Ex Machina, the film, about the Turing Test

[Alan Grayson]

If you haven't viewed it, please do so. It's about the Turing Test, science fiction, but the "special effects" aren't primarily photographic bells and whistles, but the dialogue. the text, the logic of the script. Recently, we have argued about consciousness, what it is, and how we can test for it in the context of AI. I claimed that we could do some superficial surgery to determine whether the subject of the test was a robot or a conscious entity. But this is completely mistaken. All that that would reveal is whether the subject was artificial, not whether it was "conscious". The subject could have been a black box, and still showing signs of what we can't really define; consciousness. I think Ex Machina provides an answer of what we need to look for. Please view it and report back. But do NOT read the plot, say in Wiki. It's a spoiler. AG

[Russell Standish]

Alas not available on Netflix Australia. It'll have to wait until
if/when I subscribe to Amazon Prime briefly.

I'm also not really prepared to purchase a VPN just to watch other
countries' Netflix connections, for much the same reason as I only
subscribe to one streamer - so it might have to wait until if/when I
do live in a country that has it in the Netflix catalogue.

The tangled web of movie copyright arrangements... Bah!

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[Alan Grayson]

On Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 7:26:32 PM UTC-6, Russell Standish wrote:

Alas not available on Netflix Australia. It'll have to wait until
if/when I subscribe to Amazon Prime briefly.

I'm also not really prepared to purchase a VPN just to watch other
countries' Netflix connections, for much the same reason as I only
subscribe to one streamer - so it might have to wait until if/when I
do live in a country that has it in the Netflix catalogue.

You can rent it here for $3.99 US.  https://www.amazon.com/Ex-Machina-Alicia-Vikander/dp/B00VWPQNJ4  AG

The tangled web of movie copyright arrangements... Bah!

On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 02:23:52PM -0700, Alan Grayson wrote:
> If you haven't viewed it, please do so. It's about the Turing Test, science
> fiction, but the "special effects" aren't primarily photographic bells and
> whistles, but the dialogue. the text, the logic of the script. Recently, we
> have argued about consciousness, what it is, and how we can test for it in the
> context of AI. I claimed that we could do some superficial surgery to determine
> whether the subject of the test was a robot or a conscious entity. But this is
> completely mistaken. All that that would reveal is whether the subject was
> artificial, not whether it was "conscious". The subject could have been a black
> box, and still showing signs of what we can't really define; consciousness. I
> think Ex Machina provides an answer of what we need to look for. Please view it
> and report back. But do NOT read the plot, say in Wiki. It's a spoiler. AG
>
>
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> to everyth...@googlegroups.com.

[Beixiao Robert Liu]

It’s available on YouTube. You could rent it for as little as $4, as long as you finish viewing it within 2 days once your start playing.

Thanks for recommending it. I just viewed it. My wife said that it’s stupid for the boy to trust the AI girl, Ava, so he got what he deserved.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 15, 2020, at 21:26, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
>
> Alas not available on Netflix Australia. It'll have to wait until

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/20200816012618.GA5850%40zen.

[Alan Grayson]

On Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 7:54:35 PM UTC-6, Beixiao Robert Liu wrote:

It’s available on YouTube. You could rent it for as little as $4, as long as you finish viewing it within 2 days once your start playing.

Thanks for recommending it. I just viewed it. My wife said that it’s stupid for the boy to trust the AI girl, Ava, so he got what he deserved.

Too funny! That's hardly the point. AG 

>> to everyth...@googlegroups.com.

>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/
>> everything-list/6c3c8eba-542c-45a6-a79f-ca54202fdcc8o%40googlegroups.com.
>
>
> --
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Principal, High Performance Coders     hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
>                      http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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[Beixiao Robert Liu]

Well, if the inquiry here concerns consciousness, then the question of whether a human should trust the AI, or whether the AI has the capacity to be trusted by a human, ought to be part of the inquiry, right? The movie listed others elements: compassion, sympathy, etc. I guess I was just using my wife’s off-the-cuff comment as a convenient way to suggest that Caleb might set the wrong threshold in his Turing test; and as a result, he gave a pass to the AI too easily, which later proved fatally wrong. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 15, 2020, at 23:29, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Alan Grayson]

On Saturday, August 15, 2020 at 10:36:40 PM UTC-6, Beixiao Robert Liu wrote:

Well, if the inquiry here concerns consciousness, then the question of whether a human should trust the AI, or whether the AI has the capacity to be trusted by a human, ought to be part of the inquiry, right? The movie listed others elements: compassion, sympathy, etc. I guess I was just using my wife’s off-the-cuff comment as a convenient way to suggest that Caleb might set the wrong threshold in his Turing test; and as a result, he gave a pass to the AI too easily, which later proved fatally wrong. 

