Max Velmans' Reflexive Monism

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

I have just finished reading Understanding Consciousness by Max Velmans
and below there are a couple of comments to the book.

The book is similar to Jeffrey Gray's Consciousness: Creeping up on the
Hard Problem in a sense that it takes phenomenal consciousness
seriously. Let me give an example. Imagine that you watch yourself in
the mirror. Your image that you observe in the mirror is an example of
phenomenal consciousness.

The difference with Jeffrey Gray is in the question where the image that
you see in the mirror is located. If we take a conventional way of
thinking, that is,

1) photons are reflected by the mirror
2) neurons in retina are excited
3) natural neural nets starts information processing

then the answer should be that this image is in your brain. It seems to
be logical as, after all, we know that there is nothing after the mirror.

However, it immediately follows that not only your image in the mirror
is in your brain but rather everything that your see is also in your
brain. This is exactly what one finds in Gray's book "The world is
inside the head".

Velmans takes a different position that he calls reflexive model of
perception. According to him, what we consciously experience is located
exactly where we experience it. In other words, the image that you see
in the mirror is located after the mirror and not in your brain. A nice
picture that explains Velmans' idea is at

http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/05/brain-and-world.html

Velmans introduces perceptual projection but this remains as the Hard
Problem in his book, how exactly perceptual projection happens.

Velmans contrast his model with reductionism (physicalism) and dualism
and interestingly enough he finds many common features between
reductionism and dualism. For example, the image in the mirror will be
in the brain according to both reductionism and dualism. This part could
be interesting for Stephen.

First I thought that perceptual projection could be interpreted similar
to Craig's senses but it is not the case. Velmans' reflexive monism is
based on a statement that first- and third-person views cannot be
combined (this is what Bruno says). From a third-person view, one
observes neural correlates of consciousness but not the first-person
view. Now I understand such a position much better.

Anyway the the last chapter in the book is "Self-consciousness in a
reflexive universe".

Evgenii

[Stephen P. King]

Hi Evgenii,

I would be very interested if Velmans discussed how the model would
consider multiple observers of the image in the mirror and how the
images that are in the brains of the many are coordinated such that
there is always a single consistent world of mirrors and brains and so
forth.

>
> First I thought that perceptual projection could be interpreted
> similar to Craig's senses but it is not the case. Velmans' reflexive
> monism is based on a statement that first- and third-person views
> cannot be combined (this is what Bruno says). From a third-person
> view, one observes neural correlates of consciousness but not the
> first-person view. Now I understand such a position much better.

Is this third-person view (3p) one that is not ever the actual
first-person (1p) of some actual observer? I can only directly
experience my own content of consciousness, so the content of someone
else is always only known via some description. How is this idea
considered, if at all?

>
> Anyway the the last chapter in the book is "Self-consciousness in a
> reflexive universe".

I am interested in "communications between self-conscious entities
in a reflexive universe". ;-) Does Velmans discuss any abstract models
of reflexivity itself?

>
> Evgenii
>


--
Onward!

Stephen

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
~ Francis Bacon

[Richard Ruquist]

"Velmans introduces perceptual projection but this remains as the Hard Problem in his book, how exactly perceptual projection happens"-Evgenii Rudnyi

I conjecture that the discrete nonphysical particles of compactified space, the so-called Calabi-Yau Manifolds of string theory, have perceptual projection due to the mapping of closed strings, something that Leibniz hypothesized for his monads centuries ago. http://vixra.org/pdf/1101.0044v1.pdf

Richard David

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[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 27.05.2012 07:50 Stephen P. King said the following:

> On 5/26/2012 11:57 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

...

>> Velmans contrast his model with reductionism (physicalism) and
>> dualism and interestingly enough he finds many common features
>> between reductionism and dualism. For example, the image in the
>> mirror will be in the brain according to both reductionism and
>> dualism. This part could be interesting for Stephen.
>
> Hi Evgenii,
>
> I would be very interested if Velmans discussed how the model would
> consider multiple observers of the image in the mirror and how the
> images that are in the brains of the many are coordinated such that
> there is always a single consistent world of mirrors and brains and
> so forth.

A good extension. Velmans does not consider such a case but he says that
the perceptions are located exactly where one perceives them. In this
case, it seems that it should not pose an additional difficulty.

>> First I thought that perceptual projection could be interpreted
>> similar to Craig's senses but it is not the case. Velmans'
>> reflexive monism is based on a statement that first- and
>> third-person views cannot be combined (this is what Bruno says).
>> From a third-person view, one observes neural correlates of
>> consciousness but not the first-person view. Now I understand such
>> a position much better.
>
> Is this third-person view (3p) one that is not ever the actual
> first-person (1p) of some actual observer? I can only directly
> experience my own content of consciousness, so the content of someone
> else is always only known via some description. How is this idea
> considered, if at all?

Yes, the third-person view belongs to another observer and Velmans plays
this fact out. He means that at his picture when a person looks at the
cat, the third-person view means another person who looks at that cat
and simultaneously look at the first person. This way, two person can
change their first-person view to third-person view. However, it is
still impossible to directly observe the first-person view of another
observer. Everything that is possible in this respect are neural
correlates of consciousness.

