Rationals vs Reals in Comp

[Craig Weinberg]

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."

[Telmo Menezes]

On 22 avr. 2013, at 19:14, 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."

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.

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[smi...@zonnet.nl]

See here:

http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimPDF/real.pdf

Saibal

Citeren Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>:

> --

[Craig Weinberg]

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.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.

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.
 

[Craig Weinberg]

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

[Russell Standish]

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 08:06:29PM +0200, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>
>
> On 22 avr. 2013, at 19:14, 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."
>
> 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

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Bruno Marchal]

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

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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Craig Weinberg]

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.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.

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
 

[Brian Tenneson]

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

[Jason Resch]

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?

Jason

[Craig Weinberg]

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

[Craig Weinberg]

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

[Brian Tenneson]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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?

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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?

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

[Craig Weinberg]

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

[Craig Weinberg]

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.com> 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?

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

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 5:19 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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.com> 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?

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.

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_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

[Brian Tenneson]

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?

[Craig Weinberg]

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

[Brian Tenneson]

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.

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[Craig Weinberg]

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.com> 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.com> 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?

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.

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_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.
 

 

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?

Our intuitions may not have evolved at all. Survival and propagation could easily be mindless and automatic. Aesthetic sense cannot possibly contribute to survival or propagation, especially if we doubt the effectiveness of free will in the public world. Reasoned thought is a narrow subset of consciousness, one which employs objectivity - i.e. the intentional screening out of subjective contamination. Why would we expect that to be an appropriate instrument to find consciousness?

Craig

Jason

[Craig Weinberg]

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
 

[Brian Tenneson]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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.  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"?

 

[Craig Weinberg]

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.com> 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. 

No, they are both necessary but not sufficient to each other. We can care about things we don't understand also, and we can understand things that we don't care about, but if we had no capacity to understand then we could not care, and vice versa.
 

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. 

Sure, yes, I agree (see previous).
 

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.

There is no chance of being in a Chinese room at all, because we understand some things. The Chinese room is an illustration of how a process which we associate with understanding can be executed effectively without any understanding at all.

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"?

Because the Chinese room prohibits us from ever entertaining the possibility that we are in the Chinese Room. Just because we are not omniscient and omnipotent does not mean that we are senseless and powerless.

Craig
 

 

[Bruno Marchal]

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

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[Bruno Marchal]

Searle might be right on non-comp, but his argument has been shown invalid by many.

Bruno

Craig

 

Jason

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[Craig Weinberg]

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?

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

[Brian Tenneson]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 4:46 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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.com> 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.

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 humans or at least the seat of mind are possibly all in Chinese rooms.
 

 

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.

The electric and chemical footprint of representations of symbols are in our brains and caring about the symbols is what leads to food, shelter, sex and all the things animals (not cars) want .

 

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.

Some people care about enriching their lives, presumably because it ultimately makes them more satisfied in life.  How do you know what a machine never can do? They used to say a machine would never fly.  Convictions are prisons.

 

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.

You think there is some understanding because you are really adept at symbol processing.  Your man in the Chinese room is so convincing, that the symbols transmitted affirm that you do, in fact, understand. 

I think this is one of your theorems: at least one human mind has the capacity to understand something and does understand something.

Or do you assume that when your inner voice tells you that you understand something that your inner voice is correct?

 

 

Your coupling of caring and understanding is somewhat arbitrary. 

No, it is supported by the English language: http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-synonyms/understanding

I meant in the context of this discussion, the mention of compassion and caring at best might have something to do with understanding.  I bet that by the time you reply to this email I could print a list having a million elements, each of which contains a truth that I think I understand but care about zero.

 

There is no chance of being in a Chinese room at all, because we understand some things.

That's one possibility.  Another is that we're dumb but fast.

Because the Chinese room prohibits us from ever entertaining the possibility that we are in the Chinese Room. Just because we are not omniscient and omnipotent does not mean that we are senseless and powerless.

Why is that?  Being aware of one's present location and even all the properties of present location does NOT mean understanding one's present location and understanding all the properties of present location. That's a good example because we humans are in that situation: we can describe our environment works but we do not understand all the properties of our location, we don't even understand why we are here.

[Bruno Marchal]

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


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[Bruno Marchal]

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

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[Craig Weinberg]

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.com> 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.com> 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.

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, even after I pointed out your mistake. Now you are unfazed by your unintentional straw man and are doubling down on the false accusation. You aren't listening to me and are arguing with yourself.

The first phrasing is meaningless because of the second use of the word understand (so you might as well be talking about unicorns). 

Which is why I never said that.
 

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.

Pathetic fallacy + false accusation. Next.
 

 

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?

Not at all. If you claim not to understand the very conversation in which you are participating, how does that make me desperate for pointing out that it is obviously a specious argument.
 

  While "sawing off the branch you are sitting on" is a very clever arrangement of letters (can I use it in a future poem?)

I stole it from Raymond Tallis, so you'll have to ask him.
 

, it falls short of being an argument at all or even persuasive.

Then you're on your own. If you can't understand why you can't claim not to be able to understand these words, and you are not developmentally disabled, then I can't help you.
 

We can get along just fine by thinking that we understand this conversation. 

What does 'thinking that you understand' supposed to mean? We don't have to understand the entire universe to be able to understand what we are trying to talk about. Do you think that your operating system or keyboard have an equal understanding of it?
 

But knowing that we understand this conversation?  I'd like to see that proved. 

Understanding cannot be proved, it can only be experienced. Why does everyone want to prove subjective qualities? If that were possible then it would have been done 5000 years ago. Proof is a kind of understanding.
 

Until then, I will continue to think that humans or at least the seat of mind are possibly all in Chinese rooms.

You will continue to do what? To "think"? Can you prove that? Does thinking happen in Chinese rooms. This may be the most preposterous exchange that I have ever had with someone.
 

 

 

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.

The electric and chemical footprint of representations of symbols are in our brains and caring about the symbols is what leads to food, shelter, sex and all the things animals (not cars) want .

If there is nothing to interpret the footprints as representations, then they can't 'represent' anything. Chemical functions would simply be the parts in the machine which produce the behaviors that have been selected for. No experience is required, no caring, no sensation, nothing remotely close to that.
 

 

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.

Some people care about enriching their lives, presumably because it ultimately makes them more satisfied in life. 

If you can't care about anything, then how could you find anything satisfying?
 

How do you know what a machine never can do? They used to say a machine would never fly.  Convictions are prisons.

Because I understand what a machine is. I understand that art can be scientific but that science can never appreciate art.
 

 

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.

You think there is some understanding because you are really adept at symbol processing.  Your man in the Chinese room is so convincing, that the symbols transmitted affirm that you do, in fact, understand. 

Then why don't I think I can understand Chinese?
 

I think this is one of your theorems: at least one human mind has the capacity to understand something and does understand something.

Or do you assume that when your inner voice tells you that you understand something that your inner voice is correct?

I understand the same way that you understand. You tell me. Are these words indecipherable to you? Are you fumbling around in the dark, hallucinating that there is a such thing as understanding? Why should anyone talk to you?
 

 

 

Your coupling of caring and understanding is somewhat arbitrary. 

No, it is supported by the English language: http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-synonyms/understanding

I meant in the context of this discussion, the mention of compassion and caring at best might have something to do with understanding.  I bet that by the time you reply to this email I could print a list having a million elements, each of which contains a truth that I think I understand but care about zero.

You didn't read what I said. Just because there are things that you understand and choose not to care about or care about that you don't completely understand does not mean that understanding as a phenomenon can be separated from caring as a phenomenon. I can cook hamburgers or I can cook something else, but if I cook eggs instead, that doesn't mean that hamburgers are not food.

If you don't see that the synonyms of understanding are relevant to the context of this discussion then you are having a different discussion.

There is no chance of being in a Chinese room at all, because we understand some things.

That's one possibility.  Another is that we're dumb but fast.

In theory that would be a possibility, but in reality, it is not.

Because the Chinese room prohibits us from ever entertaining the possibility that we are in the Chinese Room. Just because we are not omniscient and omnipotent does not mean that we are senseless and powerless.

Why is that?  Being aware of one's present location and even all the properties of present location does NOT mean understanding one's present location and understanding all the properties of present location.

You don't seem to be able to discern between the terms "all" and "any". Not knowing the activities of the ants under the foundation of your house does not mean that you don't know where you are.

That's a good example because we humans are in that situation: we can describe our environment works but we do not understand all the properties of our location, we don't even understand why we are here.

Why are you presuming understanding to be an all or nothing property? No matter how much or how little we understand, it is more than any machine has ever understood.

Craig

[Brian Tenneson]

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.

--

[Craig Weinberg]

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.

 

[smi...@zonnet.nl]

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


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[Craig Weinberg]

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 number system that has feeling, it can only be a feeling that has number systems.

The reason why this is a problem for machines is that it begins from the outside and tries to work inward, hoping that 'the rain follows the plow'. Our every experience with machines however, be they mere baby machines in the scheme of mechanical evolution, are that they are not loving bundles of joy and wretched upset. They are not sometimes loving and other times aloof. They are not once in a while loving. They are *never* ever emotional in any way. Their functions are 100% anesthetic and can be ported to any physical medium or aesthetic output. This makes perfect sense to me, since living creatures are build themselves from the inside out. The entire lifetime of an organism can and should be understood as a single "strike" as you say, with each "moment" an episode of relative duration...at the moment I am middle aged. At the moment I am 45. At the moment I am living in the United States.

A machine has no such relativistic 'real number' kinds of moments. It has discrete instants - clock ticks, program steps...recursive enumerations. Computation comes out of counting rather than being or feeling, so that using very detailed counting, we can count all of the little aesthetic cues which we interpret through our bodies of other people's bodies behaviors and infer a skeletal description of the mind. An impressive and useful trick, but it is only a description of a generic mind's behaviors in the outside world, not an actual reproduction of the feelings which give rise to a particular person's mind. It is like those averaged faces (http://couscousqueen.tumblr.com/post/48604405522/awkwardsituationist-world-of-averages) - nobody lives behind those faces, but it is not difficult to think that someone could.

Craig

[Bruno Marchal]

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

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[Bruno Marchal]

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 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.

You must distinguish arithmetic truth (which is very big and far beyond humans and machines), and its many internal views, where things can get unclear, fuzzy, and where intimate relations can develop.

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 number system that has feeling, it can only be a feeling that has number systems.

I can agree with all this, except I feel you say this with the idea that machines cannot support consciousness.

The reason why this is a problem for machines is that it begins from the outside and tries to work inward, hoping that 'the rain follows the plow'. Our every experience with machines however, be they mere baby machines in the scheme of mechanical evolution, are that they are not loving bundles of joy and wretched upset.

If you don't listen to them, and try to forget your prejudices, you will never know, and be stuck in your superiority complex. 

They are not sometimes loving and other times aloof.

That might be true about my fridge. 

They are not once in a while loving.

With comp, you are a machine (or you are supported by a machine), so anything you say, is said through some machine. If you keep this in mind, you can marvel about what machines can do, just by looking at yourself. 