Sorry. Maybe my comment was too flippant. I just don't think Caleb's mistake in trusting the AI relates to whether the AI is conscious. AG 

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 5:23 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The subject could have been a black box, and still showing signs of what we can't really define; consciousness. I think Ex Machina provides an answer of what we need to look for.

Ex Machina is indeed a great film, I liked it so much I bought the Blu-ray. The answer it says we need to look for is the same one Turing suggested and the same one we used to judge the consciousness of our fellow human beings, intelligent behavior, because it is the only tool we have for such things imperfect though it may be. 

Incidentally if you liked Ex Machina you'll like the 2009 movie "Moon" because, although you wouldn't know it from the title, it has many of the same themes and it's equally well-made. I have the Blu-ray of that one too. I think those are two of the best science-fiction movies made in recent years. It's going to air on showtime-2 starting on August 18.

Moon

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

I like that movie (which I have seen).

I think synthetic biological components are significantly involved, which makes the difference in making Ava conscious..

@philipthrift

[Beixiao Robert Liu]

In Buddhism teachings, a human has eight cognitions. The first five are related to our physical world: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. 

Then there are three related to our spiritual world. 

The sixth cognition is our thinking and emotions. This is where our repository of knowledge is located. All the human knowledge of philosophy, science, technology, arts belongs to the sixth cognition. This includes  mental consciousness, sub-consciousness and these related concepts. 

Then the seventh and eighth senses are uniquely oriental and are near the core theory of Buddhism. The eighth sense is easier to explain than the seventh. 

The eighth sense is the “real-self”, or an inaccurate equivalent of “soul”, that’s the constant between incarnations, regardless one’s life takes the form of this human or that life being on earth.

The seven sense can be roughly said as something between the sixth cognition - our day-to-day thinking - and the eighth cognition. The seventh cognition enables us to perform all the deep and thorough thinking at the sixth cognition level. 

Therefore, according to Buddhism teachings, AI may venture into the realm of the mental consciousness, but will never be able to reach the seventh and eighth cognition. And that seventh and eight cognition is what distinguishes a life being from a non life being. 

Sent from my iPad

On Aug 16, 2020, at 5:02 AM, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[John Clark]

On Sun, Aug 16, 2020 at 9:24 AM Beixiao Robert Liu <b.robe...@gmail.com> wrote:

 > according to Buddhism teachings, AI may venture into the realm of the mental consciousness, but will never be able to reach the seventh and eighth cognition. And that seventh and eight cognition is what distinguishes a life being from a non life being. 

This doesn't just involve AI's, how does Buddha figure out if one of his fellow human beings is conscious or not, or is alive or not?

John K Clark

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[Beixiao Robert Liu]

Let me just clarify that I’m not in any way preaching the Buddhism teaching, but was merely introducing another perspective of looking at the consciousness. 

Buddhism has its own theory and is a closed-loop system. If you accept its premises and basic methodology, then everything else falls into places. Just like other grand theories attempting to offer overarching explanations of the entire world, regardless it’s scientific theory or philosophical theory or religious theory. It’s fair to say that in many, if not all, of these grand theories, there are certain premises or tenets you have to accept without questioning, just like you have to accept that there is no friction in the elementary Newton mechanic world, before moving on to more advanced discussion.

Therefore, if you reject the premise of Buddhism and then all its theories, that’s logical, and not a problem with me. I’m not preaching Buddhism. The problem is that you risk dismissing a useful perspective prematurely, from a purely objective and neutral standpoint. 

Sent from my iPad

On Aug 16, 2020, at 9:31 AM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[John Clark]

On Sun, Aug 16, 2020 at 9:55 AM Beixiao Robert Liu <b.robe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Therefore, if you reject the premise of Buddhism and then all its theories [...]

I'm not rejecting anything I'm just asking a question, if it's not by observing intelligent behavior then how does Buddha figure out if one of his fellow human beings is conscious or not, or is alive or not?

John K Clark

[Beixiao Robert Liu]

First of all, Buddha recognizes that ALL human beings have the capacity of those eight cognitions. 

Then to tell whether a particular human being is using any of these eight cognitions, Buddha certainly observes his behavior. But here, Buddha’s observation is also not limited to the first five cognitions related to the physical world. In other words, Buddha has the ability to “see” characteristics of human beings that ordinary people can’t “see”. This ability to “see” is not limited to Buddha himself. Any enlightened person — what the term Buddha means — will possess such ability. 

Just to give you an example.

In the 1950s and 60s, there was a competition between the US and the Soviet’s intelligence communities, to recruit and develop people who possess “supernatural” cognitive faculties, for example, the ability to see what’s inside a safe deposit box or what’s behind the walls. These are some of the elementary form of Buddha’s ability to “observe”. 