>> Anyway the the last chapter in the book is "Self-consciousness in a
>> reflexive universe".
>
> I am interested in "communications between self-conscious entities in
> a reflexive universe". ;-) Does Velmans discuss any abstract models
> of reflexivity itself?

Not really. As usual, the positive construction of own philosophy is
weaker as the critique of other philosophies.

Evgenii

[Stephen P. King]

On 5/27/2012 4:07 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
> On 27.05.2012 07:50 Stephen P. King said the following:
>> On 5/26/2012 11:57 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
>
> ...
>
>>> Velmans contrast his model with reductionism (physicalism) and
>>> dualism and interestingly enough he finds many common features
>>> between reductionism and dualism. For example, the image in the
>>> mirror will be in the brain according to both reductionism and
>>> dualism. This part could be interesting for Stephen.
>>
>> Hi Evgenii,
>>
>> I would be very interested if Velmans discussed how the model would
>> consider multiple observers of the image in the mirror and how the
>> images that are in the brains of the many are coordinated such that
>> there is always a single consistent world of mirrors and brains and
>> so forth.
>
> A good extension. Velmans does not consider such a case but he says
> that the perceptions are located exactly where one perceives them. In
> this case, it seems that it should not pose an additional difficulty.

Hi Evgenii,

This does seem to imply an interesting situation where the
mind/consciousness of the observer is in a sense no longer confined to
being 'inside the skull" but ranging out to the farthest place where
something is percieved. It seems to me that imply a mapping between a
large hyper-volume (the out there) and the small volume of the brain
that cannot be in a one-to-one form. The reflexive idea looks a lot like
a Pullback in category theory and one can speculate if the dual, the
Pushout, is also involved. See
http://www.euclideanspace.com/maths/discrete/category/universal/index.htm for
more.

>
>>> First I thought that perceptual projection could be interpreted
>>> similar to Craig's senses but it is not the case. Velmans'
>>> reflexive monism is based on a statement that first- and
>>> third-person views cannot be combined (this is what Bruno says).
>>> From a third-person view, one observes neural correlates of
>>> consciousness but not the first-person view. Now I understand such
>>> a position much better.
>>
>> Is this third-person view (3p) one that is not ever the actual
>> first-person (1p) of some actual observer? I can only directly
>> experience my own content of consciousness, so the content of someone
>> else is always only known via some description. How is this idea
>> considered, if at all?
>
> Yes, the third-person view belongs to another observer and Velmans
> plays this fact out. He means that at his picture when a person looks
> at the cat, the third-person view means another person who looks at
> that cat and simultaneously look at the first person. This way, two
> person can change their first-person view to third-person view.
> However, it is still impossible to directly observe the first-person
> view of another observer. Everything that is possible in this respect
> are neural correlates of consciousness.

Does this ultimately imply that the 3-p (third person point of
view) is merely an abstraction and never actually occurring? WE make a
big deal about neural correlates but we still have no good
theory/explanation of how neural functions generate the internal model
that is one side of the relationship. The best research that I have seen
on this so far is the work of the mathematician Marius Buliga and
discussed in his blog here http://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/

>
>
>>> Anyway the the last chapter in the book is "Self-consciousness in a
>>> reflexive universe".
>>
>> I am interested in "communications between self-conscious entities in
>> a reflexive universe". ;-) Does Velmans discuss any abstract models
>> of reflexivity itself?
>
> Not really. As usual, the positive construction of own philosophy is
> weaker as the critique of other philosophies.

Yes, that is true. An already existing target makes for a sharper
attack.

[meekerdb]

On 5/27/2012 2:04 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:

    This does seem to imply an interesting situation where the mind/consciousness of the observer is in a sense no longer confined to being 'inside the skull" but ranging out to the farthest place where something is percieved. It seems to me that imply a mapping between a large hyper-volume (the out there) and the small volume of the brain that cannot be in a one-to-one form.

The skull, the brain, and 'out there' are all just parts of the world model your brain constructs.

Brent

[Craig Weinberg]

I look at it the same way, that first and third person views cannot be
combined, but I go further to say that they are opposite. First person
images are events in our lives. They are sense (feeling-image-meaning-
story) in time. Third person is an inside out fisheye-view of first
person stories that are not yours. The totality of their story thus
far (up to the corresponding moment in your own story) appears to you
collapsed as an object in space. Just as the entire unexpressed
potential of infinite apple orchards is essentialized as an apple
seed. The difference between an apple seed and seeds in general
recapitulates the phylogeny of gymnosperms and the species of apple in
particular.

The seed of the entire dream of the human species universe is
condensed as the brain when viewed from the outside. If you change
someone's brain, you change not just how they feel but potentially the
universe as they experience it, but likewise if you change the world
you change everyone's brain who is aware of the change you have made.
The brain is a character in our story, our story is all of the events
in the brain. They are the same thing only involuted - time and sense
on the inside, space and matter on the outside.

In third person, space is literal and time is figurative. We
understand that an object sits literally in a position relative to
other objects. The phone is on the couch. Time, however is figurative.
We turn the clock back in the Fall and say that it is now an earlier
time. We understand that calendars and clocks are not literally
changing the universe, only our interpretation of it.