That it is hard for a machine to believe that she is a machine is already well explained by actual machine.

Your talk is given by the Bp & p in the machine. The machine's inner God already say "I am not a machine" until she get the point that the correct phrasing is "If I am a machine, then I can't believe that I am machine".

They are *never* ever emotional in any way. Their functions are 100% anesthetic and can be ported to any physical medium or aesthetic output. This makes perfect sense to me, since living creatures are build themselves from the inside out. The entire lifetime of an organism can and should be understood as a single "strike" as you say, with each "moment" an episode of relative duration...at the moment I am middle aged. At the moment I am 45. At the moment I am living in the United States.

A machine has no such relativistic 'real number' kinds of moments.

You talk about the actual machines. I might agree with you for the material one, but not for the mathematical one that we can already interview. if your point is that my fridge cannot think, I might be with you (but don't tell him as he is a bit emotional nowadays :)

I talk about machine as defined in a theory. Not about current man-made machines.

It has discrete instants - clock ticks, program steps...recursive enumerations.

The Bp & p, has not that. It justifies why when looking inward, machines are bound to discover continuous and non enumerable things, non computable things. 

Computation comes out of counting rather than being or feeling, so that using very detailed counting, we can count all of the little aesthetic cues which we interpret through our bodies of other people's bodies behaviors and infer a skeletal description of the mind. An impressive and useful trick, but it is only a description of a generic mind's behaviors in the outside world, not an actual reproduction of the feelings which give rise to a particular person's mind. It is like those averaged faces (http://couscousqueen.tumblr.com/post/48604405522/awkwardsituationist-world-of-averages) - nobody lives behind those faces, but it is not difficult to think that someone could.

Such type of argument does not bear on the fundamental question.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Craig Weinberg]

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, it's going to steer us in exactly the wrong direction.

 

 

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.

What does that have to do with arithmetic though? We can see how others feel by looking at their face and gestures, hearing their voice, understanding their words, and perhaps intuitively as well. Our lives are positively saturated with impressions of other people's feelings. Why would an arithmetic model be superior to a sensory-motor model at explaining that?

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.

I don't think that's true. It is true of human experience and culture, certainly, but the principle of art, i.e. aesthetic appreciation, cannot be justified scientifically. Science is about finding the shortest distance between two points, not calculating the most scenic route. If we tell a machine to take the day off, what will it do? A computer has no need for 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.

Ok, contingencies, but aren't contingencies just second order extensions of necessities? No amount of contingencies would entail an aesthetic appreciation of itself.
 

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.

You must distinguish arithmetic truth (which is very big and far beyond humans and machines), and its many internal views, where things can get unclear, fuzzy, and where intimate relations can develop.

My view is that you have it inside out. Arithmetic truth is an internal view of fuzzy experience. It is an abstracted meta-pattern of hyper-clarity arising from reductive interaction among public objects and space. Arithmetic is a simulation. Arithmetic is every simulation. Only the unmeasured ideopathic qualia is genuine and whole. Wholes cannot be assembled from parts, they can only divide themselves from wholes intentionally.

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 number system that has feeling, it can only be a feeling that has number systems.

I can agree with all this, except I feel you say this with the idea that machines cannot support consciousness.

Machines can support and extend the motives of consciousness as technology, and that could become quite fantastic as we bring more machines into ourselves and more of ourselves out into machines, but without something conscious there in the first place, machines can't generate consciousness.  Re-quoting myself from FB: "The only thing that computation doesn't relate to is how consciousness itself is generated...because it isn't generated, it's diffracted from eternity, from the inside out."

The reason why this is a problem for machines is that it begins from the outside and tries to work inward, hoping that 'the rain follows the plow'. Our every experience with machines however, be they mere baby machines in the scheme of mechanical evolution, are that they are not loving bundles of joy and wretched upset.

If you don't listen to them, and try to forget your prejudices, you will never know, and be stuck in your superiority complex. 

Who said superiority? I only say that machines are unconscious. If that is intuitively inferior, then that might be a clue as to the proper place of sense in the cosmos. What matters to me is only the truthful categorization of the big picture. Machines can do much that we can't, but they can't appreciate it, so it doesn't matter.
 

They are not sometimes loving and other times aloof.

That might be true about my fridge. 

Heh.
 

They are not once in a while loving.

With comp, you are a machine (or you are supported by a machine),

As a human being, I am supported by a brain and body, (and civilization, species). I use machines, and even "I", Craig Weinberg, could be a machine in a sense, but my awareness is not only not a machine, it is the exact opposite of a machine.
 

so anything you say, is said through some machine. If you keep this in mind, you can marvel about what machines can do, just by looking at yourself. 

That it is hard for a machine to believe that she is a machine is already well explained by actual machine.

Your talk is given by the Bp & p in the machine. The machine's inner God already say "I am not a machine" until she get the point that the correct phrasing is "If I am a machine, then I can't believe that I am machine".

Except that some machines, like Bruno, can believe that they are machine. So it can go either way. Maybe it's you who has a superiority complex...to be better than the machines who can't believe that they are machine?
 

They are *never* ever emotional in any way. Their functions are 100% anesthetic and can be ported to any physical medium or aesthetic output. This makes perfect sense to me, since living creatures are build themselves from the inside out. The entire lifetime of an organism can and should be understood as a single "strike" as you say, with each "moment" an episode of relative duration...at the moment I am middle aged. At the moment I am 45. At the moment I am living in the United States.

A machine has no such relativistic 'real number' kinds of moments.

You talk about the actual machines. I might agree with you for the material one, but not for the mathematical one that we can already interview. if your point is that my fridge cannot think, I might be with you (but don't tell him as he is a bit emotional nowadays :)

I talk about machine as defined in a theory. Not about current man-made machines.

Then it could be the case that the theoretical attributes which you are assuming for machines might actually belong to sense.
 

It has discrete instants - clock ticks, program steps...recursive enumerations.

The Bp & p, has not that. It justifies why when looking inward, machines are bound to discover continuous and non enumerable things, non computable things. 

They may be non-computable, but that doesn't mean that they are aesthetic or give rise to aesthetic presentations.
 

Computation comes out of counting rather than being or feeling, so that using very detailed counting, we can count all of the little aesthetic cues which we interpret through our bodies of other people's bodies behaviors and infer a skeletal description of the mind. An impressive and useful trick, but it is only a description of a generic mind's behaviors in the outside world, not an actual reproduction of the feelings which give rise to a particular person's mind. It is like those averaged faces (http://couscousqueen.tumblr.com/post/48604405522/awkwardsituationist-world-of-averages) - nobody lives behind those faces, but it is not difficult to think that someone could.

Such type of argument does not bear on the fundamental question.

Why not? Counting is a kind of feeling, but feeling cannot be generated by counting.

Craig
 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 25 Apr 2013, at 16:02, Craig Weinberg wrote:

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.

OK. But nobody said that.

 

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?

Real numbers are conceptually more simple. The (first order) theory of real numbers with addition and multiplication is decidable, and thus not Turing universal. The first order theories of natural numbers, or integers, or ratio, are already Turing universal.

This is not entirely obvious to prove, but thing about Fermat. It is not hard to compute the infinitely many real solutions of x^n + y^n = z^n, for each n, but it took more than 300 years to prove it has no non trivial solutions for n bigger than 2.

Now, if you add the trigonometrical functions to the first order theory of the reals, you get the Turing universality.

 

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.

With comp, it is absolutely undecidable if the basic ontology is more rich than the natural numbers? I have chosen arithmetic to fix the things. Then real numbers have an epistemological reality, like the physical.

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.

That contradict some correct statement you made, but which showed that your position leads to the existence of zombie (which makes not a lot of sense with comp). So I have to ask you, how can you ever know that it worked? Although I don't believe in p-zombies, I do believe in good approximation of them, for some period of time.

But then comp might be false for other reason. The guy with the new brain might be conscious but someone else, etc.

We cannot prove comp, nor test it if it is true. We can only refute it if it is false, by comparing the comp-physics with actual observations.

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?

Comp is only falsifiable.

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, it's going to steer us in exactly the wrong direction.

It is what comp does the best, as the machine already refutes Socrates' refutation of Theaetetus' definition of knowledge. Then it predicts the MW perceptible below the substitution level, and it explains better than any theory today the qualia and the quanta, in a testable way, and this by accepting standard definition put by people independently of comp.

Indeed comp provides a simple and transparent arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus theology, and exactly where Plotinus predicts where to find 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?

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.

What does that have to do with arithmetic though? We can see how others feel by looking at their face and gestures, hearing their voice, understanding their words, and perhaps intuitively as well. Our lives are positively saturated with impressions of other people's feelings. Why would an arithmetic model be superior to a sensory-motor model at explaining that?

We just get it by derivation, once we believe the brain works without magic, like biology, physics, chemistry implies.

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.

I don't think that's true. It is true of human experience and culture, certainly, but the principle of art, i.e. aesthetic appreciation, cannot be justified scientifically.

I agree, this is indeed a consequence of comp.

Science is about finding the shortest distance between two points, not calculating the most scenic route. If we tell a machine to take the day off, what will it do? A computer has no need for art.

Today, perhaps. But that kind of argument is weak, to say the least. 

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.

Ok, contingencies, but aren't contingencies just second order extensions of necessities?

First order negation is enough. <>p is usually defined as ~[] ~p. Possible p is "not necessary not p".

No amount of contingencies would entail an aesthetic appreciation of itself.

You are right, you need some connections more.

 

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.

You must distinguish arithmetic truth (which is very big and far beyond humans and machines), and its many internal views, where things can get unclear, fuzzy, and where intimate relations can develop.

My view is that you have it inside out. Arithmetic truth is an internal view of fuzzy experience. It is an abstracted meta-pattern of hyper-clarity arising from reductive interaction among public objects and space. Arithmetic is a simulation. Arithmetic is every simulation. Only the unmeasured ideopathic qualia is genuine and whole. Wholes cannot be assembled from parts, they can only divide themselves from wholes intentionally.

No argument here.

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 number system that has feeling, it can only be a feeling that has number systems.

I can agree with all this, except I feel you say this with the idea that machines cannot support consciousness.

Machines can support and extend the motives of consciousness as technology, and that could become quite fantastic as we bring more machines into ourselves and more of ourselves out into machines, but without something conscious there in the first place, machines can't generate consciousness. 

Plausible. But machines can borrow consciousness from truth, or better: consciousness can borrow machines to make itself manifest in some situation. 

Re-quoting myself from FB: "The only thing that computation doesn't relate to is how consciousness itself is generated...because it isn't generated, it's diffracted from eternity, from the inside out."

Why not. It is too fuzzy to use it for or against comp. There is something like that with comp, that is what I try to explain.

The reason why this is a problem for machines is that it begins from the outside and tries to work inward, hoping that 'the rain follows the plow'. Our every experience with machines however, be they mere baby machines in the scheme of mechanical evolution, are that they are not loving bundles of joy and wretched upset.

If you don't listen to them, and try to forget your prejudices, you will never know, and be stuck in your superiority complex. 

