to explain the other two, but only the view which explains all three in terms of sensory-motor participation, aka being-doing or sense can explain all three at once without over-signifying one and under-signifying the other. God cannot be a
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 22 Apr 2013, at 19:14, Craig Weinberg wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. You can represent many real numbers by the program computing their approximation. You can fan constructively on all real numbers (like the UD does notably). Only if a brain uses some non computable real number as an oracle, with all decimals given in one strike, then we cannot simulate it with Turing machine, but this needs to make the mind actually infinite. So the statement above is just a statement of non-comp, not an argument for non comp, as it fails to give us what is that non computable real playing a role in cognition. But there is something correct. A computer, nor a brain, can simulate consciousness. Nor can a computer simlulate the number one, or the number two. It has to borrow them from arithmetical truth. Bruno -- 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?hl=en . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Monday, April 22, 2013 10:23:04 PM UTC-4, Russell Standish wrote: On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 08:06:29PM +0200, Telmo Menezes wrote: On 22 avr. 2013, at 19:14, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. Of course it can, the same way it represents the letter A, as some sequence of bits. And it can perform symbolic computations with it. It can calculate pi/2 + pi/2 = pi and so on. To expand a bit on Telmo's comment, the computer represents pi, e, sqrt(2) and so on as a set of properties, or algorithms. Computers can happily compute exactly with any computable number (which are of measure zero in the reals). They cannot represent nondescribable numbers, and cannot compute with noncomputable numbers (such as Chaitin's Omega). Also, computers do not compute with rational numbers, they compute with integers (often of fixed word size, but that restriction can easily be lifted, at the cost of performance). Rational numbers can obviously be represented as a pair of integers. What are called real numbers in some computer languages, or more accurately float numbers in other computer languages, are actually integers that have been mapped in a non-uniform way onto subsets of the real number line. Their properties are such that they efficiently generate adequate approximations to continuous mathematical models. There is a whole branch of mathematics devoted to determining what adequate means in this context. I think there are some clues there as to why computation can never generate awareness. While a computer can approximate the reals to an arbitrary degree of precision, we must delimit that degree programmatically. A machine has no preference about what is adequate, and can compute decimal places for a thousand years without coming any closer to conceiving of the particular significance of pi to circle geometry. I'll paste the next comment from the OP of the first. I think it's interesting that he also has noticed the connection between biological origins in the single cell and non-computability, but he is looking at it from QM perspective. My view is to focus on the single cell origin as a single autopoietic event origin...an event which lasts an entire lifetime. If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. This is simply a HW problem you can't get around with the current technology. With Quantum Computing it may be possible to make large models where all pixels are part of one structure build on entanglement. Man comes from a single cell and that means that entanglement could bind the cells together, icluding our cells dedicated to building the internal cinema. But it is still not enough to create the necessary understanding of the picture. Gödels theorem states than there are problems that are unsolvable within the system, that you need something from without the system, and computers are fully within the system and as man can solve these problems he must have something from without this system. This understanding you wouldn't get if you don't use Gödels theorem, so you put fences up and around you hindering your expansion of your understanding. BTW I am a computer scientist educated at Datalogical Institute at the University of Copenhagen, and have worked with Artificial Intelligence, Numerical Analysis and Combinatorial Optimization, all ways to bring pseudo intelligence to computers. Craig Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.aujavascript: 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 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?hl=en. For more options, visit
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
Interesting read. The problem I have with this is that in set theory, there are several examples of sets who owe their existence to axioms alone. In other words, there is an axiom that states there is a set X such that (blah, blah, blah). How are we to know which sets/notions are meaningless concepts? Because to me, it sounds like Doron's personal opinion that some concepts are meaningless while other concepts like huge, unknowable, and tiny are not meaningless. Is there anything that would remove the opinion portion of this? How is the second axiom an improvement while containing words like huge, unknowable, and tiny?? quote So I deny even the existence of the Peano axiom that every integer has a successor. Eventually we would get an overflow error in the big computer in the sky, and the sum and product of any two integers is well-defined only if the result is less than p, or if one wishes, one can compute them modulo p. Since p is so large, this is not a practical problem, since the overflow in our earthly computers comes so much sooner than the overflow errors in the big computer in the sky. end quote What if the big computer in the sky is infinite? Or if all computers are finite in capacity yet there is no largest computer? What if NO computer activity is relevant to the set of numbers that exist mathematically? On Monday, April 22, 2013 11:28:46 AM UTC-7, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote: See here: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimPDF/real.pdf Saibal To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript:. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Jason -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 5:11:06 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 22 Apr 2013, at 19:14, Craig Weinberg wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. You can represent many real numbers by the program computing their approximation. You can fan constructively on all real numbers (like the UD does notably). Only if a brain uses some non computable real number as an oracle, with all decimals given in one strike, then we cannot simulate it with Turing machine, but this needs to make the mind actually infinite. If the mind is what is real, then there are no decimals. The brain is the public representation of the history, and as such, it can only be observed from the reduced 3p set of qualia. The 3p reduction may rationalize the appearance. From an absolute perspective, all phenomena are temporary partitions within the one strike of eternity. So the statement above is just a statement of non-comp, not an argument for non comp, as it fails to give us what is that non computable real playing a role in cognition. What does the machine say when we ask it why it can't understand pi without approximating it? But there is something correct. A computer, nor a brain, can simulate consciousness. Nor can a computer simlulate the number one, or the number two. It has to borrow them from arithmetical truth. Then why would your son in law's computer brain provide him with consciousness? Craig Bruno -- 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. Craig Jason -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. How do we know that what humans do is understand things rather than just compute things? -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? The people who buy such software and don't return it. All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. It's a little more sophisticated than that. There are CAPTCHA defeating OCR programs that recognize letters distorted in ways they have never previously seen before: http://www.slideshare.net/rachelshadoan/machine-learning-methods-for-captcha-recognition You need more than a simple look up table for that capability. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Sounds like what goes on when someone dreams in the dark. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. It doesn't point out anything, it is an intuition pump ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump ) that succeeds in swaying people to an apparently obvious conclusion (if they don't think too deeply about it). Jason -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 4:31:05 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. How do we know that what humans do is understand things rather than just compute things? Because we care about what we understand, and we identify with it personally. Understanding is used also to mean compassion. When someone demonstrates a lack of human understanding, we say that they are behaving robotically, like a machine, etc. Questions like, How do you know you are conscious?, or How do you know that you feel? are sophistry. How do you know that you can ask that question? Craig -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 4:46:52 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? The people who buy such software and don't return it. All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. It's a little more sophisticated than that. There are CAPTCHA defeating OCR programs that recognize letters distorted in ways they have never previously seen before: http://www.slideshare.net/rachelshadoan/machine-learning-methods-for-captcha-recognition You need more than a simple look up table for that capability. I don't deny that, but you still only need a more sophisticated algorithm, you don't need to 'see' anything or understand characters. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Sounds like what goes on when someone dreams in the dark. If that were the case then we would not need a video screen, we could simply look at the part of the computer where the chip is showing videos to itself and put a big magnifying glass on it. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. It doesn't point out anything, it is an intuition pump ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump ) that succeeds in swaying people to an apparently obvious conclusion (if they don't think too deeply about it). Intuition pumps are exactly what are needed to understand consciousness. The conclusion is obvious because the alternative is absurd, and the absurdity stems from trying to project public physics into the realm of private physics. It is a category error and the Chinese Room demonstrates that. What makes you so sure that intuition is not the only way to find consciousness? Craig Jason -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 5:19 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 4:46:52 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? The people who buy such software and don't return it. All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. It's a little more sophisticated than that. There are CAPTCHA defeating OCR programs that recognize letters distorted in ways they have never previously seen before: http://www.slideshare.net/**rachelshadoan/machine-** learning-methods-for-captcha-**recognitionhttp://www.slideshare.net/rachelshadoan/machine-learning-methods-for-captcha-recognition You need more than a simple look up table for that capability. I don't deny that, but you still only need a more sophisticated algorithm, you don't need to 'see' anything or understand characters. To recognize a character (in most algorithms that do so) must consider multiple the values of pixels at once, which was the whole point of me bringing up this example. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Sounds like what goes on when someone dreams in the dark. If that were the case then we would not need a video screen, we could simply look at the part of the computer where the chip is showing videos to itself and put a big magnifying glass on it. You could plug the electronics of the computer up to your optic nerve in a way that let you see the screen without any photons having to enter your eyes at all. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. It doesn't point out anything, it is an intuition pump ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Intuition_pumphttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump) that succeeds in swaying people to an apparently obvious conclusion (if they don't think too deeply about it). Intuition pumps are exactly what are needed to understand consciousness. They can be used and misused. The conclusion is obvious because the alternative is absurd, and the absurdity stems from trying to project public physics into the realm of private physics. It is a category error and the Chinese Room demonstrates that. What makes you so sure that intuition is not the only way to find consciousness? Our intuitions were evolved to suit our survival and propagation, why should we expect them to be better at locating consciousness than reasoned thought? Jason -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 4:31:05 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. How do we know that what humans do is understand things rather than just compute things? Because we care about what we understand, and we identify with it personally. Understanding is used also to mean compassion. When someone demonstrates a lack of human understanding, we say that they are behaving robotically, like a machine, etc. Questions like, How do you know you are conscious?, or How do you know that you feel? are sophistry. How do you know that you can ask that question? Sounds circular. we do understand things because we care about what we understand. The type of understanding I was referring to was not about compassion. Why is it so strange to think that we are stuck in a big Chinese room, without really understanding anything but being adept at pushing symbols around? -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:59:26 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 4:31:05 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. How do we know that what humans do is understand things rather than just compute things? Because we care about what we understand, and we identify with it personally. Understanding is used also to mean compassion. When someone demonstrates a lack of human understanding, we say that they are behaving robotically, like a machine, etc. Questions like, How do you know you are conscious?, or How do you know that you feel? are sophistry. How do you know that you can ask that question? Sounds circular. we do understand things because we care about what we understand. The type of understanding I was referring to was not about compassion. Why is it so strange to think that we are stuck in a big Chinese room, without really understanding anything but being adept at pushing symbols around? It's not circular, I was trying to be clear about the difference between computation and understanding. Computation is variations on the theme of counting, but counting does not help us understand. A dog might be able to count how many times we speak a command, and we can train them to respond to the third instance we speak it, but we can use any command to associate with the action of sitting or begging. We are not in a Chinese room because we know what kinds of things the word 'sit' actually might refer to. We know what kind of context it relates to, and we understand what our options for interpretation and participation are. The dog has no options. It can follow the conditioned response and get the reward, or it can fail to do that. It doesn't know what else to do. Craig -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
You keep claiming that we understand this and that or know this and that. And, yes, saying something along the lines of we know we understand because we care about what we understand *is* circular. Still doesn't rule out the possibility that we are in a Chinese room right now, manipulating symbols without really understanding what's going on but able to adeptly shuffle the symbols around fast enough to appear functional. If that is the case, AI might be able to replicate human behavior if human behavior is all computation-based. On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:25 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:59:26 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 4:31:05 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. How do we know that what humans do is understand things rather than just compute things? Because we care about what we understand, and we identify with it personally. Understanding is used also to mean compassion. When someone demonstrates a lack of human understanding, we say that they are behaving robotically, like a machine, etc. Questions like, How do you know you are conscious?, or How do you know that you feel? are sophistry. How do you know that you can ask that question? Sounds circular. we do understand things because we care about what we understand. The type of understanding I was referring to was not about compassion. Why is it so strange to think that we are stuck in a big Chinese room, without really understanding anything but being adept at pushing symbols around? It's not circular, I was trying to be clear about the difference between computation and understanding. Computation is variations on the theme of counting, but counting does not help us understand. A dog might be able to count how many times we speak a command, and we can train them to respond to the third instance we speak it, but we can use any command to associate with the action of sitting or begging. We are not in a Chinese room because we know what kinds of things the word 'sit' actually might refer to. We know what kind of context it relates to, and we understand what our options for interpretation and participation are. The dog has no options. It can follow the conditioned response and get the reward, or it can fail to do that. It doesn't know what else to do. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/bY0TNHtwNh8/unsubscribe?hl=en . To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:09:42 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 5:19 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 4:46:52 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 3:58:33 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: If you think about your own vision, you can see millions of pixels constantly, you are aware of the full picture, but a computer can't do that, the cpu can only know about 32 or 64 pixels, eventually multiplied by number of kernels, but it see them as single bit's so in reality the can't be conscious of a full picture, not even of the full color at a single pixel. He is making the same mistake Searle did regarding the Chinese room. He is conflating what the CPU can see at one time (analogous to rule follower in Chinese room) with what the program can know. Consider the program of a neural network: it can be processed by a sequentially operating CPU processing one connection at a time, but the simulated network itself can see any arbitrary number of inputs at once. How do he propose OCR software can recognize letters if it can only see a single pixel at a time? Who says OCR software can recognize letters? The people who buy such software and don't return it. All that it needs to do is execute some algorithm sequentially and blindly against a table of expected values. It's a little more sophisticated than that. There are CAPTCHA defeating OCR programs that recognize letters distorted in ways they have never previously seen before: http://www.slideshare.net/**rachelshadoan/machine-** learning-methods-for-captcha-**recognitionhttp://www.slideshare.net/rachelshadoan/machine-learning-methods-for-captcha-recognition You need more than a simple look up table for that capability. I don't deny that, but you still only need a more sophisticated algorithm, you don't need to 'see' anything or understand characters. To recognize a character (in most algorithms that do so) must consider multiple the values of pixels at once, which was the whole point of me bringing up this example. Multiple values of pixels aren't characters though. No pixels are even necessary - which is why I brought up the OCR file emulator. The OCR will interpolate just as well from hexadecimal code as it would from adjacent pixels in bitmap. This is relevant because if we can see that computation can only offer us approximations of real numbers, or real circles, then we could only expect that it could offer an approximation of sense - which doesn't work for sense, because it is that which cannot be approximated or generalized. It is 100% proprietary because it is the principle through which privacy itself is defined. There need not be any recognition of the character as a character at at all, let alone any seeing. A program could convert a Word document into an input file for an OCR program without there ever being any optical activity - no camera, no screen caps, no monitor or printer at all. Completely in the dark, the bits of the Word file could be converted into the bits of an emulated optical scan, and presto, invisible optics. Sounds like what goes on when someone dreams in the dark. If that were the case then we would not need a video screen, we could simply look at the part of the computer where the chip is showing videos to itself and put a big magnifying glass on it. You could plug the electronics of the computer up to your optic nerve in a way that let you see the screen without any photons having to enter your eyes at all. Not without a driver to convert the meaningless patterns of bits into something that your visual cortex expects to see. If you used that same driver on a person who had been blind since birth, they would not be able to see, and what they would feel would not likely have the same meaning. Blindsight tells us that information processing can occur without any personal aesthetic experience, so there is no reason at all to give the benefit of the doubt to a CPU that its processing is clothed in any sensory qualia, let alone some specific human qualia. Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. It doesn't point out anything, it is an intuition pump ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Intuition_pumphttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump) that succeeds in swaying people to an apparently obvious conclusion (if they don't think too deeply about it). Intuition pumps are exactly what are needed to understand consciousness. They can be used and misused. I agree.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 11:37:14 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: You keep claiming that we understand this and that or know this and that. And, yes, saying something along the lines of we know we understand because we care about what we understand *is* circular. No, it's not. I'm saying that it is impossible to doubt we understand. It's just playing with words. My point about caring is that it makes it clear that we intuitively make a distinction between merely being aware of something and understanding it. Still doesn't rule out the possibility that we are in a Chinese room right now, manipulating symbols without really understanding what's going on but able to adeptly shuffle the symbols around fast enough to appear functional. Why not? If we were manipulating symbols, why would we care about them. What you're saying doesn't even make sense. We are having a conversation. We care about the conversation because we understand it. If I was being dictated to write in another language instead, I would not care about the conversation. Are you claiming that there is no difference between having a conversation in English and dictating text in a language you don't understand? If that is the case, AI might be able to replicate human behavior if human behavior is all computation-based. Yes and no. Human behavior can never be generic. The more generic it is, the more inhuman it is. AI could imitate a particular person's behavior and fool X% of a given audience, but because human behavior is ultimately driven by proprietary preferences, there will probably always be some ratio of audience size to duration of exposure which will wind up with a positive detection of simulation. The threshold may be much lower than it seems. Judging from existing simulation, it may not always be possible to determine absolutely that something is a simulation, but I would be willing to bet that some part of the brain lights up differently when presented with a simulated presentation vs a genuine one. Craig On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:25 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:59:26 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, April 23, 2013 4:31:05 PM UTC-4, Brian Tenneson wrote: On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: Searle wasn't wrong. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to point out that computation is a disconnected, anesthetic function which is accomplished with no need for understanding of larger contexts. How do we know that what humans do is understand things rather than just compute things? Because we care about what we understand, and we identify with it personally. Understanding is used also to mean compassion. When someone demonstrates a lack of human understanding, we say that they are behaving robotically, like a machine, etc. Questions like, How do you know you are conscious?, or How do you know that you feel? are sophistry. How do you know that you can ask that question? Sounds circular. we do understand things because we care about what we understand. The type of understanding I was referring to was not about compassion. Why is it so strange to think that we are stuck in a big Chinese room, without really understanding anything but being adept at pushing symbols around? It's not circular, I was trying to be clear about the difference between computation and understanding. Computation is variations on the theme of counting, but counting does not help us understand. A dog might be able to count how many times we speak a command, and we can train them to respond to the third instance we speak it, but we can use any command to associate with the action of sitting or begging. We are not in a Chinese room because we know what kinds of things the word 'sit' actually might refer to. We know what kind of context it relates to, and we understand what our options for interpretation and participation are. The dog has no options. It can follow the conditioned response and get the reward, or it can fail to do that. It doesn't know what else to do. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/bY0TNHtwNh8/unsubscribe?hl=en . To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On 22 avr. 2013, at 19:14, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. Of course it can, the same way it represents the letter A, as some sequence of bits. And it can perform symbolic computations with it. It can calculate pi/2 + pi/2 = pi and so on. 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
See here: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimPDF/real.pdf Saibal Citeren Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Monday, April 22, 2013 2:06:29 PM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On 22 avr. 2013, at 19:14, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. Of course it can, the same way it represents the letter A, as some sequence of bits. And it can perform symbolic computations with it. It can calculate pi/2 + pi/2 = pi and so on. It's not representing pi with A though, it's representing a digital sequence which is arbitrarily truncated or rounded off at some point. It is not pi, but pi-ish. 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Monday, April 22, 2013 2:28:46 PM UTC-4, smi...@zonnet.nl wrote: See here: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimPDF/real.pdf Ah yes, we come full circle... Develop math to help understand reality realize that math is different from reality build instruments using math which prove that math can only see the mathematical aspects of reality decide that reality can't be real and make plans to replace it with math. Craig Saibal Citeren Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. -- 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript:. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Rationals vs Reals in Comp
On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 08:06:29PM +0200, Telmo Menezes wrote: On 22 avr. 2013, at 19:14, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: A quote from someone on Facebook. Any comments? Computers can only do computations for rational numbers, not for real numbers. Every number in a computer is represented as rational. No computer can represent pi or any other real number... So even when consciousness can be explained by computations, no computer can actually simulate it. Of course it can, the same way it represents the letter A, as some sequence of bits. And it can perform symbolic computations with it. It can calculate pi/2 + pi/2 = pi and so on. To expand a bit on Telmo's comment, the computer represents pi, e, sqrt(2) and so on as a set of properties, or algorithms. Computers can happily compute exactly with any computable number (which are of measure zero in the reals). They cannot represent nondescribable numbers, and cannot compute with noncomputable numbers (such as Chaitin's Omega). Also, computers do not compute with rational numbers, they compute with integers (often of fixed word size, but that restriction can easily be lifted, at the cost of performance). Rational numbers can obviously be represented as a pair of integers. What are called real numbers in some computer languages, or more accurately float numbers in other computer languages, are actually integers that have been mapped in a non-uniform way onto subsets of the real number line. Their properties are such that they efficiently generate adequate approximations to continuous mathematical models. There is a whole branch of mathematics devoted to determining what adequate means in this context. Cheers -- 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 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?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