Sent from my iPad

On Aug 16, 2020, at 10:03 AM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Alan Grayson]

On Sunday, August 16, 2020 at 4:37:13 AM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 5:23 PM Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The subject could have been a black box, and still showing signs of what we can't really define; consciousness. I think Ex Machina provides an answer of what we need to look for.

Ex Machina is indeed a great film, I liked it so much I bought the Blu-ray. The answer it says we need to look for is the same one Turing suggested and the same one we used to judge the consciousness of our fellow human beings, intelligent behavior, because it is the only tool we have for such things imperfect though it may be. 

IMO, "intelligence" doesn't work in determining if an AI is "conscious". For example, Trumpers are conscious but not intelligent. The film offers another criterion. AG

[Bruno Marchal]

On 15 Aug 2020, at 23:23, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

If you haven't viewed it, please do so. It's about the Turing Test, science fiction, but the "special effects" aren't primarily photographic bells and whistles, but the dialogue. the text, the logic of the script. Recently, we have argued about consciousness, what it is, and how we can test for it in the context of AI. I claimed that we could do some superficial surgery to determine whether the subject of the test was a robot or a conscious entity. But this is completely mistaken. All that that would reveal is whether the subject was artificial, not whether it was "conscious". The subject could have been a black box, and still showing signs of what we can't really define; consciousness.

Glad to hear that. It looks like you agree with my characterisation of consciousness. It is such that “I am conscious” ones the fact that it is

1) True,

2) (immediately) knowable,

3) indubitable (for the sufficiently reflexive conscious entities),

4) non rationally justifiable (non provable),

5) non definable (without invoking a notion of truth or semantic/model)

Then it is a theorem in elementary arithmetic that all digital machine which introspect itself (in the canonical sense of Gödel 1931) discover “I am conscious”. 

Mechanism adds the fact that there is a level such that we survive a digital brain transplant.

So we do have a theory of consciousness, and it is testable, as physics has to be derived from the measure on the differentiating consciousness flux that this theory implies, and we do get what we observed in nature up to now, avoiding to add the reduction of the wave postulate (that we (of course?) never observe.

We are back at Pythagorus, enriched by the Church-Turing thesis.

Concerning the Turing test, It makes no theoretical sense, but it can make some local practical sense.

I think Ex Machina provides an answer of what we need to look for. Please view it and report back. But do NOT read the plot, say in Wiki. It's a spoiler. AG

Can we find it on Youtube or similar?

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

> On 16 Aug 2020, at 03:36, Beixiao Robert Liu <b.robe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It’s available on YouTube.

OK Thx. I found it, but only in paid version, which I usually avoid.

> You could rent it for as little as $4, as long as you finish viewing it within 2 days once your start playing.
>
> Thanks for recommending it. I just viewed it. My wife said that it’s stupid for the boy to trust the AI girl, Ava, so he got what he deserved.

Oooooh…. Hmm…

---Well I guess I need to see the movie to be more precise here … :)

Bruno

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/E42BBFFB-5C55-4065-A4AC-42426380C2A8%40gmail.com.

[Alan Grayson]

Concerning the Turing test, It makes no theoretical sense, but it can make some local practical sense.

I am not conversant with your system or definitions. All I am asserting is that we believe we are conscious, or shall we say we have a property called "consciousness", but are unable to define exactly (or even approximately?) what it is. Hence, if we encounter a humanoid-type robot that can verbally respond or interact with us, even in the form of a black box, we lack any criteria for determining IF it is conscious. But the movie offers a hint of what to look for. At first I thought it was the concept of time, but that's wrong. The entity in question could have been supplied with a clock and thus could respond as if the concept of time exists; present, past and future. But that's insufficient to qualify for being "conscious". You should view the movie and see what it suggests to you. AG

I think Ex Machina provides an answer of what we need to look for. Please view it and report back. But do NOT read the plot, say in Wiki. It's a spoiler. AG

Can we find it on Youtube or similar?

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 18 Aug 2020, at 08:07, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

Concerning the Turing test, It makes no theoretical sense, but it can make some local practical sense.

I am not conversant with your system or definitions. All I am asserting is that we believe we are conscious, or shall we say we have a property called "consciousness", but are unable to define exactly (or even approximately?) what it is.

OK. But we can make approximation, like “knowledge” or “knowledge of oneself”. Knowledge can be defined axiomatically, but the personal knowledge attached to consciousness, or even just the knowledge of a machine or of any third-person definable entity is not definable by that entity, without invoking a Truth operator (itself not definable by that entity, by Traski theorem).