Who said superiority? I only say that machines are unconscious. If that is intuitively inferior, then that might be a clue as to the proper place of sense in the cosmos. What matters to me is only the truthful categorization of the big picture. Machines can do much that we can't, but they can't appreciate it, so it doesn't matter.

In your theory, assuming there is a theory. It looks more to propaganda to me. Just find your axioms, and until you have done so, it might help you to be more agnostic on this issue.

 

They are not sometimes loving and other times aloof.

That might be true about my fridge. 

Heh.
 

They are not once in a while loving.

With comp, you are a machine (or you are supported by a machine),

As a human being, I am supported by a brain and body, (and civilization, species). I use machines, and even "I", Craig Weinberg, could be a machine in a sense, but my awareness is not only not a machine, it is the exact opposite of a machine.

That's the point where I agree with you, but it is a consequence of comp.

 

so anything you say, is said through some machine. If you keep this in mind, you can marvel about what machines can do, just by looking at yourself. 

That it is hard for a machine to believe that she is a machine is already well explained by actual machine.

Your talk is given by the Bp & p in the machine. The machine's inner God already say "I am not a machine" until she get the point that the correct phrasing is "If I am a machine, then I can't believe that I am machine".

Except that some machines, like Bruno, can believe that they are machine.

In the sense that I can assume it, and reason from it. My private opinion is ... private.

So it can go either way. Maybe it's you who has a superiority complex...to be better than the machines who can't believe that they are machine?

Machines' too can assume that they are machine, and bet on their correcteness, with some caution, as this makes them indeed quite near inconsistency. 

 

They are *never* ever emotional in any way. Their functions are 100% anesthetic and can be ported to any physical medium or aesthetic output. This makes perfect sense to me, since living creatures are build themselves from the inside out. The entire lifetime of an organism can and should be understood as a single "strike" as you say, with each "moment" an episode of relative duration...at the moment I am middle aged. At the moment I am 45. At the moment I am living in the United States.

A machine has no such relativistic 'real number' kinds of moments.

You talk about the actual machines. I might agree with you for the material one, but not for the mathematical one that we can already interview. if your point is that my fridge cannot think, I might be with you (but don't tell him as he is a bit emotional nowadays :)

I talk about machine as defined in a theory. Not about current man-made machines.

Then it could be the case that the theoretical attributes which you are assuming for machines might actually belong to sense.

Some of them. But again, that follows from comp.

 

It has discrete instants - clock ticks, program steps...recursive enumerations.

The Bp & p, has not that. It justifies why when looking inward, machines are bound to discover continuous and non enumerable things, non computable things. 

They may be non-computable, but that doesn't mean that they are aesthetic or give rise to aesthetic presentations.

Of course. But that does not mean that they are incompatible with aesthetic and not give rise to aesthetic presentations.

You are the one saying that comp is false. I am not the one saying that comp is true.

 

Computation comes out of counting rather than being or feeling, so that using very detailed counting, we can count all of the little aesthetic cues which we interpret through our bodies of other people's bodies behaviors and infer a skeletal description of the mind. An impressive and useful trick, but it is only a description of a generic mind's behaviors in the outside world, not an actual reproduction of the feelings which give rise to a particular person's mind. It is like those averaged faces (http://couscousqueen.tumblr.com/post/48604405522/awkwardsituationist-world-of-averages) - nobody lives behind those faces, but it is not difficult to think that someone could.

Such type of argument does not bear on the fundamental question.

Why not? Counting is a kind of feeling, but feeling cannot be generated by counting.

Logic is not enough for Turing universality.

Logic + numbers + counting is not enough.

Logic + numbers + addition + counting is not enough.

Logic + numbers + addition + multiplication + counting is enough. And then, by comp, that's enough for feeling.

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Craig Weinberg]

On Thursday, April 25, 2013 11:20:59 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 25 Apr 2013, at 16:02, Craig Weinberg wrote:

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.

OK. But nobody said that.

Wouldn't that be what Comp assumes? Otherwise in the simulation arguments we are talking not only about an untapped level of sophistication of computation, but a wholly undiscovered transcendental mode of computation. It's not computation as it is, but as it might be.
 

 

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?

Real numbers are conceptually more simple. The (first order) theory of real numbers with addition and multiplication is decidable, and thus not Turing universal. The first order theories of natural numbers, or integers, or ratio, are already Turing universal.

This is not entirely obvious to prove, but thing about Fermat. It is not hard to compute the infinitely many real solutions of x^n + y^n = z^n, for each n, but it took more than 300 years to prove it has no non trivial solutions for n bigger than 2.

Now, if you add the trigonometrical functions to the first order theory of the reals, you get the Turing universality.

Ok, but the simplification is what I am taking issue with. Having a concept which works is not necessarily a lossy simplification of reality, but rather an essentialization of the principles within reality. Interesting about the trigonometry + reals - Turing universality...have to think about that. It seems consistent with my cosmology (only as a second order public reflection).
 

 

 

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.

With comp, it is absolutely undecidable if the basic ontology is more rich than the natural numbers? I have chosen arithmetic to fix the things. Then real numbers have an epistemological reality, like the physical.

I would say that the real numbers are part of the skeleton of objective realism, which is itself the skeleton of the totality. They have an epistemological reality only if there is some conscious experience to appreciate the universality of the agreement.
 

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.

That contradict some correct statement you made, but which showed that your position leads to the existence of zombie (which makes not a lot of sense with comp). So I have to ask you, how can you ever know that it worked?

I don't think that it would work. I don't think that a person off of their brain in reality, it would just be a mess. They would not be present in the new brain, they would not remember being in the new brain, and the new brain ultimately would not do anything except perhaps store pointers to experiences which could be used by the real brain. You couldn't know for sure if it worked, but you could know that it didn't. If you don't know that it didn't then we might assume that it could work.
 

Although I don't believe in p-zombies, I do believe in good approximation of them, for some period of time.

I agree.
 

But then comp might be false for other reason. The guy with the new brain might be conscious but someone else, etc.

We cannot prove comp, nor test it if it is true. We can only refute it if it is false, by comparing the comp-physics with actual observations.

Right, yes. Even if the new brain seemed to work, I would say that it would be a new person and the original person would not experience being in the new brain at all.
 

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?

Comp is only falsifiable.

How? What criteria wouldn't be circular?
 

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, it's going to steer us in exactly the wrong direction.

It is what comp does the best, as the machine already refutes Socrates' refutation of Theaetetus' definition of knowledge. Then it predicts the MW perceptible below the substitution level, and it explains better than any theory today the qualia and the quanta, in a testable way, and this by accepting standard definition put by people independently of comp.

Indeed comp provides a simple and transparent arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus theology, and exactly where Plotinus predicts where to find it.

I don't think that it addresses qualia at all. It only addresses non-quanta. You are inferring that to be qualia, but it isn't, it is anesthetic 3p self-reference.  As for knowledge and theology, those are conceptual conditions which supervene on awareness, not awareness itself. Machine knowledge and machine theology are tautological, like traffic patterns in a large city...positions which can be used to triangulate the status of other positions.

 

 

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.

What does that have to do with arithmetic though? We can see how others feel by looking at their face and gestures, hearing their voice, understanding their words, and perhaps intuitively as well. Our lives are positively saturated with impressions of other people's feelings. Why would an arithmetic model be superior to a sensory-motor model at explaining that?

We just get it by derivation, once we believe the brain works without magic, like biology, physics, chemistry implies.

But comp doesn't need a brain. It's already non-physical magic, no less likely to appear in a complicated doorknob than a baby. I'm surprised that you are suddenly reaching for the physical to justify arithmetic. A sensory-motor model predicts the brain better than arithmetic does, since it is grounded in the aesthetic agenda there is every reason to expect a non-repeating layer cake of forms and functions from the physical to the biological. Arithmetic is lost in biology. There would be no need for more than one kind of fractal or sense modality. Biology would be superfluous and irrelevant. Biological machines should have no particular preference for the biological and we should see many natural hybrids on Earth.

 

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.

I don't think that's true. It is true of human experience and culture, certainly, but the principle of art, i.e. aesthetic appreciation, cannot be justified scientifically.

I agree, this is indeed a consequence of comp.

cool
 

Science is about finding the shortest distance between two points, not calculating the most scenic route. If we tell a machine to take the day off, what will it do? A computer has no need for art.

Today, perhaps. But that kind of argument is weak, to say the least. 

It may be week, but it may also be as strong as any argument could be, given the topic. How can we expect objective answers to questions about the subjective?
 

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.

Ok, contingencies, but aren't contingencies just second order extensions of necessities?

First order negation is enough. <>p is usually defined as ~[] ~p. Possible p is "not necessary not p".

Not sure if I understand, but it sounds too naive. It sounds like "Anything that isn't meatloaf could be a rainbow."...which maybe is ok given the a priori of rainbow, but if there is no a priori known, then why would rainbow appear from non-meatloafness?
 

No amount of contingencies would entail an aesthetic appreciation of itself.

You are right, you need some connections more.

What if there aren't any more?
 

 

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.

You must distinguish arithmetic truth (which is very big and far beyond humans and machines), and its many internal views, where things can get unclear, fuzzy, and where intimate relations can develop.

My view is that you have it inside out. Arithmetic truth is an internal view of fuzzy experience. It is an abstracted meta-pattern of hyper-clarity arising from reductive interaction among public objects and space. Arithmetic is a simulation. Arithmetic is every simulation. Only the unmeasured ideopathic qualia is genuine and whole. Wholes cannot be assembled from parts, they can only divide themselves from wholes intentionally.

No argument here.

If you say so. I thought you were saying that awareness supervenes on arithmetic though. I suppose it's really academic, since locally arithmetic truth and experiential aesthetics are always found together. It is only from an absolute perspective that I think it makes sense to say that arithmetic supervenes on sense. The difference though is that it means that machines can only simulate human quality feeling.

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 number system that has feeling, it can only be a feeling that has number systems.

I can agree with all this, except I feel you say this with the idea that machines cannot support consciousness.

Machines can support and extend the motives of consciousness as technology, and that could become quite fantastic as we bring more machines into ourselves and more of ourselves out into machines, but without something conscious there in the first place, machines can't generate consciousness. 

Plausible. But machines can borrow consciousness from truth, or better: consciousness can borrow machines to make itself manifest in some situation. 

Yes to the second! But there's a hierarchy there because of these aesthetic levels of richness...which accumulate only through direct experience in real time. That's why stimulating a congenitally blind person's visual cortex gives them tactile aesthetics rather than visual. The aesthetic is driven by connection with the universal...seeing actual stuff in the world with eyeballs, not only by the signal forms and functions in the brain. That's also why splicing an phosphorescent gene from a fish into a mouse doesn't make a mouse with fish scales, but only a mouse with phosphorescent fur. The aesthetic thing is a narrative through time, an experiential story, not a mechanism across space. No matter what you do to the mouse, it's still a mouse having a weird experience. No matter what you do to a silicon crystal or a set of water pipes, how complex and sophisticated it is, the aesthetics of the experience never extend any higher aesthetically. The lower level entities and the higher level entities can use each other, but it is a symbiotic rather than peer relation.