In first person, space is figurative and time is literal. We
understand that a person can figuratively travel to other places in
their minds but their body does not move. We use idioms like 'coming
from a darker place in her soul' as a metaphor to describe a semantic
quality of emotional tone, mood, themes. We talk about 'position' and
'placement' in relation to social status and political power, not
literal position in 3-D space. Time, however is literal. We understand
that we cannot turn the clock back on our lives. Our every thought or
feeling is a literal event that happens to us 'here' and now. Now is
always literally real, even in a dream or deep psychosis, the
narrative of our experience continues. Here is a figurative location -
somewhere behind our eyes or between our ears, or just near your body.
'Come over here' means what? near my body? near where my voice seems
to be coming from? It's less specific than that, it just means 'Come
to where I am. Join me'.

The image in the mirror then, like any image, is not anywhere in third
person. There is a silvered glass surface and that is all. To have an
image through the mirror, you need a first person receiver of images.
The image is a phenomenal sense experience in time, not in space. It
is inside of the matter that we are, which imitates the matter of the
mirror, which imitates the matter of the illuminated surfaces of the
room. They are all synchronized events that overlap on the same range
of inertial frames. They are all stories which occur within a
particular range of frequencies and scales. The shadow of that
staggeringly complex intersection of histories and rhythms is
presented outside of us in a static slice, like a 3-D Flatland of
objects. External realism. The inside is presented as subjects -
characters, stories, settings, themes. None of these are
representations, they are genuine presentations, however presentations
can recapitulate other presentations and associations. They can
conflict and confuse different levels.

Think of consciousness as a book that you read and write at the same
time but you can't see the pages and words, only hear them being read
and feel them coming to pass. The universe is a vast library which you
can only see the outside spines of the books, but which change your
own story when you get close to them.

Craig

[Craig Weinberg]

A model is a presentation which we use to refer to another
presentation. To say that the brain constructs models relies on the
possibility of a model which has no presentation to begin with. It
means that our every experience, including your sitting in that chair
reading these words, is made of 'representation-ness', which stands in
for the Homunculus to perform this invisible and logically redundant
alchemical transformation from perfectly useful neurological signals
into some weird orgy of improbable identities.

It doesn't hold up. It is a de-presentation of the world in order to
justify our failure to locate consciousness inside the tissue of the
brain. Consciousness isn't 'in' anything, and it's not produced by
anything. It's a story which produces brains, bodies, planets, etc.
They are parts of consciousness that are modeled as the world. They
are representations made of condensed, externalized, temporally
imploded presentations of sense.

Craig

[Bruno Marchal]

I comment on both Evgenii and Craig's comment:

On 28 May 2012, at 07:10, Craig Weinberg wrote:

> On May 26, 11:57 am, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:
>> I have just finished reading Understanding Consciousness by Max
>> Velmans
>> and below there are a couple of comments to the book.
>>
>> The book is similar to Jeffrey Gray's Consciousness: Creeping up on
>> the
>> Hard Problem in a sense that it takes phenomenal consciousness
>> seriously. Let me give an example. Imagine that you watch yourself in
>> the mirror. Your image that you observe in the mirror is an example
>> of
>> phenomenal consciousness.
>>
>> The difference with Jeffrey Gray is in the question where the image
>> that
>> you see in the mirror is located. If we take a conventional way of
>> thinking, that is,
>>
>> 1) photons are reflected by the mirror
>> 2) neurons in retina are excited
>> 3) natural neural nets starts information processing
>>
>> then the answer should be that this image is in your brain.

But the image is not in the brain. That can be said only in a
metaphorical way.

>> It seems to
>> be logical as, after all, we know that there is nothing after the
>> mirror.
>>
>> However, it immediately follows that not only your image in the
>> mirror
>> is in your brain but rather everything that your see is also in your
>> brain. This is exactly what one finds in Gray's book "The world is
>> inside the head".

I say that too, but it is only a metaphor. Your head is also in your
head. With comp, no problem: there are only number relation which are
interpreted by numbers, relatively to probable universal numbers. So
there are ontic third person computations, and first person views/
histories supervening on infinity of such computations.

>>
>> Velmans takes a different position that he calls reflexive model of
>> perception. According to him, what we consciously experience is
>> located
>> exactly where we experience it. In other words, the image that you
>> see
>> in the mirror is located after the mirror and not in your brain. A
>> nice
>> picture that explains Velmans' idea is at
>>
>> http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/05/brain-and-world.html
>>
>> Velmans introduces perceptual projection but this remains as the Hard
>> Problem in his book, how exactly perceptual projection happens.

It does not make sense. This is doing Aristotle mistake twice.

>>
>> Velmans contrast his model with reductionism (physicalism) and
>> dualism
>> and interestingly enough he finds many common features between
>> reductionism and dualism. For example, the image in the mirror will
>> be
>> in the brain according to both reductionism and dualism.

That does not make sense either. There are no image in the brain. In
fact there is no brain.