Hence, if we encounter a humanoid-type robot that can verbally respond or interact with us, even in the form of a black box, we lack any criteria for determining IF it is conscious. But the movie offers a hint of what to look for. At first I thought it was the concept of time, but that's wrong. The entity in question could have been supplied with a clock and thus could respond as if the concept of time exists; present, past and future. But that's insufficient to qualify for being "conscious". You should view the movie and see what it suggests to you. AG

Consciousness attribution is always a sort of projection of oneself to the other(s). We attribute consciousness to an entity when we can recognise oneself in that entity. We could be wrong, of course, like a kid attributing a soul to its Teddy Bear.

You might tell what the movie suggests. (Just put a spoiler alert in the title of the post)

Bruno

I think Ex Machina provides an answer of what we need to look for. Please view it and report back. But do NOT read the plot, say in Wiki. It's a spoiler. AG

Can we find it on Youtube or similar?

Bruno

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Aug 16, 2020 at 10:26 AM Beixiao Robert Liu <b.robe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> First of all, Buddha recognizes that ALL human beings have the capacity of those eight cognitions. 

Why does Buddha assume humans have all eight of those cognitions but computers don't have any regardless of how brilliantly they behave? And if a computer can outsmart Buddha why does it even need those eight cognitions? They didn't seem to do the Buddha any good.

 

> Buddha has the ability to “see” characteristics of human beings that ordinary people can’t “see”. This ability to “see” is not limited to Buddha himself. Any enlightened person — what the term Buddha means — will possess such ability. 

Just as I feared, we've entered the realm of comic book science and religious superstition.

> In the 1950s and 60s, there was a competition between the US and the Soviet’s intelligence communities, to recruit and develop people who possess “supernatural” cognitive faculties, for example, the ability to see what’s inside a safe deposit box or what’s behind the walls.

And that was not the first time Soviet or US taxpayers had their money wasted on nonsense, nor would it be the last.

 John K Clark

[Alan Grayson]

On Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 3:14:10 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 18 Aug 2020, at 08:07, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

Concerning the Turing test, It makes no theoretical sense, but it can make some local practical sense.

I am not conversant with your system or definitions. All I am asserting is that we believe we are conscious, or shall we say we have a property called "consciousness", but are unable to define exactly (or even approximately?) what it is.

OK. But we can make approximation, like “knowledge” or “knowledge of oneself”. Knowledge can be defined axiomatically, but the personal knowledge attached to consciousness, or even just the knowledge of a machine or of any third-person definable entity is not definable by that entity, without invoking a Truth operator (itself not definable by that entity, by Traski theorem).

Hence, if we encounter a humanoid-type robot that can verbally respond or interact with us, even in the form of a black box, we lack any criteria for determining IF it is conscious. But the movie offers a hint of what to look for. At first I thought it was the concept of time, but that's wrong. The entity in question could have been supplied with a clock and thus could respond as if the concept of time exists; present, past and future. But that's insufficient to qualify for being "conscious". You should view the movie and see what it suggests to you. AG

Consciousness attribution is always a sort of projection of oneself to the other(s). We attribute consciousness to an entity when we can recognise oneself in that entity. We could be wrong, of course, like a kid attributing a soul to its Teddy Bear.

You might tell what the movie suggests. (Just put a spoiler alert in the title of the post)

I didn't do that to test the level of interest. AG 

Bruno

I think Ex Machina provides an answer of what we need to look for. Please view it and report back. But do NOT read the plot, say in Wiki. It's a spoiler. AG

Can we find it on Youtube or similar?

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 16 Aug 2020, at 15:24, Beixiao Robert Liu <b.robe...@gmail.com> wrote:

In Buddhism teachings, a human has eight cognitions.

Oh! Like the universal machine. You get the cognitions mode by taking into account Gödel’s incompleteness. 

I abbreviate Gödel’s bewiesibar(‘p’) by []p, p is an arithmetical restricted to the partial computable/decidable one, the so called sigma_1 sentences: that’s the arithmetical version of the Digital Mechanist Hypothesis). 

<>p is an abbreviation of ~[]~p. “T” is for “0 = 0", f for “0 = 1”.

In that case, it can be shown that p, []p, []p & p (theaetetus true opinion), []p & <>t and []p & <>t & p, are equivalent, but very few of those equivalence can be proved by the machine itself, making those five modes obeying different logics and mathematics.

p

[]p

[]p & p

Correspond nicely to Plotinus three primary hypostases

ONE

INTELLECT

SOUL

Or, with less platonic vocabulary

TRUE

BELIEVABLE

KNOWABLE

The modes

[]p & <>t

[]p & <>t & p

Can be motivated through through experiments and defines what is observable by the universal machine. They can also be related to Plotinus platonic reconstruction of Aristotle’s theory of matter, pointing on the presence of non provability and non controllability. 