Re-quoting myself from FB: "The only thing that computation doesn't relate to is how consciousness itself is generated...because it isn't generated, it's diffracted from eternity, from the inside out."

Why not. It is too fuzzy to use it for or against comp. There is something like that with comp, that is what I try to explain.

So it sounds like you are open to a sensory-motor primitive, but you're not wanting to see it as the parent of arithmetic truth. I mean the +, * and numbers are basically the same model that I have, only I see + as a reduction of public physics/motor participation and * as a reduction of private experience/sense perception. The numbers are a reduction of the hierarchical levels of self reference...the consequence of what I call solitropy. Solitropy could be computationalized as the 1p feeling which drives any subroutine to return or any circuit to complete. The feeling is 'going home', or whole, healed, restored, returned, recovered, remembered, etc.

You can't assemble that feeling from + and * though. It is already assumed, just in a very under-signifying scientific way which filters out almost all of the art.

Actually wait. The + should really be - and the * should be ÷. Because it's diffracted from the absolute, which is one. Arithmetic truth is all ultimately a schema diffracted within 1. + and * are local views but ultimately nothing is separate so there can only be - and ÷ within the 1.
 

The reason why this is a problem for machines is that it begins from the outside and tries to work inward, hoping that 'the rain follows the plow'. Our every experience with machines however, be they mere baby machines in the scheme of mechanical evolution, are that they are not loving bundles of joy and wretched upset.

If you don't listen to them, and try to forget your prejudices, you will never know, and be stuck in your superiority complex. 

Who said superiority? I only say that machines are unconscious. If that is intuitively inferior, then that might be a clue as to the proper place of sense in the cosmos. What matters to me is only the truthful categorization of the big picture. Machines can do much that we can't, but they can't appreciate it, so it doesn't matter.

In your theory, assuming there is a theory. It looks more to propaganda to me. Just find your axioms, and until you have done so, it might help you to be more agnostic on this issue.

We already experience the axioms directly. All that we can do is name them: Sense and motive.
 

 

They are not sometimes loving and other times aloof.

That might be true about my fridge. 

Heh.
 

They are not once in a while loving.

With comp, you are a machine (or you are supported by a machine),

As a human being, I am supported by a brain and body, (and civilization, species). I use machines, and even "I", Craig Weinberg, could be a machine in a sense, but my awareness is not only not a machine, it is the exact opposite of a machine.

That's the point where I agree with you, but it is a consequence of comp.

My human qualities could be a consequence of sense + comp, but the awareness itself behind any individuality, the raw capacity to receive and project presence in the universe, can't be a consequence of comp (why would it be? Comp doesn't need any aesthetic appreciation of itself.)

 

so anything you say, is said through some machine. If you keep this in mind, you can marvel about what machines can do, just by looking at yourself. 

That it is hard for a machine to believe that she is a machine is already well explained by actual machine.

Your talk is given by the Bp & p in the machine. The machine's inner God already say "I am not a machine" until she get the point that the correct phrasing is "If I am a machine, then I can't believe that I am machine".

Except that some machines, like Bruno, can believe that they are machine.

In the sense that I can assume it, and reason from it.

 
Isn't that good enough to qualify as a Bp & p?

 

My private opinion is ... private.

If machines can have conflicting opinions about themselves then I don't see how either opinion can be used to support a generalization about machines.

So it can go either way. Maybe it's you who has a superiority complex...to be better than the machines who can't believe that they are machine?

Machines' too can assume that they are machine, and bet on their correcteness, with some caution, as this makes them indeed quite near inconsistency. 

What would make them prefer one assumption or another?
 

 

They are *never* ever emotional in any way. Their functions are 100% anesthetic and can be ported to any physical medium or aesthetic output. This makes perfect sense to me, since living creatures are build themselves from the inside out. The entire lifetime of an organism can and should be understood as a single "strike" as you say, with each "moment" an episode of relative duration...at the moment I am middle aged. At the moment I am 45. At the moment I am living in the United States.

A machine has no such relativistic 'real number' kinds of moments.

You talk about the actual machines. I might agree with you for the material one, but not for the mathematical one that we can already interview. if your point is that my fridge cannot think, I might be with you (but don't tell him as he is a bit emotional nowadays :)

I talk about machine as defined in a theory. Not about current man-made machines.

Then it could be the case that the theoretical attributes which you are assuming for machines might actually belong to sense.

Some of them. But again, that follows from comp.

Comp follows from my model too. Since each perspective within the continuum of sense defines the rest of the continuum relativistically, it stands to reason that looking at the universe from a perspective of pure science-knowing would make art-feeling seem subordinate - would under-signify it in the way that characterizes mechanism...breaking it down into meaningless functional parts.
 

 

It has discrete instants - clock ticks, program steps...recursive enumerations.

The Bp & p, has not that. It justifies why when looking inward, machines are bound to discover continuous and non enumerable things, non computable things. 

They may be non-computable, but that doesn't mean that they are aesthetic or give rise to aesthetic presentations.

Of course. But that does not mean that they are incompatible with aesthetic and not give rise to aesthetic presentations.

You are the one saying that comp is false. I am not the one saying that comp is true.

It's not a neutral possibility though. Everything that we have seen of real machines indicate that my view is right. Comp could be valid only if numbers had an aesthetic participation on their own, but why would they? How could they? If it is the aesthetic which is the prime mover, then it is easy to see how it can bend itself temporarily into anesthetic bubbles to build more significant experiences with. That is entirely consistent with an erotic agenda.
 

 

Computation comes out of counting rather than being or feeling, so that using very detailed counting, we can count all of the little aesthetic cues which we interpret through our bodies of other people's bodies behaviors and infer a skeletal description of the mind. An impressive and useful trick, but it is only a description of a generic mind's behaviors in the outside world, not an actual reproduction of the feelings which give rise to a particular person's mind. It is like those averaged faces (http://couscousqueen.tumblr.com/post/48604405522/awkwardsituationist-world-of-averages) - nobody lives behind those faces, but it is not difficult to think that someone could.

Such type of argument does not bear on the fundamental question.

Why not? Counting is a kind of feeling, but feeling cannot be generated by counting.

Logic is not enough for Turing universality.

Logic + numbers + counting is not enough.

Logic + numbers + addition + counting is not enough.

Logic + numbers + addition + multiplication + counting is enough. And then, by comp, that's enough for feeling.

But comp doesn't explain what it is doing with feeling. It's just an opening assumption that feeling is part of what numbers can do.  Logic + numbers + addition + multiplication + counting would be perfectly adequate without feeling.

Craig

[Stathis Papaioannou]

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?


--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Bruno Marchal]

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

[John Mikes]

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 "human"mind? which is also unidentified). 

JohnM 

--
Stathis Papaioannou

[Craig Weinberg]

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

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 28/04/2013, at 3:31 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@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

[Craig Weinberg]

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.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.

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

[Bruno Marchal]

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 "human"mind? 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

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Russell Standish]

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 hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Bruno Marchal]

On 25 Apr 2013, at 19:21, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Thursday, April 25, 2013 11:20:59 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 25 Apr 2013, at 16:02, Craig Weinberg wrote:

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:

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.

OK. But nobody said that.

Wouldn't that be what Comp assumes? Otherwise in the simulation arguments we are talking not only about an untapped level of sophistication of computation, but a wholly undiscovered transcendental mode of computation. It's not computation as it is, but as it might be.

The basic level is not important. Having chosen arithmetic, we have natural numbers, not "real's decimals".

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.

That contradict some correct statement you made, but which showed that your position leads to the existence of zombie (which makes not a lot of sense with comp). So I have to ask you, how can you ever know that it worked?

I don't think that it would work. I don't think that a person off of their brain in reality, it would just be a mess. They would not be present in the new brain, they would not remember being in the new brain, and the new brain ultimately would not do anything except perhaps store pointers to experiences which could be used by the real brain. You couldn't know for sure if it worked, but you could know that it didn't. If you don't know that it didn't then we might assume that it could work.
 

Although I don't believe in p-zombies, I do believe in good approximation of them, for some period of time.

I agree.
 

But then comp might be false for other reason. The guy with the new brain might be conscious but someone else, etc.

We cannot prove comp, nor test it if it is true. We can only refute it if it is false, by comparing the comp-physics with actual observations.

Right, yes. Even if the new brain seemed to work, I would say that it would be a new person and the original person would not experience being in the new brain at all.

Our brain is replaced, "continuously" all the time. 

 

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?

Comp is only falsifiable.

How? What criteria wouldn't be circular?

Comp predicts the physics, so we can compare the comp physics and what we observe. Of course it needs work and progress in mathematical logic, but the open problem in math are there.

 

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, it's going to steer us in exactly the wrong direction.

It is what comp does the best, as the machine already refutes Socrates' refutation of Theaetetus' definition of knowledge. Then it predicts the MW perceptible below the substitution level, and it explains better than any theory today the qualia and the quanta, in a testable way, and this by accepting standard definition put by people independently of comp.

Indeed comp provides a simple and transparent arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus theology, and exactly where Plotinus predicts where to find it.

I don't think that it addresses qualia at all. It only addresses non-quanta. You are inferring that to be qualia, but it isn't, it is anesthetic 3p self-reference. 

The machines already  will differ on this. You will say it is just a zombie, so it is easy for you to not care, but that's begging the question. The qualia I am talking about would not make an atom of sense if they were 3p. They are not.

As for knowledge and theology, those are conceptual conditions which supervene on awareness, not awareness itself. Machine knowledge and machine theology are tautological, like traffic patterns in a large city...positions which can be used to triangulate the status of other positions.

No. You must study them, and grasp by yourself that they are not tautological at all. Or you are using that term in a so very large sense that you say nothing here. We did not expect those theorems. They are counterintuitive in the large. Not so much people grasp them correctly.

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.

What does that have to do with arithmetic though? We can see how others feel by looking at their face and gestures, hearing their voice, understanding their words, and perhaps intuitively as well. Our lives are positively saturated with impressions of other people's feelings. Why would an arithmetic model be superior to a sensory-motor model at explaining that?

We just get it by derivation, once we believe the brain works without magic, like biology, physics, chemistry implies.

But comp doesn't need a brain. It's already non-physical magic, no less likely to appear in a complicated doorknob than a baby. I'm surprised that you are suddenly reaching for the physical to justify arithmetic.

Even if the physical is not primary, it exists and plays a key role in machine's "theology".

A sensory-motor model predicts the brain better than arithmetic does, since it is grounded in the aesthetic agenda there is every reason to expect a non-repeating layer cake of forms and functions from the physical to the biological. Arithmetic is lost in biology.

Arithmetic justifies biology.

There would be no need for more than one kind of fractal or sense modality.

There are eight one, among the main one. In fact it is 4 + 4 * infinity. You are still talking about grandpa arithmetic, but we have discover the universal numbers since. That changes everything. It introduces chaos in Plato Heaven.

Biology would be superfluous and irrelevant. Biological machines should have no particular preference for the biological and we should see many natural hybrids on Earth.

There are no reason for that for the emergence of life, but you are right on the long term. Well, hybrids already exists.