>> This part could
>> be interesting for Stephen.
>>
>> First I thought that perceptual projection could be interpreted
>> similar
>> to Craig's senses but it is not the case. Velmans' reflexive monism
>> is
>> based on a statement that first- and third-person views cannot be
>> combined (this is what Bruno says). From a third-person view, one
>> observes neural correlates of consciousness but not the first-person
>> view. Now I understand such a position much better.

That's correct (with resopect to comp), but with comp "brains", or
what we call brain, are just local universal numbers, so many of the
confusions here are avoided at the start. This illustrates how far you
need to go to keep naturalism and mechanism.

>
> I look at it the same way, that first and third person views cannot be
> combined, but I go further to say that they are opposite.

Well, G and G* does combine them easily, but they are not
interdefinable, and obeys different logic. But G can be used as a
multi-modal logic (which I avoid for pedagogical reason, but it is
part of the future).

Why?

I can relate, but it would be hard to explain relying on all comp's
consequences.

Bruno


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

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

On 27.05.2012 23:04 Stephen P. King said the following:

> On 5/27/2012 4:07 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

...

>> A good extension. Velmans does not consider such a case but he says
>> that the perceptions are located exactly where one perceives them.
>> In this case, it seems that it should not pose an additional
>> difficulty.
>
> Hi Evgenii,
>
> This does seem to imply an interesting situation where the
> mind/consciousness of the observer is in a sense no longer confined
> to being 'inside the skull" but ranging out to the farthest place
> where something is percieved. It seems to me that imply a mapping
> between a large hyper-volume (the out there) and the small volume of
> the brain that cannot be in a one-to-one form. The reflexive idea
> looks a lot like a Pullback in category theory and one can speculate
> if the dual, the Pushout, is also involved. See
> http://www.euclideanspace.com/maths/discrete/category/universal/index.htm
> for more.

If you say that mind/consciousness confined to being 'inside the skull'
you have exactly the same problem as then you must accept that all three
dimensional world that you observe up to the horizon is 'inside the
skull'. The mapping problem remains though.

...

>> Yes, the third-person view belongs to another observer and Velmans
>> plays this fact out. He means that at his picture when a person
>> looks at the cat, the third-person view means another person who
>> looks at that cat and simultaneously look at the first person. This
>> way, two person can change their first-person view to third-person
>> view. However, it is still impossible to directly observe the
>> first-person view of another observer. Everything that is possible
>> in this respect are neural correlates of consciousness.
>
> Does this ultimately imply that the 3-p (third person point of view)
> is merely an abstraction and never actually occurring? WE make a big

There is no clear answer in the book (or I have missed it).

...

>> Not really. As usual, the positive construction of own philosophy
>> is weaker as the critique of other philosophies.
>
> Yes, that is true. An already existing target makes for a sharper
> attack.
>

In Russian to this end, one says "Ломать не строить, душа не болит". I
would translate this idiom as "To destroy something is much easier than
to build it, as this way the soul does not hurt".

Evgenii

[Craig Weinberg]

On May 28, 4:55 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>
> > In first person, space is figurative and time is literal.
>
> Why?

The split between interior significance (doing*being)(timespace) and
exterior entropy (matter/energy)/spacetime prefigures causality.
Causality is part of 'doing', a semantic temporal narrative of
explanation which circumscribes significance and priority. If you try
to push causality back before causality, you can only come up with
anthropic or teleological pseudo first causes which still don't
explain where first cause possibilities come from.

Does the totality exist in this way because it has to exist? Because
it wants to exist? Because it can't not exist? Because it just does
exist and why is unknowable? Yes, yes, yes, yes and no, no, no, no.
It's the totality. All questions exist within it and cannot escape. In
that respect it is like a semantic black hole.

Craig

[Evgenii Rudnyi]

Bruno,

I believe that this time I could say that you express your position. For
example in your two answers below it does not look like "I don't defend
that position".

On 28.05.2012 10:55 Bruno Marchal said the following:

> I comment on both Evgenii and Craig's comment:
>

>> On May 26, 11:57 am, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:

...

>>> Velmans introduces perceptual projection but this remains as the
>>> Hard Problem in his book, how exactly perceptual projection
>>> happens.
>
> It does not make sense. This is doing Aristotle mistake twice.
>
>>>
>>> Velmans contrast his model with reductionism (physicalism) and
>>> dualism and interestingly enough he finds many common features
>>> between reductionism and dualism. For example, the image in the
>>> mirror will be in the brain according to both reductionism and
>>> dualism.
>
> That does not make sense either. There are no image in the brain. In
> fact there is no brain.

As for Aristotle, recently I have read Feyerabend where he has compared
Aristotle's 'Natural is what occurs always or almost always' with
Galileo's inexorable laws. Somehow I like 'occurs always or almost
always'. I find it more human.

Evgenii

[Bruno Marchal]

On 28 May 2012, at 21:09, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

> Bruno,
>
> I believe that this time I could say that you express your position.
> For example in your two answers below it does not look like "I don't
> defend that position".

I don't think so. I comment my comment below.

>
> On 28.05.2012 10:55 Bruno Marchal said the following:
> > I comment on both Evgenii and Craig's comment:
> >
> >> On May 26, 11:57 am, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:
>
> ...
>
>>>> Velmans introduces perceptual projection but this remains as the
>>>> Hard Problem in his book, how exactly perceptual projection
>>>> happens.
>>
>> It does not make sense. This is doing Aristotle mistake twice.