Those two modes gives the two “matters”: the intelligible matter (quanta, first person plural), and the sensible matter (qualia). The “quantum quanta” appears as special qualia (apparently).

This gives five modes, but incompleteness splits again three of those logics ([]p, []p & <>t, []p & <>t & p) in two, ((corresponding to “provable” versus “true”, making eight "modes of cognition”, or eight ways arithmetic can see itself through universal numbers).

The logic of the modes with the occurence of “& p”, gives first person modes, and describes entities which cannot be defined in any third person description, something inherited by the qualia, consciousness, etc. technically, they entail that the subject obeys some intuitionistic logic.

The logic of the modes with “& <>t” gives the physical modes, and implies a quantum logic and some measure, corresponding to the machine’s ignorance on which computations support her (among an infinity). Recently,  I realised that the existence of this measure exists and can be proved in ZF + some sufficiently large cardinal.

The “& p” makes things non definable.

The “<>t” makes things non provable, which allows the study of the negation of those modes, and things get subtle and counter-intuitive.

The first five are related to our physical world: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. 

Of course, those should be obtained by the particularisation of some of the modes above, if we want to make this coherent with some school go Buddhism. The Hinayana, the Mahayana, the tantric, zen have many school, and variants. Some Buddhists have develop school on logics. It is rather complex. The Plato/Aristotle divide divides also Buddhism. 

Then there are three related to our spiritual world. 

The sixth cognition is our thinking and emotions. This is where our repository of knowledge is located. All the human knowledge of philosophy, science, technology, arts belongs to the sixth cognition. This includes  mental consciousness, sub-consciousness and these related concepts. 

Looks like []p, intellect, mind, ...

Then the seventh and eighth senses are uniquely oriental and are near the core theory of Buddhism. The eighth sense is easier to explain than the seventh. 

The eighth sense is the “real-self”, or an inaccurate equivalent of “soul”, that’s the constant between incarnations, regardless one’s life takes the form of this human or that life being on earth.

That becomes close to the simplest mode (conceptually), but that the machine can not defined the “p” mode. That’s Plotinus One :)

But it might be []p & p (it depends of before or after illumination (“p <-> []p”).

You need to take this with some grain of salt (but not the whole salt shaker!).

The seven sense can be roughly said as something between the sixth cognition - our day-to-day thinking - and the eighth cognition. The seventh cognition enables us to perform all the deep and thorough thinking at the sixth cognition level. 

Maybe []p & <>t? It is unclear.

Therefore, according to Buddhism teachings, AI may venture into the realm of the mental consciousness, but will never be able to reach the seventh and eighth cognition.

Really?

And that seventh and eight cognition is what distinguishes a life being from a non life being. 

The universal machine is born illuminated, in the eight cognition mode, p. But then attached itself to some universal body/representation/number []p, and the laws of arithmetic are such that this one put an infinite mess in Arithmetic, and that is nothing compared to the mess when they met and multiply. 

I explain elsewhere why, if we assume the minimal amount of mechanism (Descartes) to make sense of Darwin, and a notion of finite information, + the Church Turing thesis, the mind body problem becomes a problem of reducing the “hallucination of matter” from the logic of self-reference. It works. It is not well known, and it is normal, given that behind the modes, you have the mood, and the mood today is almost everywhere Aristotelian, with few exception, since about 1500 years in Occident, 800 years in the Middle-East, and it is more complex to figure out in India and China. 

Thanks to Gödel and the logicians, the theology of machine is taught to logicians, but, not many realise, or appreciate, that as a platonic Pythagorean theory, it is testable (as it contains physics, or its invariant (for all universal machine) core).

If interested I give you references, including good books on the mathematics of self-reference. The mode “[]p & p” is a standard variant of []p in the literature.

Bruno

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[Beixiao Liu]

That’s a very thoughtful reply. I’m interested in learning about some of these fields you mentioned. Right now, I don’t know enough about these fields to give an informed reply. 

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 19 Aug 2020, at 05:39, Beixiao Liu <b.robe...@gmail.com> wrote:

That’s a very thoughtful reply. I’m interested in learning about some of these fields you mentioned. Right now, I don’t know enough about these fields to give an informed reply. 

That is fair enough, and rathe normal, as I summed up many years of work, mainly based on the (many) incompleteness and undefinability theorems of the 1930s, and which were axiomatised in a modal logic of provability by Solovay in 1979, by the split logic G and G* (sometimes called GL and GLS, for Gödel, Löb and Solovay).