Science is about finding the shortest distance between two points, not calculating the most scenic route. If we tell a machine to take the day off, what will it do? A computer has no need for art.

Today, perhaps. But that kind of argument is weak, to say the least. 

It may be week, but it may also be as strong as any argument could be, given the topic. How can we expect objective answers to questions about the subjective?

By agreeing on semi-axioms about them, or on some hypothesis. There is no reason to allow more subjectivity in the science of the subjectivity. I would say, on the contrary. Not seeing this means level confusion. That is the very confusion which makes hard for the human science to progress, and for theology to come out of the political.

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.

Ok, contingencies, but aren't contingencies just second order extensions of necessities?

First order negation is enough. <>p is usually defined as ~[] ~p. Possible p is "not necessary not p".

Not sure if I understand, but it sounds too naive. It sounds like "Anything that isn't meatloaf could be a rainbow."...which maybe is ok given the a priori of rainbow, but if there is no a priori known, then why would rainbow appear from non-meatloafness?

I was just saying than in classical modal logic the contingencies are at the same conceptual level than the necessities.

 

No amount of contingencies would entail an aesthetic appreciation of itself.

You are right, you need some connections more.

What if there aren't any more?

But there is more.   (truth, consistency, and many others). 

The problem is that I can see from the way you argue, that nothing can change your mind: you "already know", and that means that you will not been able to reason in the hypothetico-deductive manner. 

I do NOT know, so I can try theories with an open mind.

 

 

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.

You must distinguish arithmetic truth (which is very big and far beyond humans and machines), and its many internal views, where things can get unclear, fuzzy, and where intimate relations can develop.

My view is that you have it inside out. Arithmetic truth is an internal view of fuzzy experience. It is an abstracted meta-pattern of hyper-clarity arising from reductive interaction among public objects and space. Arithmetic is a simulation. Arithmetic is every simulation. Only the unmeasured ideopathic qualia is genuine and whole. Wholes cannot be assembled from parts, they can only divide themselves from wholes intentionally.

No argument here.

If you say so. I thought you were saying that awareness supervenes on arithmetic though. I suppose it's really academic, since locally arithmetic truth and experiential aesthetics are always found together. It is only from an absolute perspective that I think it makes sense to say that arithmetic supervenes on sense. The difference though is that it means that machines can only simulate human quality feeling.

You lost me.

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 number system that has feeling, it can only be a feeling that has number systems.

I can agree with all this, except I feel you say this with the idea that machines cannot support consciousness.

Machines can support and extend the motives of consciousness as technology, and that could become quite fantastic as we bring more machines into ourselves and more of ourselves out into machines, but without something conscious there in the first place, machines can't generate consciousness. 

Plausible. But machines can borrow consciousness from truth, or better: consciousness can borrow machines to make itself manifest in some situation. 

Yes to the second! But there's a hierarchy there because of these aesthetic levels of richness...which accumulate only through direct experience in real time.

OK. But "real time" is something relative in the comp theory. You reify "real" and "direct". That's assuming what I want to explain, and what I show we need to explain once we bet on comp.

That's why stimulating a congenitally blind person's visual cortex gives them tactile aesthetics rather than visual. The aesthetic is driven by connection with the universal...seeing actual stuff in the world with eyeballs, not only by the signal forms and functions in the brain. That's also why splicing an phosphorescent gene from a fish into a mouse doesn't make a mouse with fish scales, but only a mouse with phosphorescent fur. The aesthetic thing is a narrative through time, an experiential story, not a mechanism across space. No matter what you do to the mouse, it's still a mouse having a weird experience. No matter what you do to a silicon crystal or a set of water pipes, how complex and sophisticated it is, the aesthetics of the experience never extend any higher aesthetically. The lower level entities and the higher level entities can use each other, but it is a symbiotic rather than peer relation.

That makes sense in the machine first person discourse, but the generalization of it is not made necessary.

Re-quoting myself from FB: "The only thing that computation doesn't relate to is how consciousness itself is generated...because it isn't generated, it's diffracted from eternity, from the inside out."

Why not. It is too fuzzy to use it for or against comp. There is something like that with comp, that is what I try to explain.

So it sounds like you are open to a sensory-motor primitive, but you're not wanting to see it as the parent of arithmetic truth.

It is a child of arithmetic truth.

I mean the +, * and numbers are basically the same model that I have, only I see + as a reduction of public physics/motor participation and * as a reduction of private experience/sense perception. The numbers are a reduction of the hierarchical levels of self reference...the consequence of what I call solitropy. Solitropy could be computationalized as the 1p feeling which drives any subroutine to return or any circuit to complete. The feeling is 'going home', or whole, healed, restored, returned, recovered, remembered, etc.

You can't assemble that feeling from + and * though. It is already assumed, just in a very under-signifying scientific way which filters out almost all of the art.

Actually wait. The + should really be - and the * should be ÷. Because it's diffracted from the absolute, which is one. Arithmetic truth is all ultimately a schema diffracted within 1. + and * are local views but ultimately nothing is separate so there can only be - and ÷ within the 1.

Hmm...

 

The reason why this is a problem for machines is that it begins from the outside and tries to work inward, hoping that 'the rain follows the plow'. Our every experience with machines however, be they mere baby machines in the scheme of mechanical evolution, are that they are not loving bundles of joy and wretched upset.

If you don't listen to them, and try to forget your prejudices, you will never know, and be stuck in your superiority complex. 

Who said superiority? I only say that machines are unconscious. If that is intuitively inferior, then that might be a clue as to the proper place of sense in the cosmos. What matters to me is only the truthful categorization of the big picture. Machines can do much that we can't, but they can't appreciate it, so it doesn't matter.

In your theory, assuming there is a theory. It looks more to propaganda to me. Just find your axioms, and until you have done so, it might help you to be more agnostic on this issue.

We already experience the axioms directly. All that we can do is name them: Sense and motive.

Yeah but I am a mathematician, and I will ask you for some formula that I can use. Words have no value, except if we have a political agenda (like when I use "theology", where the political agenda is to retrieve theology from the authoritative argument). But in the theory, any words can be replaced by any words. Only the logical relations meant something.

 

 

They are not sometimes loving and other times aloof.

That might be true about my fridge. 

Heh.
 

They are not once in a while loving.

With comp, you are a machine (or you are supported by a machine),

As a human being, I am supported by a brain and body, (and civilization, species). I use machines, and even "I", Craig Weinberg, could be a machine in a sense, but my awareness is not only not a machine, it is the exact opposite of a machine.

That's the point where I agree with you, but it is a consequence of comp.

My human qualities could be a consequence of sense + comp, but the awareness itself behind any individuality, the raw capacity to receive and project presence in the universe, can't be a consequence of comp (why would it be? Comp doesn't need any aesthetic appreciation of itself.)

Comp is just the belief that you can survive with an aritificial brain, with all the aesthetic you need.

 

so anything you say, is said through some machine. If you keep this in mind, you can marvel about what machines can do, just by looking at yourself. 

That it is hard for a machine to believe that she is a machine is already well explained by actual machine.

Your talk is given by the Bp & p in the machine. The machine's inner God already say "I am not a machine" until she get the point that the correct phrasing is "If I am a machine, then I can't believe that I am machine".

Except that some machines, like Bruno, can believe that they are machine.

In the sense that I can assume it, and reason from it.

 
Isn't that good enough to qualify as a Bp & p?

If God was kind enough to tell me that comp is true, but He is wiser than that. Don't confuse "p is true" with "I know p". There is an abyss in between.

 

My private opinion is ... private.

If machines can have conflicting opinions about themselves then I don't see how either opinion can be used to support a generalization about machines.

We can bet. If we were asking a proof that a plane will not crash, we would just not take any plane. Life is risky, and comp will not change that. 

So it can go either way. Maybe it's you who has a superiority complex...to be better than the machines who can't believe that they are machine?

Machines' too can assume that they are machine, and bet on their correcteness, with some caution, as this makes them indeed quite near inconsistency. 

What would make them prefer one assumption or another?

The doctor's cautious suggestion that it might help to see the next soccer cup.

 

 

They are *never* ever emotional in any way. Their functions are 100% anesthetic and can be ported to any physical medium or aesthetic output. This makes perfect sense to me, since living creatures are build themselves from the inside out. The entire lifetime of an organism can and should be understood as a single "strike" as you say, with each "moment" an episode of relative duration...at the moment I am middle aged. At the moment I am 45. At the moment I am living in the United States.

A machine has no such relativistic 'real number' kinds of moments.

You talk about the actual machines. I might agree with you for the material one, but not for the mathematical one that we can already interview. if your point is that my fridge cannot think, I might be with you (but don't tell him as he is a bit emotional nowadays :)

I talk about machine as defined in a theory. Not about current man-made machines.

Then it could be the case that the theoretical attributes which you are assuming for machines might actually belong to sense.

Some of them. But again, that follows from comp.

Comp follows from my model too. Since each perspective within the continuum of sense defines the rest of the continuum relativistically, it stands to reason that looking at the universe from a perspective of pure science-knowing

There is no science-knowing. A scientist who says "I know" is a charlatan.

would make art-feeling seem subordinate - would under-signify it in the way that characterizes mechanism...breaking it down into meaningless functional parts.

We are more than our parts. 

 

 

It has discrete instants - clock ticks, program steps...recursive enumerations.

The Bp & p, has not that. It justifies why when looking inward, machines are bound to discover continuous and non enumerable things, non computable things. 

They may be non-computable, but that doesn't mean that they are aesthetic or give rise to aesthetic presentations.

Of course. But that does not mean that they are incompatible with aesthetic and not give rise to aesthetic presentations.

You are the one saying that comp is false. I am not the one saying that comp is true.

It's not a neutral possibility though. Everything that we have seen of real machines indicate that my view is right.

Everything we can derive from machine's theory indicates that you might be wrong. The very fact that you refer to current machines defeat already your argumentation.

Comp could be valid only if numbers had an aesthetic participation on their own,

That's what I try to convey to you. Numbers do have an aesthetic participation on their own, with some definitions.

but why would they? How could they?

I have already explained this on this list, and I will make some attempt on the FOAR list of Russell soon.

If it is the aesthetic which is the prime mover, then it is easy to see how it can bend itself temporarily into anesthetic bubbles to build more significant experiences with. That is entirely consistent with an erotic agenda.

No need of any prime mover for the "numbers" erotic agenda. 

 

 

Computation comes out of counting rather than being or feeling, so that using very detailed counting, we can count all of the little aesthetic cues which we interpret through our bodies of other people's bodies behaviors and infer a skeletal description of the mind. An impressive and useful trick, but it is only a description of a generic mind's behaviors in the outside world, not an actual reproduction of the feelings which give rise to a particular person's mind. It is like those averaged faces (http://couscousqueen.tumblr.com/post/48604405522/awkwardsituationist-world-of-averages) - nobody lives behind those faces, but it is not difficult to think that someone could.

Such type of argument does not bear on the fundamental question.

Why not? Counting is a kind of feeling, but feeling cannot be generated by counting.