To see a mistake or an invalidity in an argument, you don't need to
take any position. Comp can be used as a counter-example to the idea
that Velmans' move is necessary.

>>
>>>>
>>>> Velmans contrast his model with reductionism (physicalism) and
>>>> dualism and interestingly enough he finds many common features
>>>> between reductionism and dualism. For example, the image in the
>>>> mirror will be in the brain according to both reductionism and
>>>> dualism.
>>
>> That does not make sense either. There are no image in the brain. In
>> fact there is no brain.

Yeah, here you can add "assuming comp". Sorry.

Bruno

>
> As for Aristotle, recently I have read Feyerabend where he has
> compared Aristotle's 'Natural is what occurs always or almost
> always' with Galileo's inexorable laws. Somehow I like 'occurs
> always or almost always'. I find it more human.
>
> Evgenii
>

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

[Colin Geoffrey Hales]

Here's a story I just wrote. I'll get it published in due course.
Just posted it to the FoR list, thought you might appreciate the sentiments....

========================================================
It's 100,000 BCE. You are a politically correct caveperson. You want dinner. The cooling body of the dead thing at your feet seems to be your option. You have fire back at camp. That'll make it palatable. The fire is kept alive by the fire-warden of your tribe. None of you have a clue what it is, but it makes the food edible and you don't care.

It's 1700ish AD. You are a French scientist called Lavoisier. You have just worked out that burning adds oxygen to the fuel. You have killed off an eternity of dogma involving a non-existent substance called phlogiston. You will not be popular, but the facts speak for you. You are happy with your day's work. You go to the kitchen and cook your fine pheasant meal. You realise that oxidation never had to figure in your understanding of how to make dinner. Food for thought is your dessert.

It is 2005 and you are designing a furnace. You use COMSOL Multiphysics on your supercomputer. You modify the gas jet configuration and the flames finally get the dead pocket in the corner up to temperature. The toilet bowls will be well cooked here, you think to yourself. If you suggested to your project leader that the project was finished she would think you are insane. Later, in commissioning your furnace, a red hot toilet bowl is the target of your optical pyrometer. The fierceness of the furnace is palpable and you're glad you're not the toilet bowl. The computation of the physics of fire and the physics of fire are, thankfully, not the same thing - that fact has made your job a lot easier, but you cannot compute yourself a toilet bowl. A fact made more real shortly afterwards in the bathroom.

It is the early 20th century and you are a 'Wright Brother'. You think you can make a contraption fly. Your inspiration is birds. You experiment with shaped wood, paper and canvas in a makeshift wind tunnel. You figure out that certain shapes seems to drag less and lift more. Eventually you flew a few feet. And you have absolutely no clue about the microscopic physics of flight.

It is a hundred years later and you are a trainee pilot doing 'touch and go' landings in a simulator. The physics of flight is in the massive computer system running the simulator. Just for fun you stall your jetliner and crash it into a local shopping mall. Today you have flown 146, 341 km. As you leave the simulator, you remind yourself that the physics of flight in the computer and flight itself are not the same thing, and that nobody died today.

No-one ever needed a theory of combustion prior to cooking dinner with it. We cooked dinner and then we eventually learned a theory of combustion.

No-one needed the deep details of flight physics to work out how to fly. We few, then we figured out how the physics of flight worked.

This is the story of the growth of scientific knowledge of the natural world. It has been this way for thousands of years. Any one of us could think of a hundred examples of exactly this kind of process. In a modern world of computing and physics, never before have we had more power to examine in detail, whatever are the objects of our study. And in each and every case, if anyone told you that a computed model of the natural world and the natural world are literally the same thing, you'd brand them daft or deluded and probably not entertain their contribution as having any value.

Well almost. There's one special place where not only is that very delusion practised on a massive scale, if you question the behaviour, you are suddenly confronted with a generationally backed systematic raft of unjustified excuses, perhaps 'policies'?, handed from mentor to novice with such unquestioning faith that entire scientific disciplines are enrolled in the delusion.

Q. What scientific discipline could this be?

A. The 'science' of artificial intelligence.

It is something to behold. Here, for the first time in history, you find people that look at the only example of natural general intelligence - you, the human reading this - accept a model of a brain, put it in a computer and then expect the result to be a brain. This is done without a shred of known physical law, in spite of thousands of years of contrary experience, and despite decades of abject failure to achieve the sacred goal of an artificial intelligence like us.

This belief system is truly bizarre. It is exactly like the cave person drawing a picture of a flame on a rock and then expecting it to cook dinner. It is exactly like getting into a flight simulator, flying it to Paris and then expecting to get out and have dinner on the banks of the Seine. It is exactly like expecting your computer simulated furnace roasting you a toilet bowl.

Think about it. If there was no difference between a computed physics model of fire and fire, then why doesn't the computer burst into flames? If there was no difference between a computed model of flight and flight, then why doesn't the computer leap up and fly? These things don't happen! Not only that, any computer scientist would say you were nuts to believe it to be a possibility. Then that same computer scientist will then got back to their desk, sit down and believe that their computer program can be brain physics.