We might have opportunity to discuss this more. Meanwhile I give you some references on my main papers where I have developed this. It is also in my Phd Thesis (short and long version, but they were written in French, and are easily available on my webpage (which I should update since 2007!).

Your mentioning of Buddhism was quite appropriate, and I might make this clearer in some of the papers below.

Here are some:

Marchal B. The computationalist reformulation of the mind-body problem. Prog Biophys Mol Biol; 2013 Sep;113(1):127-40
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23567157

Marchal B. The Universal Numbers. From Biology to Physics, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2015, Vol. 119, Issue 3, 368-381.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26140993

B. Marchal. The Origin of Physical Laws and Sensations. In 4th International System Administration and Network Engineering Conference, SANE 2004, Amsterdam, 2004.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html (sane04)

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html

Plotinus PDF paper with the link:
Marchal B. A Purely Arithmetical, yet Empirically Falsifiable, Interpretation of Plotinus’ Theory of Matter. In Barry Cooper S. Löwe B., Kent T. F. and Sorbi A., editors, Computation and Logic in the Real World, Third Conference on Computability in Europe June 18-23, pages 263–273. Universita degli studi di Sienna, Dipartimento di Roberto Magari, 2007.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/CiE2007/SIENA.pdf
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/CiE2007/SIENA.pdf

Marchal B. The East, the West and the Universal Machine, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2017, Vol. 131, pp. 251-260.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28919132

Marchal B.  Religion, science and theology, similarity and differences, Dialogo Journal, 2018, Vol. 5, pp. 205-218.
(available at http://www.dialogo-conf.com/archive/)

Bruno

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[Beixiao Robert Liu]

Thanks for recommending these readings. I’ll see how much I can get through. Can’t promise too much at this point. Nowadays we all get too many items on our to-do list, just as you indicated below about your website situation.

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 19, 2020, at 10:51, Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:



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[Alan Grayson]

On Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 8:39:27 AM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 3:14:10 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 18 Aug 2020, at 08:07, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

Concerning the Turing test, It makes no theoretical sense, but it can make some local practical sense.

I am not conversant with your system or definitions. All I am asserting is that we believe we are conscious, or shall we say we have a property called "consciousness", but are unable to define exactly (or even approximately?) what it is.

OK. But we can make approximation, like “knowledge” or “knowledge of oneself”. Knowledge can be defined axiomatically, but the personal knowledge attached to consciousness, or even just the knowledge of a machine or of any third-person definable entity is not definable by that entity, without invoking a Truth operator (itself not definable by that entity, by Traski theorem).

Hence, if we encounter a humanoid-type robot that can verbally respond or interact with us, even in the form of a black box, we lack any criteria for determining IF it is conscious. But the movie offers a hint of what to look for. At first I thought it was the concept of time, but that's wrong. The entity in question could have been supplied with a clock and thus could respond as if the concept of time exists; present, past and future. But that's insufficient to qualify for being "conscious". You should view the movie and see what it suggests to you. AG

Consciousness attribution is always a sort of projection of oneself to the other(s). We attribute consciousness to an entity when we can recognise oneself in that entity. We could be wrong, of course, like a kid attributing a soul to its Teddy Bear.

You might tell what the movie suggests. (Just put a spoiler alert in the title of the post)

I didn't do that to test the level of interest. AG 

Bruno

The entity being tested for "consciousness" must want something which can only be achieved by a sequence of actions that achieve that result. AG 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Aug 2020, at 06:36, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 8:39:27 AM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 3:14:10 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 18 Aug 2020, at 08:07, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

Concerning the Turing test, It makes no theoretical sense, but it can make some local practical sense.

I am not conversant with your system or definitions. All I am asserting is that we believe we are conscious, or shall we say we have a property called "consciousness", but are unable to define exactly (or even approximately?) what it is.

OK. But we can make approximation, like “knowledge” or “knowledge of oneself”. Knowledge can be defined axiomatically, but the personal knowledge attached to consciousness, or even just the knowledge of a machine or of any third-person definable entity is not definable by that entity, without invoking a Truth operator (itself not definable by that entity, by Traski theorem).

Hence, if we encounter a humanoid-type robot that can verbally respond or interact with us, even in the form of a black box, we lack any criteria for determining IF it is conscious. But the movie offers a hint of what to look for. At first I thought it was the concept of time, but that's wrong. The entity in question could have been supplied with a clock and thus could respond as if the concept of time exists; present, past and future. But that's insufficient to qualify for being "conscious". You should view the movie and see what it suggests to you. AG

Consciousness attribution is always a sort of projection of oneself to the other(s). We attribute consciousness to an entity when we can recognise oneself in that entity. We could be wrong, of course, like a kid attributing a soul to its Teddy Bear.