Logic is not enough for Turing universality.

Logic + numbers + counting is not enough.

Logic + numbers + addition + counting is not enough.

Logic + numbers + addition + multiplication + counting is enough. And then, by comp, that's enough for feeling.

But comp doesn't explain what it is doing with feeling.

You must study this, and then compare with your theory or intuition.

It's just an opening assumption that feeling is part of what numbers can do. 

No, it is an understanding that the best definition of knowledge works on the numbers thanks to some incompletness phenomenon. It *is* NOT completely obvious.

Logic + numbers + addition + multiplication + counting would be perfectly adequate without feeling.

Perhaps, but the point is that this can't happen. Feeling is not a gift for machines, it is a true reality, once you can acceot some definition of feeling ('course).

You look like an alien looking at a human brain, and saying that he does not see anything like emotion or aesthetic there. But the 1p is not 3p-visible, be it in hulman, alien, or number relations. Machines already understand that.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Craig Weinberg]

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.
 

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 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.

Only if you are already assuming Comp is true from the start.

Craig
 

[Craig Weinberg]

On Monday, April 29, 2013 12:55:57 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 25 Apr 2013, at 19:21, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Thursday, April 25, 2013 11:20:59 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 25 Apr 2013, at 16:02, Craig Weinberg wrote:

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:

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.

OK. But nobody said that.

Wouldn't that be what Comp assumes? Otherwise in the simulation arguments we are talking not only about an untapped level of sophistication of computation, but a wholly undiscovered transcendental mode of computation. It's not computation as it is, but as it might be.

The basic level is not important. Having chosen arithmetic, we have natural numbers, not "real's decimals".

This is a evasion. Of course the basic level is important. That is the whole question: Does the basic level of consciousness supervene on arithmetic or not? The lack of real numbers and geometry in Turing emulation tells me that it doesn't even get off the ground. That kind of mechanical ordering of digits is hugely derivative, narrow, and fragile compared to the radical elasticity and fluidity of sense. Even in their emulation of fluid mechanics computers are rigid. The subtle aesthetics of genuine flow are lost to the clockwork slithering of repositioned pixels.
 

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.

That contradict some correct statement you made, but which showed that your position leads to the existence of zombie (which makes not a lot of sense with comp). So I have to ask you, how can you ever know that it worked?

I don't think that it would work. I don't think that a person off of their brain in reality, it would just be a mess. They would not be present in the new brain, they would not remember being in the new brain, and the new brain ultimately would not do anything except perhaps store pointers to experiences which could be used by the real brain. You couldn't know for sure if it worked, but you could know that it didn't. If you don't know that it didn't then we might assume that it could work.
 

Although I don't believe in p-zombies, I do believe in good approximation of them, for some period of time.

I agree.
 

But then comp might be false for other reason. The guy with the new brain might be conscious but someone else, etc.

We cannot prove comp, nor test it if it is true. We can only refute it if it is false, by comparing the comp-physics with actual observations.

Right, yes. Even if the new brain seemed to work, I would say that it would be a new person and the original person would not experience being in the new brain at all.

Our brain is replaced, "continuously" all the time. 

Not really. Only fragments are replaced. People move to New York and move out of New York, but New York itself is not replaced, even though the population is completely different from 100 years ago. The attitudes and gestures of people, the culture and dialect also remain present as a collective influence independently of any particular function or form within the city.
 

 

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?

Comp is only falsifiable.

How? What criteria wouldn't be circular?

Comp predicts the physics,

Predicting the possibility of a moon landing and landing on the moon are two different things.
 

so we can compare the comp physics and what we observe. Of course it needs work and progress in mathematical logic, but the open problem in math are there.

The presentation problem remains. If Comp can predict physics, then why bother with the formality of generating physics?
 

 

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, it's going to steer us in exactly the wrong direction.

It is what comp does the best, as the machine already refutes Socrates' refutation of Theaetetus' definition of knowledge. Then it predicts the MW perceptible below the substitution level, and it explains better than any theory today the qualia and the quanta, in a testable way, and this by accepting standard definition put by people independently of comp.

Indeed comp provides a simple and transparent arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus theology, and exactly where Plotinus predicts where to find it.

I don't think that it addresses qualia at all. It only addresses non-quanta. You are inferring that to be qualia, but it isn't, it is anesthetic 3p self-reference. 

The machines already  will differ on this. You will say it is just a zombie, so it is easy for you to not care, but that's begging the question. The qualia I am talking about would not make an atom of sense if they were 3p. They are not.

In this case, by 3p I mean self-reference in the logical sense rather than the experienced sense. If I watch the behavior of cars, I can make a theory about how any given car will drive, and that can include self-referential functions. If the car parallel parks, there needs to be some factoring in of the dimensions of the car and the possible approaches to filling the space without colliding. That is not the same thing as a theory about what it is like to drive a car, or an explanation of who it is that drives cars, why they built them, etc.
 

As for knowledge and theology, those are conceptual conditions which supervene on awareness, not awareness itself. Machine knowledge and machine theology are tautological, like traffic patterns in a large city...positions which can be used to triangulate the status of other positions.

No. You must study them, and grasp by yourself that they are not tautological at all. Or you are using that term in a so very large sense that you say nothing here. We did not expect those theorems. They are counterintuitive in the large. Not so much people grasp them correctly.

Of course mathematicians don't expect them, but the arithmetic truths are familiar with themselves. Machines have to know how to be machines. If you know how to do math, then you don't need any understanding to perform any particular functions. The knowledge doesn't need to be discovered, it can simply be located in arithmetic truth.
 

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.

What does that have to do with arithmetic though? We can see how others feel by looking at their face and gestures, hearing their voice, understanding their words, and perhaps intuitively as well. Our lives are positively saturated with impressions of other people's feelings. Why would an arithmetic model be superior to a sensory-motor model at explaining that?

We just get it by derivation, once we believe the brain works without magic, like biology, physics, chemistry implies.

But comp doesn't need a brain. It's already non-physical magic, no less likely to appear in a complicated doorknob than a baby. I'm surprised that you are suddenly reaching for the physical to justify arithmetic.

Even if the physical is not primary, it exists and plays a key role in machine's "theology".

That seems weird. Why not have a universe of machines that are purely musical or graphic?
 

A sensory-motor model predicts the brain better than arithmetic does, since it is grounded in the aesthetic agenda there is every reason to expect a non-repeating layer cake of forms and functions from the physical to the biological. Arithmetic is lost in biology.

Arithmetic justifies biology.

I don't think that arithmetic can justify anything except the sense and logic that it supervenes on.
 

There would be no need for more than one kind of fractal or sense modality.

There are eight one, among the main one. In fact it is 4 + 4 * infinity. You are still talking about grandpa arithmetic, but we have discover the universal numbers since. That changes everything. It introduces chaos in Plato Heaven.

Chaos, fine, but where are the aesthetics? Where are the sense modalities coming from, and why?
 

Biology would be superfluous and irrelevant. Biological machines should have no particular preference for the biological and we should see many natural hybrids on Earth.

There are no reason for that for the emergence of life, but you are right on the long term. Well, hybrids already exists.

What hybrids exist? Species which mate with minerals?
 

Science is about finding the shortest distance between two points, not calculating the most scenic route. If we tell a machine to take the day off, what will it do? A computer has no need for art.

Today, perhaps. But that kind of argument is weak, to say the least. 

It may be week, but it may also be as strong as any argument could be, given the topic. How can we expect objective answers to questions about the subjective?

By agreeing on semi-axioms about them, or on some hypothesis. There is no reason to allow more subjectivity in the science of the subjectivity. I would say, on the contrary. Not seeing this means level confusion. That is the very confusion which makes hard for the human science to progress, and for theology to come out of the political.

I don't think that axioms or hypotheses can locate aesthetics. Not seeing that means category error.
 

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.

Ok, contingencies, but aren't contingencies just second order extensions of necessities?

First order negation is enough. <>p is usually defined as ~[] ~p. Possible p is "not necessary not p".

Not sure if I understand, but it sounds too naive. It sounds like "Anything that isn't meatloaf could be a rainbow."...which maybe is ok given the a priori of rainbow, but if there is no a priori known, then why would rainbow appear from non-meatloafness?

I was just saying than in classical modal logic the contingencies are at the same conceptual level than the necessities.

There is still no room in either modal logic or arithmetic truth for aesthetic experience. There are no playful ornaments. No dessert.
 

 

No amount of contingencies would entail an aesthetic appreciation of itself.

You are right, you need some connections more.

What if there aren't any more?

But there is more.   (truth, consistency, and many others). 

But no sense. No experience. Nothing to touch or taste or look at. Nothing to care about.
 

The problem is that I can see from the way you argue, that nothing can change your mind: you "already know", and that means that you will not been able to reason in the hypothetico-deductive manner. 

I do NOT know, so I can try theories with an open mind.

But you still profess to know that you do not know. What's the difference? The epistemology is ultimately subjective. You are still taking your own word for your understanding, just like I am.

I don't claim to know or not to know, only that in my experience, some theories seem to make more sense than others. I try to make a theory that makes the most sense.

 

 

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.

You must distinguish arithmetic truth (which is very big and far beyond humans and machines), and its many internal views, where things can get unclear, fuzzy, and where intimate relations can develop.

My view is that you have it inside out. Arithmetic truth is an internal view of fuzzy experience. It is an abstracted meta-pattern of hyper-clarity arising from reductive interaction among public objects and space. Arithmetic is a simulation. Arithmetic is every simulation. Only the unmeasured ideopathic qualia is genuine and whole. Wholes cannot be assembled from parts, they can only divide themselves from wholes intentionally.

No argument here.

If you say so. I thought you were saying that awareness supervenes on arithmetic though. I suppose it's really academic, since locally arithmetic truth and experiential aesthetics are always found together. It is only from an absolute perspective that I think it makes sense to say that arithmetic supervenes on sense. The difference though is that it means that machines can only simulate human quality feeling.

You lost me.

I'm saying that for all practical purposes in medicine, etc, Comp may as well be true. We still have to treat the brain as if it is a machine even though the machine aspects of it are not the fundamental generators of consciousness. Ultimately, however, if we wanted to really make a machine that was conscious, we would only be able to simulate behaviors which remind us of our own, and not actually conscious experience.
 

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 number system that has feeling, it can only be a feeling that has number systems.

I can agree with all this, except I feel you say this with the idea that machines cannot support consciousness.

Machines can support and extend the motives of consciousness as technology, and that could become quite fantastic as we bring more machines into ourselves and more of ourselves out into machines, but without something conscious there in the first place, machines can't generate consciousness. 

Plausible. But machines can borrow consciousness from truth, or better: consciousness can borrow machines to make itself manifest in some situation. 

Yes to the second! But there's a hierarchy there because of these aesthetic levels of richness...which accumulate only through direct experience in real time.

OK. But "real time" is something relative in the comp theory.

But I think that it is absolute in conscious phenomenology.
 

You reify "real" and "direct". That's assuming what I want to explain, and what I show we need to explain once we bet on comp.

If we don't bet on Comp, then we don't have that problem.
 