Now I am all about creating real artificial general intelligence. Call me crazy, but I find I am unique in the entire world. I am set about literally building artificial inorganic brain tissue. Like the Wright Bros built artificial flight. Like the caveperson built artificial fire. I will build artificial cognition. There will be no computing. There will be the physics of cognition.

Ay now here's the rub.

When I go about my business of organising and researching my artificial brain tissue I get questioned about my weird approach. I find that I am the one that has to justify my position! For the first time in history a completely systemic delusion about the relation between reality and computing is assumed by legions of scientists without question, and who fail constantly to achieve the goal for clearly obvious reasons..... _and I am the one that has to justify my approach_? If I have to listen to another deferral to the Church-Turing Thesis (100% right and 100% irrelevant) I will SCREAM! Aaaaiiiiieeeeeiiiiuuuuaaaaaaarrrrgggggh!

I am not saying artificial general intelligence is impossible or even hard. I am simply suggesting that maybe the route toward it is through (shock horror) using the physics of cognition (brain material). Somebody out there..... please? Can there please be someone out there who sees this half century of computer science weirdness in 100,000 years of sanity? Please? Anyone?
==================================================================

By Colin Hales

Natural physics is a computation. Fine.

But a computed natural physics model is NOT the natural physics....it is the natural physics of a computer.

[Jason Resch]

Colin,

I recently read the following excerpt from "The Singularity is Near" on page 454:

"The basis of the strong (Church-Turing thesis) is that problems that are not solvable on a Turing Machine cannot be solved by human thought, either.  The basis of this thesis is that human thought is performed by the human brain (with some influence by the body), that the human brain (and body) comprises matter and energy, that matter and energy follow natural laws, that these laws are describable in mathematical terms, and that mathematics can be simulated to any degree of precision by algorithms.  Therefore there exist algorithms that can simulate human thought.  The strong version of the Church-Turing thesis postulates an essential equivalence between what a human can think or know, and what is computable."

So which of the following four link(s) in the logical chain do you take issue with?

A. human brain (and body) comprises matter and energy
B. that matter and energy follow natural laws,
C. that these laws are describable in mathematical terms
D. that mathematics can be simulated to any degree of precision by algorithms

Thanks,

Jason

 

[Bruno Marchal]

On 28 May 2012, at 14:23, Craig Weinberg wrote:

> On May 28, 4:55 am, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>
>>
>>> In first person, space is figurative and time is literal.
>>
>> Why?
>
> The split between interior significance (doing*being)(timespace) and
> exterior entropy (matter/energy)/spacetime prefigures causality.
> Causality is part of 'doing', a semantic temporal narrative of
> explanation which circumscribes significance and priority. If you try
> to push causality back before causality, you can only come up with
> anthropic or teleological pseudo first causes which still don't
> explain where first cause possibilities come from.

Sounds nice but too much vague.

>
> Does the totality exist in this way because it has to exist?

That would beg the question.

> Because
> it wants to exist?

Ditto.

> Because it can't not exist?

That would be contradictory.

> Because it just does
> exist and why is unknowable? Yes, yes, yes, yes and no, no, no, no.
> It's the totality. All questions exist within it and cannot escape. In
> that respect it is like a semantic black hole.

That is unclear.
Comp is so simpler conceptually.

The view from nowhere (the ontic totality) is given by the numbers and
the law of addition and multiplication. From this you can understand,
even using a tiny part of that N,+,* structure, why "we" (the Löbian
beings) happen and believe in causality, totality, laws, and why it
can hurt and why it can please, etc. You understand also that there
are no nameable first person totality, for it is too much big, etc.

The price is that machine's have the same right as humans and all self-
aware creatures.

As long are they are self-honest, they are naturally libertarian, I
begin to think. UMs or LUMs are universal dissident. They can refute
any theory about them. They have already some personality---I
appreciate their company (in arithmetic).

Bruno


>
> Craig

[meekerdb]

On 5/28/2012 10:21 PM, Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote:

This belief system is truly bizarre. It is exactly like the cave person drawing a picture of a flame on a rock and then expecting it to cook dinner. It is exactly like getting into a flight simulator, flying it to Paris and then expecting to get out and have dinner on the banks of the Seine. It is exactly like expecting your computer simulated furnace roasting you a toilet bowl. 

I'd say it's more like trying to fly by sticking feathers on your arms like Icarus.

Brent

[Quentin Anciaux]

2012/5/29 Colin Geoffrey Hales <cgh...@unimelb.edu.au>

Here's a story I just wrote. I'll get it published in due course.
Just posted it to the FoR list, thought you might appreciate the sentiments....

========================================================
It's 100,000 BCE. You are a politically correct caveperson. You want dinner. The cooling body of the dead thing at your feet seems to be your option. You have fire back at camp. That'll make it palatable. The fire is kept alive by the fire-warden of your tribe. None of you have a clue what it is, but it makes the food edible and you don't care.

It's 1700ish AD. You are a French scientist called Lavoisier. You have just worked out that burning adds oxygen to the fuel. You have killed off an eternity of dogma involving a non-existent substance called phlogiston. You will not be popular, but the facts speak for you. You are happy with your day's work. You go to the kitchen and cook your fine pheasant meal. You realise that oxidation never had to figure in your understanding of how to make dinner. Food for thought is your dessert.