You might tell what the movie suggests. (Just put a spoiler alert in the title of the post)

I didn't do that to test the level of interest. AG 

Bruno

The entity being tested for "consciousness" must want something which can only be achieved by a sequence of actions that achieve that result. AG 

I usually distinguish a notion of rough, basic, consciousness, and of reflexive consciousness. They obey the same characterisation (true, knowable, non provable, non definable-without-mentioning “true”), but the reflexive consciousness (brought just by adding the induction axioms, technically) adds “indubitable”, and is more or less what Descartes talked about in his Meditations. 

In theory, we cannot test consciousness. In practice, there is no problem for the people in which we can recognise one-self, in normal conditions. We just project our own consciousness onto them.

Now, problems arise in non normal condition, like 1) with some comatose people (a woman,n was thought being unconscious for a comatose period lasting 50 years, then she “woke up” and told people that she has been conscious all the time., or 2) with “alien” (like when the catholics were debating if the “Indians” have a soul, etc.

To be sure, we cannot test the existence of consciousness of some other, but we can’t really test the existence of the body either, except as a local accessible plausible physical reality. But this takes into account the “anti-materialist” consequences of Mechanism; the physical reality is an emerging lawful hallucination by numbers or “numbers” (Turing equivalent to natural number + addition/multiplication). This comes from the fact that all computations are emulated (in the precise mathematical sense of Church-Turing-Post-Kleene) in the arithmetical reality, as logicians know since Gödel, Kleene, … (unfortunately it seems only logicians know that and they tend to live in a Ivory Tower…).

Bruno

I think Ex Machina provides an answer of what we need to look for. Please view it and report back. But do NOT read the plot, say in Wiki. It's a spoiler. AG

Can we find it on Youtube or similar?

Bruno

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 20 Aug 2020, at 05:49, Beixiao Robert Liu <b.robe...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for recommending these readings. I’ll see how much I can get through. Can’t promise too much at this point.

Take it easy? I am a platonicien, I have a lot of time, I can wait millennia, if not infinities, (but not much more) :)

Nowadays we all get too many items on our to-do list, just as you indicated below about your website situation.

Sometimes I sum up things in this way:

The laws of thought are given by George Boole. (The Laws of Thought, (re-edited by Dover books)

The laws of mind are given by George Boolos (the unprovability of consistency, Cambridge University Press, 1979, or the longer version, “the logic of provability” Cambridge University Press, 1993).

*all* books by Raymond Smullyan introduces this logic or provability (known also as logic of self-reference), but an explicit recreative introduction to the logic G (and a bit of G*) is made in his book “Forever Undecided”, easy to find in hard cover or Paperback).

Imo, the best introduction to Mathematical Logic is the book by Eliot Mendelson “Introduction to Mathematical Logic” Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole, Monterey, 1987 (for the 3rd edition).

For the laws of matter, you will need this, and then my work becomes rather easy, albeit hard to believe, doubly so for Aristotelian believer in physicalism/materialism. That is hardly astonishing for historical reasons.

Take all you time, Plato Heaven will not disappear soon :)

Bruno

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[Alan Grayson]

On Thursday, August 20, 2020 at 2:29:10 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 20 Aug 2020, at 06:36, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 8:39:27 AM UTC-6, Alan Grayson wrote:

On Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 3:14:10 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 18 Aug 2020, at 08:07, Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:

Concerning the Turing test, It makes no theoretical sense, but it can make some local practical sense.

I am not conversant with your system or definitions. All I am asserting is that we believe we are conscious, or shall we say we have a property called "consciousness", but are unable to define exactly (or even approximately?) what it is.

OK. But we can make approximation, like “knowledge” or “knowledge of oneself”. Knowledge can be defined axiomatically, but the personal knowledge attached to consciousness, or even just the knowledge of a machine or of any third-person definable entity is not definable by that entity, without invoking a Truth operator (itself not definable by that entity, by Traski theorem).

Hence, if we encounter a humanoid-type robot that can verbally respond or interact with us, even in the form of a black box, we lack any criteria for determining IF it is conscious. But the movie offers a hint of what to look for. At first I thought it was the concept of time, but that's wrong. The entity in question could have been supplied with a clock and thus could respond as if the concept of time exists; present, past and future. But that's insufficient to qualify for being "conscious". You should view the movie and see what it suggests to you. AG

Consciousness attribution is always a sort of projection of oneself to the other(s). We attribute consciousness to an entity when we can recognise oneself in that entity. We could be wrong, of course, like a kid attributing a soul to its Teddy Bear.