That's why stimulating a congenitally blind person's visual cortex gives them tactile aesthetics rather than visual. The aesthetic is driven by connection with the universal...seeing actual stuff in the world with eyeballs, not only by the signal forms and functions in the brain. That's also why splicing an phosphorescent gene from a fish into a mouse doesn't make a mouse with fish scales, but only a mouse with phosphorescent fur. The aesthetic thing is a narrative through time, an experiential story, not a mechanism across space. No matter what you do to the mouse, it's still a mouse having a weird experience. No matter what you do to a silicon crystal or a set of water pipes, how complex and sophisticated it is, the aesthetics of the experience never extend any higher aesthetically. The lower level entities and the higher level entities can use each other, but it is a symbiotic rather than peer relation.

That makes sense in the machine first person discourse, but the generalization of it is not made necessary.

It can't be because Comp incorrectly presumes a universe of generic interchangable parts in space or recurring through time rather than incidents which are inherently unique within their own perceptual frame of reference.
 

Re-quoting myself from FB: "The only thing that computation doesn't relate to is how consciousness itself is generated...because it isn't generated, it's diffracted from eternity, from the inside out."

Why not. It is too fuzzy to use it for or against comp. There is something like that with comp, that is what I try to explain.

So it sounds like you are open to a sensory-motor primitive, but you're not wanting to see it as the parent of arithmetic truth.

It is a child of arithmetic truth.

Why would it be? What would be the point of such a thing to arithmetic, and how does arithmetic make sense of itself without it?
 

I mean the +, * and numbers are basically the same model that I have, only I see + as a reduction of public physics/motor participation and * as a reduction of private experience/sense perception. The numbers are a reduction of the hierarchical levels of self reference...the consequence of what I call solitropy. Solitropy could be computationalized as the 1p feeling which drives any subroutine to return or any circuit to complete. The feeling is 'going home', or whole, healed, restored, returned, recovered, remembered, etc.

You can't assemble that feeling from + and * though. It is already assumed, just in a very under-signifying scientific way which filters out almost all of the art.

Actually wait. The + should really be - and the * should be ÷. Because it's diffracted from the absolute, which is one. Arithmetic truth is all ultimately a schema diffracted within 1. + and * are local views but ultimately nothing is separate so there can only be - and ÷ within the 1.

Hmm...

:)
 

 

The reason why this is a problem for machines is that it begins from the outside and tries to work inward, hoping that 'the rain follows the plow'. Our every experience with machines however, be they mere baby machines in the scheme of mechanical evolution, are that they are not loving bundles of joy and wretched upset.

If you don't listen to them, and try to forget your prejudices, you will never know, and be stuck in your superiority complex. 

Who said superiority? I only say that machines are unconscious. If that is intuitively inferior, then that might be a clue as to the proper place of sense in the cosmos. What matters to me is only the truthful categorization of the big picture. Machines can do much that we can't, but they can't appreciate it, so it doesn't matter.

In your theory, assuming there is a theory. It looks more to propaganda to me. Just find your axioms, and until you have done so, it might help you to be more agnostic on this issue.

We already experience the axioms directly. All that we can do is name them: Sense and motive.

Yeah but I am a mathematician, and I will ask you for some formula that I can use. Words have no value, except if we have a political agenda (like when I use "theology", where the political agenda is to retrieve theology from the authoritative argument). But in the theory, any words can be replaced by any words. Only the logical relations meant something.

Sense and motive are no different from force and field, except that they are 1p experiential rather than 3p observable. Whatever is done with force and field in public physics should be doable with sense and motive in private physics...if you reverse everything.
 

 

 

They are not sometimes loving and other times aloof.

That might be true about my fridge. 

Heh.
 

They are not once in a while loving.

With comp, you are a machine (or you are supported by a machine),

As a human being, I am supported by a brain and body, (and civilization, species). I use machines, and even "I", Craig Weinberg, could be a machine in a sense, but my awareness is not only not a machine, it is the exact opposite of a machine.

That's the point where I agree with you, but it is a consequence of comp.

My human qualities could be a consequence of sense + comp, but the awareness itself behind any individuality, the raw capacity to receive and project presence in the universe, can't be a consequence of comp (why would it be? Comp doesn't need any aesthetic appreciation of itself.)

Comp is just the belief that you can survive with an aritificial brain, with all the aesthetic you need.

I don't think there is any way to get into a brain unless you are born into it.
 

 

so anything you say, is said through some machine. If you keep this in mind, you can marvel about what machines can do, just by looking at yourself. 

That it is hard for a machine to believe that she is a machine is already well explained by actual machine.

Your talk is given by the Bp & p in the machine. The machine's inner God already say "I am not a machine" until she get the point that the correct phrasing is "If I am a machine, then I can't believe that I am machine".

Except that some machines, like Bruno, can believe that they are machine.

In the sense that I can assume it, and reason from it.

 
Isn't that good enough to qualify as a Bp & p?

If God was kind enough to tell me that comp is true, but He is wiser than that. Don't confuse "p is true" with "I know p". There is an abyss in between.

True or not, it seems like you are saying on the one hand that machines believe X, and that you are a machine but you are able to disbelieve X on some level.
 

 

My private opinion is ... private.

If machines can have conflicting opinions about themselves then I don't see how either opinion can be used to support a generalization about machines.

We can bet. If we were asking a proof that a plane will not crash, we would just not take any plane. Life is risky, and comp will not change that. 

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.
 

So it can go either way. Maybe it's you who has a superiority complex...to be better than the machines who can't believe that they are machine?

Machines' too can assume that they are machine, and bet on their correcteness, with some caution, as this makes them indeed quite near inconsistency. 

What would make them prefer one assumption or another?

The doctor's cautious suggestion that it might help to see the next soccer cup.

So it's not really based on any reasonable expectation, more of a threat against our lives. The way the thought experiment is set up is revealing as it forces us to consider believing in Comp or to die. Seems a bit coercive, no?
 

 

 

They are *never* ever emotional in any way. Their functions are 100% anesthetic and can be ported to any physical medium or aesthetic output. This makes perfect sense to me, since living creatures are build themselves from the inside out. The entire lifetime of an organism can and should be understood as a single "strike" as you say, with each "moment" an episode of relative duration...at the moment I am middle aged. At the moment I am 45. At the moment I am living in the United States.

A machine has no such relativistic 'real number' kinds of moments.

You talk about the actual machines. I might agree with you for the material one, but not for the mathematical one that we can already interview. if your point is that my fridge cannot think, I might be with you (but don't tell him as he is a bit emotional nowadays :)

I talk about machine as defined in a theory. Not about current man-made machines.

Then it could be the case that the theoretical attributes which you are assuming for machines might actually belong to sense.

Some of them. But again, that follows from comp.

Comp follows from my model too. Since each perspective within the continuum of sense defines the rest of the continuum relativistically, it stands to reason that looking at the universe from a perspective of pure science-knowing

There is no science-knowing. A scientist who says "I know" is a charlatan.

But a scientist who says "I know that I don't know" is a charlatan too, he just doesn't know it.
 

would make art-feeling seem subordinate - would under-signify it in the way that characterizes mechanism...breaking it down into meaningless functional parts.

We are more than our parts. 

Does Comp know that?
 

 

 

It has discrete instants - clock ticks, program steps...recursive enumerations.

The Bp & p, has not that. It justifies why when looking inward, machines are bound to discover continuous and non enumerable things, non computable things. 

They may be non-computable, but that doesn't mean that they are aesthetic or give rise to aesthetic presentations.

Of course. But that does not mean that they are incompatible with aesthetic and not give rise to aesthetic presentations.

You are the one saying that comp is false. I am not the one saying that comp is true.

It's not a neutral possibility though. Everything that we have seen of real machines indicate that my view is right.

Everything we can derive from machine's theory indicates that you might be wrong. The very fact that you refer to current machines defeat already your argumentation.

You can't get any less evidence than 'no evidence'. It may not disprove Comp, but it would help Comp's case enormously if it were not true of current machines.
 

Comp could be valid only if numbers had an aesthetic participation on their own,

That's what I try to convey to you. Numbers do have an aesthetic participation on their own, with some definitions.

If that were true then we would not need to specify whether a file should be played as music or displayed as an image. The data itself would be one or the other.
 

but why would they? How could they?

I have already explained this on this list, and I will make some attempt on the FOAR list of Russell soon.

If it is the aesthetic which is the prime mover, then it is easy to see how it can bend itself temporarily into anesthetic bubbles to build more significant experiences with. That is entirely consistent with an erotic agenda.

No need of any prime mover for the "numbers" erotic agenda. 

Only because you are defining numbers as omnipotent and self-evident.
 

 

 

Computation comes out of counting rather than being or feeling, so that using very detailed counting, we can count all of the little aesthetic cues which we interpret through our bodies of other people's bodies behaviors and infer a skeletal description of the mind. An impressive and useful trick, but it is only a description of a generic mind's behaviors in the outside world, not an actual reproduction of the feelings which give rise to a particular person's mind. It is like those averaged faces (http://couscousqueen.tumblr.com/post/48604405522/awkwardsituationist-world-of-averages) - nobody lives behind those faces, but it is not difficult to think that someone could.

Such type of argument does not bear on the fundamental question.

Why not? Counting is a kind of feeling, but feeling cannot be generated by counting.

Logic is not enough for Turing universality.

Logic + numbers + counting is not enough.

Logic + numbers + addition + counting is not enough.

Logic + numbers + addition + multiplication + counting is enough. And then, by comp, that's enough for feeling.

But comp doesn't explain what it is doing with feeling.

You must study this, and then compare with your theory or intuition.

The relation between sense and logic is already clear to me though. Logic is the second order representation - the skeleton which allows unconscious development for first order sense to extend its presentation.
 

It's just an opening assumption that feeling is part of what numbers can do. 

No, it is an understanding that the best definition of knowledge works on the numbers thanks to some incompletness phenomenon. It *is* NOT completely obvious.

Right, but there is no positive link between incompleteness and feeling.
 

Logic + numbers + addition + multiplication + counting would be perfectly adequate without feeling.

Perhaps, but the point is that this can't happen. Feeling is not a gift for machines, it is a true reality, once you can acceot some definition of feeling ('course).

You look like an alien looking at a human brain, and saying that he does not see anything like emotion or aesthetic there. But the 1p is not 3p-visible, be it in hulman, alien, or number relations. Machines already understand that.

Just because the 1p is not 3p visible doesn't mean that we should assume 1p for every cartoon, puppet, stuffed animal, and road sign in the world. Comp gives no recognition of the distance between maps and territories.

Craig
 

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

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 attention to the man behind the curtain' response.

Without that consensus, there would be no scientific researches nor beliefs. The consensus is not on truth in general, but on the means of communication. Your answer betrays that yo have more a pseudo-religious agenda than an inquiry in what could possibly be true or false.

 

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.

Only if you are already assuming Comp is true from the start.

Not at all. It is rare I do not assume comp, though, but here I was not.