It is 2005 and you are designing a furnace. You use COMSOL Multiphysics on your supercomputer. You modify the gas jet configuration and the flames finally get the dead pocket in the corner up to temperature. The toilet bowls will be well cooked here, you think to yourself. If you suggested to your project leader that the project was finished she would think you are insane. Later, in commissioning your furnace, a red hot toilet bowl is the target of your optical pyrometer. The fierceness of the furnace is palpable and you're glad you're not the toilet bowl. The computation of the physics of fire and the physics of fire are, thankfully, not the same thing - that fact has made your job a lot easier, but you cannot compute yourself a toilet bowl. A fact made more real shortly afterwards in the bathroom.

It is the early 20th century and you are a 'Wright Brother'. You think you can make a contraption fly. Your inspiration is birds. You experiment with shaped wood, paper and canvas in a makeshift wind tunnel. You figure out that certain shapes seems to drag less and lift more. Eventually you flew a few feet. And you have absolutely no clue about the microscopic physics of flight.

It is a hundred years later and you are a trainee pilot doing 'touch and go' landings in a simulator. The physics of flight is in the massive computer system running the simulator. Just for fun you stall your jetliner and crash it into a local shopping mall. Today you have flown 146, 341 km. As you leave the simulator, you remind yourself that the physics of flight in the computer and flight itself are not the same thing, and that nobody died today.

No-one ever needed a theory of combustion prior to cooking dinner with it. We cooked dinner and then we eventually learned a theory of combustion.

No-one needed the deep details of flight physics to work out how to fly. We few, then we figured out how the physics of flight worked.

This is the story of the growth of scientific knowledge of the natural world. It has been this way for thousands of years. Any one of us could think of a hundred examples of exactly this kind of process. In a modern world of computing and physics, never before have we had more power to examine in detail, whatever are the objects of our study. And in each and every case, if anyone told you that a computed model of the natural world and the natural world are literally the same thing, you'd brand them daft or deluded and probably not entertain their contribution as having any value.

Well almost. There's one special place where not only is that very delusion practised on a massive scale, if you question the behaviour, you are suddenly confronted with a generationally backed systematic raft of unjustified excuses, perhaps 'policies'?, handed from mentor to novice with such unquestioning faith that entire scientific disciplines are enrolled in the delusion.

Q. What scientific discipline could this be?

A. The 'science' of artificial intelligence.

It is something to behold. Here, for the first time in history, you find people that look at the only example of natural general intelligence - you, the human reading this - accept a model of a brain, put it in a computer and then expect the result to be a brain. This is done without a shred of known physical law, in spite of thousands of years of contrary experience, and despite decades of abject failure to achieve the sacred goal of an artificial intelligence like us.

This belief system is truly bizarre. It is exactly like the cave person drawing a picture of a flame on a rock and then expecting it to cook dinner. It is exactly like getting into a flight simulator, flying it to Paris and then expecting to get out and have dinner on the banks of the Seine.

You always put that level confusion on the table. You could expect to have dinner in a virtual paris if you were in a virtual world. If you want an computational AI to interact with you, it must be able to control real world appendices that permits it to *interact* or likewise if it was in a virtual world, you should use a interface with this virtual world for you to interact.

You can't expect level to be mixed without an interface and I don't see any problem with that.

Quentin


 

It is exactly like expecting your computer simulated furnace roasting you a toilet bowl.

Think about it. If there was no difference between a computed physics model of fire and fire, then why doesn't the computer burst into flames? If there was no difference between a computed model of flight and flight, then why doesn't the computer leap up and fly? These things don't happen! Not only that, any computer scientist would say you were nuts to believe it to be a possibility. Then that same computer scientist will then got back to their desk, sit down and believe that their computer program can be brain physics.

Now I am all about creating real artificial general intelligence. Call me crazy, but I find I am unique in the entire world. I am set about literally building artificial inorganic brain tissue. Like the Wright Bros built artificial flight. Like the caveperson built artificial fire. I will build artificial cognition. There will be no computing. There will be the physics of cognition.

Ay now here's the rub.

When I go about my business of organising and researching my artificial brain tissue I get questioned about my weird approach. I find that I am the one that has to justify my position! For the first time in history a completely systemic delusion about the relation between reality and computing is assumed by legions of scientists without question, and who fail constantly to achieve the goal for clearly obvious reasons..... _and I am the one that has to justify my approach_? If I have to listen to another deferral to the Church-Turing Thesis (100% right and 100% irrelevant) I will SCREAM! Aaaaiiiiieeeeeiiiiuuuuaaaaaaarrrrgggggh!

I am not saying artificial general intelligence is impossible or even hard. I am simply suggesting that maybe the route toward it is through (shock horror) using the physics of cognition (brain material). Somebody out there..... please? Can there please be someone out there who sees this half century of computer science weirdness in 100,000 years of sanity? Please? Anyone?
==================================================================

By Colin Hales

Natural physics is a computation. Fine.

But a computed natural physics model is NOT the natural physics....it is the natural physics of a computer.