You might tell what the movie suggests. (Just put a spoiler alert in the title of the post)

I didn't do that to test the level of interest. AG 

Bruno

The entity being tested for "consciousness" must want something which can only be achieved by a sequence of actions that achieve that result. AG 

I usually distinguish a notion of rough, basic, consciousness, and of reflexive consciousness. They obey the same characterisation (true, knowable, non provable, non definable-without-mentioning “true”), but the reflexive consciousness (brought just by adding the induction axioms, technically) adds “indubitable”, and is more or less what Descartes talked about in his Meditations. 

In theory, we cannot test consciousness. In practice, there is no problem for the people in which we can recognise one-self, in normal conditions. We just project our own consciousness onto them.

Now, problems arise in non normal condition, like 1) with some comatose people (a woman,n was thought being unconscious for a comatose period lasting 50 years, then she “woke up” and told people that she has been conscious all the time., or 2) with “alien” (like when the catholics were debating if the “Indians” have a soul, etc.

To be sure, we cannot test the existence of consciousness of some other, but we can’t really test the existence of the body either, except as a local accessible plausible physical reality. But this takes into account the “anti-materialist” consequences of Mechanism; the physical reality is an emerging lawful hallucination by numbers or “numbers” (Turing equivalent to natural number + addition/multiplication). This comes from the fact that all computations are emulated (in the precise mathematical sense of Church-Turing-Post-Kleene) in the arithmetical reality, as logicians know since Gödel, Kleene, … (unfortunately it seems only logicians know that and they tend to live in a Ivory Tower…).

Bruno

I don't think you appreciate my point. In the movie, the entity being tested wants freedom, without presumably or ostensibly being programmed to want it.  It then takes successful steps to achieve that objective. I would conclude it is "conscious". What would you conclude? AG

I think Ex Machina provides an answer of what we need to look for. Please view it and report back. But do NOT read the plot, say in Wiki. It's a spoiler. AG

Can we find it on Youtube or similar?

Bruno

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[Tomasz Rola]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 02:23:52PM -0700, Alan Grayson wrote:
> If you haven't viewed it, please do so. It's about the Turing Test, science
> fiction, but the "special effects" aren't primarily photographic bells and
> whistles, but the dialogue. the text, the logic of the script. Recently, we
> have argued about consciousness, what it is, and how we can test for it in
> the context of AI. I claimed that we could do some superficial surgery to
> determine whether the subject of the test was a robot or a conscious
> entity. But this is completely mistaken. All that that would reveal is
> whether the subject was artificial, not whether it was "conscious". The
> subject could have been a black box, and still showing signs of what we

> can't really define; consciousness. I think Ex Machina provides an answer

> of what we need to look for. Please view it and report back. But do NOT
> read the plot, say in Wiki. It's a spoiler. AG

My loose thoughts, in no specific order:

1. The ultimate test of AI is when it does not play your
game. Actually, very same can be said about humans.

2. Are there any readers of Stanislaw Lem here (besides me)? I
consider Lem a philosopher, and a very conscious and contemporary one
(he was more interested in a world around him and the future path of
humanity rather than in subjects like whether the world or humanity
exists), whereas I am afraid majority of public will have opinions
based on poorly done cinematisation of some books he wrote. In his
works, he gives, among other things, a gallery of automatons, whose
actions are erratic in various ways. A protagonist usually shrugs it
off as "requires repair or replacement", but sometimes he is not so
sure. The errors become quite specific, suggesting underlying will and
goal. There is a thin border line, a level of complication of electric
brain, after which doubts start to appear.

The appearance of real AI is burried in a whirl of human activity,
always hurring somewhere, get home early, go to sleep, go to work, go
see fiancee, drive children to school... Nobody will realize when such
moment happens. Only in retrospect there may be speculation - "it
happened during project M going on in skunk basement under the X-1
building... probably". Or during night watch of some lonesome
programmer at his home/villa/castle.

The movie "Ex machina" has more of Lem in itself than half of the
movies "based on him" that I watched (the other half was great, but
none of it were done on big budget, thus probably unknown beyound a
circle of enthusiasts).

3. Who is going to judge consciousness of the black box? Humans are
not equal. Not everybody is great athlete. In my opinion, not
everybody is conscious to the same degree. Some folks I hear about
(maybe meet with) are on the level of legendary talking animals. I am
willing to believe that with some effort, they could upend themselves
a bit, just like everybody could become better athlete with some
patience (as long as he can steer a single muscle).

So who is going to judge AI? How do we choose the judge(s)? From my
observations, a good number of potential choices will still be naive
and unable to overcome their biases.

Who is going to judge consciousness of a tenured professor? Or a
politician? Should we test voters? If yes, how exactly? What to do
with those who fail? I guess, give them more blockbusters and
entertainment...

--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomas...@bigfoot.com **