Our position are not symmetrical. I suggest a theory and reason from there. You pretend knowing a truth, and use this as a pretext for not looking at a theory.  I doubt the condition for a dialog is possible.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Bruno Marchal]

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/

[Craig Weinberg]

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. 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 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.

Without that consensus, there would be no scientific researches nor beliefs. The consensus is not on truth in general, but on the means of communication. Your answer betrays that yo have more a pseudo-religious agenda than an inquiry in what could possibly be true or false.

My agenda is to understand consciousness as it actually is, rather than as a theory would like it to be.
 

 

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.

Only if you are already assuming Comp is true from the start.

Not at all. It is rare I do not assume comp, though, but here I was not.

Our position are not symmetrical. I suggest a theory and reason from there. You pretend knowing a truth, and use this as a pretext for not looking at a theory.  I doubt the condition for a dialog is possible.

I'm not pretending to know a truth, I am stating that I understand the point that Searle and Leibniz made, and which the replies to that point do not. They underestimate the depth of consciousness, and mistake copy and pasting Shakespeare for being Shakespeare.

Craig
 

[Bruno Marchal]

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 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.

Without that consensus, there would be no scientific researches nor beliefs. The consensus is not on truth in general, but on the means of communication. Your answer betrays that yo have more a pseudo-religious agenda than an inquiry in what could possibly be true or false.

My agenda is to understand consciousness as it actually is, rather than as a theory would like it to be.

Understanding is always in the frame of some assumption. You confuse the experience, and the possible explanation for the existence of that experience (which is indeed more direct, but that can be due to the existence of the brain).

 

 

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.

Only if you are already assuming Comp is true from the start.

Not at all. It is rare I do not assume comp, though, but here I was not.

Our position are not symmetrical. I suggest a theory and reason from there. You pretend knowing a truth, and use this as a pretext for not looking at a theory.  I doubt the condition for a dialog is possible.

I'm not pretending to know a truth, I am stating that I understand the point that Searle and Leibniz made, and which the replies to that point do not. They underestimate the depth of consciousness, and mistake copy and pasting Shakespeare for being Shakespeare.

But here you betray that you are again begging the question. What you say is just "no doctor". So you introduce either an infinite low level of comp (= non comp), or something non turing emulable in the brain or the body.

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Craig Weinberg]

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.
 

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 made of programs? It sounds like you are importing the Explanatory Gap into computation.
 

 

 

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.

Without that consensus, there would be no scientific researches nor beliefs. The consensus is not on truth in general, but on the means of communication. Your answer betrays that yo have more a pseudo-religious agenda than an inquiry in what could possibly be true or false.

My agenda is to understand consciousness as it actually is, rather than as a theory would like it to be.

Understanding is always in the frame of some assumption. You confuse the experience, and the possible explanation for the existence of that experience (which is indeed more direct, but that can be due to the existence of the brain).\

I'm really not confused at all. Explanations are experiences too. Existence is an experience. There can be nothing other than experiences.
 

 

 

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.

Only if you are already assuming Comp is true from the start.

Not at all. It is rare I do not assume comp, though, but here I was not.

Our position are not symmetrical. I suggest a theory and reason from there. You pretend knowing a truth, and use this as a pretext for not looking at a theory.  I doubt the condition for a dialog is possible.

I'm not pretending to know a truth, I am stating that I understand the point that Searle and Leibniz made, and which the replies to that point do not. They underestimate the depth of consciousness, and mistake copy and pasting Shakespeare for being Shakespeare.

But here you betray that you are again begging the question. What you say is just "no doctor". So you introduce either an infinite low level of comp (= non comp), or something non turing emulable in the brain or the body.

No, I am challenging the entire frame of quantitative reference. It has no authority over qualitative, aesthetic phenomena. I am saying that numbers are always derived from aesthetic experience - either bodies in public space or experiences in private time, but that no aesthetic experience can ever be generated by numbers alone.

The consequences then, of trying to generate aesthetic experience by reverse engineering it from its footprints in public space and the narrow awareness-of-awareness of our human privacy, is the uncanny valley - impersonated presence. This of course is precisely what we have observed in every instance where AI has been implemented. No device is born as a baby is, giving and receiving emotion and sensation.

It's not a matter of the brain not being emulable, it is a matter of the activity of the brain being partially driven by something which is not emulable in any way, because it is by definition a genuine and utterly unique event in the universe.

Craig

 

[Bruno Marchal]

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. 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 made of programs? It sounds like you are importing the Explanatory Gap into computation.

A universal program is a program. it is made of instructions, or code like any program. I identify it with its number in a universal enumeration phi_i. It is a u such that phi_u(x,y) = phi_x(y). u is the universal program, x is the program, and y is the data. Those relatioon can be defined in term of 0, s(x), + and *.

 

 

 

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.

Without that consensus, there would be no scientific researches nor beliefs. The consensus is not on truth in general, but on the means of communication. Your answer betrays that yo have more a pseudo-religious agenda than an inquiry in what could possibly be true or false.

My agenda is to understand consciousness as it actually is, rather than as a theory would like it to be.

Understanding is always in the frame of some assumption. You confuse the experience, and the possible explanation for the existence of that experience (which is indeed more direct, but that can be due to the existence of the brain).\

I'm really not confused at all. Explanations are experiences too. Existence is an experience. There can be nothing other than experiences.

There are the experiences of others, and what might relate yours to the one of the others.

 

 

 

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.

Only if you are already assuming Comp is true from the start.

Not at all. It is rare I do not assume comp, though, but here I was not.

Our position are not symmetrical. I suggest a theory and reason from there. You pretend knowing a truth, and use this as a pretext for not looking at a theory.  I doubt the condition for a dialog is possible.

I'm not pretending to know a truth, I am stating that I understand the point that Searle and Leibniz made, and which the replies to that point do not. They underestimate the depth of consciousness, and mistake copy and pasting Shakespeare for being Shakespeare.

But here you betray that you are again begging the question. What you say is just "no doctor". So you introduce either an infinite low level of comp (= non comp), or something non turing emulable in the brain or the body.

No, I am challenging the entire frame of quantitative reference. It has no authority over qualitative, aesthetic phenomena.

Both are needed, but you can't communicate what is not communicable.

I am saying that numbers are always derived from aesthetic experience - either bodies in public space or experiences in private time, but that no aesthetic experience can ever be generated by numbers alone.

Numbers are simpler to assume than aesthetic experience, which might be "just" the 1p-experience of machine.

You assume the complex to explain the simple. 

The consequences then, of trying to generate aesthetic experience by reverse engineering it from its footprints in public space and the narrow awareness-of-awareness of our human privacy, is the uncanny valley - impersonated presence. This of course is precisely what we have observed in every instance where AI has been implemented. No device is born as a baby is, giving and receiving emotion and sensation.

Creatures can appear in many ways.

It's not a matter of the brain not being emulable, it is a matter of the activity of the brain being partially driven by something which is not emulable in any way, because it is by definition a genuine and utterly unique event in the universe.

This looks like wishful thinking. 

We might be relatively unique, but the evidences are that we are not unique, at many different levels.

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

[Craig Weinberg]

Sure, but we have to constantly remind ourselves that we are dealing with the ground of understanding. We can communicate with others on our experience too - that we know that we have to go to the bathroom without have an actual proof of the fact or a reason to suspect it beyond the presence of the feeling of urgent need for relief. The feeling is self-explanatory, and it cannot be made any more plain. It is not a concept or a computation, it is a tangible presence in our experience.

 

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 made of programs? It sounds like you are importing the Explanatory Gap into computation.

A universal program is a program. it is made of instructions, or code like any program. I identify it with its number in a universal enumeration phi_i. It is a u such that phi_u(x,y) = phi_x(y). u is the universal program, x is the program, and y is the data. Those relatioon can be defined in term of 0, s(x), + and *.

Why would it matter whether the Chinese Room, its book, or CPU man corresponded to a universal program rather than ordinary program? My sense is that you are saying something like 'if you give a man a fish (program), he eats for a day, but if you teach a man to fish (universal program) he eats for a lifetime.'
 

 

 

 

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.

Without that consensus, there would be no scientific researches nor beliefs. The consensus is not on truth in general, but on the means of communication. Your answer betrays that yo have more a pseudo-religious agenda than an inquiry in what could possibly be true or false.

My agenda is to understand consciousness as it actually is, rather than as a theory would like it to be.

Understanding is always in the frame of some assumption. You confuse the experience, and the possible explanation for the existence of that experience (which is indeed more direct, but that can be due to the existence of the brain).\

I'm really not confused at all. Explanations are experiences too. Existence is an experience. There can be nothing other than experiences.

There are the experiences of others, and what might relate yours to the one of the others.

Sure, but they are all aspects of experience and have no existence independently of it.
 

 

 

 

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.

Only if you are already assuming Comp is true from the start.

Not at all. It is rare I do not assume comp, though, but here I was not.

Our position are not symmetrical. I suggest a theory and reason from there. You pretend knowing a truth, and use this as a pretext for not looking at a theory.  I doubt the condition for a dialog is possible.

I'm not pretending to know a truth, I am stating that I understand the point that Searle and Leibniz made, and which the replies to that point do not. They underestimate the depth of consciousness, and mistake copy and pasting Shakespeare for being Shakespeare.

But here you betray that you are again begging the question. What you say is just "no doctor". So you introduce either an infinite low level of comp (= non comp), or something non turing emulable in the brain or the body.

No, I am challenging the entire frame of quantitative reference. It has no authority over qualitative, aesthetic phenomena.

Both are needed, but you can't communicate what is not communicable.

You don't need to communicate it, because we have empathy that we share the same experiences.

I am saying that numbers are always derived from aesthetic experience - either bodies in public space or experiences in private time, but that no aesthetic experience can ever be generated by numbers alone.

Numbers are simpler to assume than aesthetic experience, which might be "just" the 1p-experience of machine.

You assume the complex to explain the simple. 

Numbers are not simple. I have listed why many times but you ignore. Numbers require all kinds of expectations about logic, ordinality and cardinality, persistence, memory, location, identity, equivalence, positive and negative symmetry, etc. The Turing machine needs tape, and a motor, and a read head, and the ability to control the motor, and stability and coherence for every relation of form and function. Numbers are software. Sense is the hardware. Numbers never turn into colors or shapes without the help of sense. Sense, however, can analyze colors or shapes numerically.

The consequences then, of trying to generate aesthetic experience by reverse engineering it from its footprints in public space and the narrow awareness-of-awareness of our human privacy, is the uncanny valley - impersonated presence. This of course is precisely what we have observed in every instance where AI has been implemented. No device is born as a baby is, giving and receiving emotion and sensation.

Creatures can appear in many ways.

Do any biological creatures appear catatonic, yet awaiting instruction like a machine?
 

It's not a matter of the brain not being emulable, it is a matter of the activity of the brain being partially driven by something which is not emulable in any way, because it is by definition a genuine and utterly unique event in the universe.

This looks like wishful thinking. 

We might be relatively unique, but the evidences are that we are not unique, at many different levels.

But there is no evidence that we are not unique if we include all levels. There is only one Taj Mahal, one World War I, etc. We are unified aesthetic moments, not generic combinations.

Craig