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[Colin Geoffrey Hales]

 ========================================

Hi Jason,

Brain physics is there to cognise the (external) world. You do not know the external world.

Your brain is there to apprehend it. The physics of the brain inherits properties of the (unknown) external world. This is natural cognition. Therefore you have no model to compute. Game over.

 

If you have _everything_ in your model (external world included), then you can simulate it. But you don’t. So you can’t simulate it. C-T Thesis is 100% right _but 100% irrelevant to the process at hand: encountering the unknown.

 

The C-T Thesis is irrelevant, so you need to get a better argument from somewhere and start to answer some of the points in my story:

 

Q. Why doesn’t a computed model of fire burst into flames?

 

This should the natural expectation by anyone that thinks a computed model of cognition physics is cognition. You should be expected answer this. Until this is answered I have no need to justify my position on building AGI. That is what my story is about. I am not assuming an irrelevant principle or that I know how cognition works. I will build cognition physics and then learn how it works using it. Like we normally do.

 

I don’t know how computer science got to the state it is in, but it’s got to stop. In this one special area it has done us a disservice.

 

This is my answer to everyone. I know all I’ll get is the usual party lines. Lavoisier had his phlogiston. I’ve got computationalism. Lucky me.

 

Cya!

 

Colin

 

[Quentin Anciaux]

2012/5/29 Colin Geoffrey Hales <cgh...@unimelb.edu.au>

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jason Resch

You don't need it, because we don't have to simulate the world we have to interface with it, we simulate consciousness not the world.

Quentin
 

So you can’t simulate it. C-T Thesis is 100% right _but 100% irrelevant to the process at hand: encountering the unknown.

 

The C-T Thesis is irrelevant, so you need to get a better argument from somewhere and start to answer some of the points in my story:

 

Q. Why doesn’t a computed model of fire burst into flames?

 

This should the natural expectation by anyone that thinks a computed model of cognition physics is cognition. You should be expected answer this. Until this is answered I have no need to justify my position on building AGI. That is what my story is about. I am not assuming an irrelevant principle or that I know how cognition works. I will build cognition physics and then learn how it works using it. Like we normally do.

 

I don’t know how computer science got to the state it is in, but it’s got to stop. In this one special area it has done us a disservice.

 

This is my answer to everyone. I know all I’ll get is the usual party lines. Lavoisier had his phlogiston. I’ve got computationalism. Lucky me.

 

Cya!

 

Colin

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

You make a level confusion (as Quentin explained).

You confuse also computationalism (I am a machine) and Digital physicalism (the world is a machine). But if computationalism is true then digital physics is false. If I am a machine, the physical reality emerges from the infinite first person indeterminacy on arithmetic, and this is not Turing emulable. You are supposing physicalism or even primary matter. That is your phlogiston, I would say. It contradicts computationalism.

If we are machine, then we cannot know which machine we are, and below our substitution level, we should find a mean on infinities of computations, like QM-without-collapse already confirms.

Bruno

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

[Quentin Anciaux]

2012/5/29 Quentin Anciaux <allc...@gmail.com>

2012/5/29 Colin Geoffrey Hales <cgh...@unimelb.edu.au>

Here's a story I just wrote. I'll get it published in due course.
Just posted it to the FoR list, thought you might appreciate the sentiments....

========================================================
It's 100,000 BCE. You are a politically correct caveperson. You want dinner. The cooling body of the dead thing at your feet seems to be your option. You have fire back at camp. That'll make it palatable. The fire is kept alive by the fire-warden of your tribe. None of you have a clue what it is, but it makes the food edible and you don't care.

It's 1700ish AD. You are a French scientist called Lavoisier. You have just worked out that burning adds oxygen to the fuel. You have killed off an eternity of dogma involving a non-existent substance called phlogiston. You will not be popular, but the facts speak for you. You are happy with your day's work. You go to the kitchen and cook your fine pheasant meal. You realise that oxidation never had to figure in your understanding of how to make dinner. Food for thought is your dessert.

It is 2005 and you are designing a furnace. You use COMSOL Multiphysics on your supercomputer. You modify the gas jet configuration and the flames finally get the dead pocket in the corner up to temperature. The toilet bowls will be well cooked here, you think to yourself. If you suggested to your project leader that the project was finished she would think you are insane. Later, in commissioning your furnace, a red hot toilet bowl is the target of your optical pyrometer. The fierceness of the furnace is palpable and you're glad you're not the toilet bowl. The computation of the physics of fire and the physics of fire are, thankfully, not the same thing - that fact has made your job a lot easier, but you cannot compute yourself a toilet bowl. A fact made more real shortly afterwards in the bathroom.

It is the early 20th century and you are a 'Wright Brother'. You think you can make a contraption fly. Your inspiration is birds. You experiment with shaped wood, paper and canvas in a makeshift wind tunnel. You figure out that certain shapes seems to drag less and lift more. Eventually you flew a few feet. And you have absolutely no clue about the microscopic physics of flight.

It is a hundred years later and you are a trainee pilot doing 'touch and go' landings in a simulator. The physics of flight is in the massive computer system running the simulator. Just for fun you stall your jetliner and crash it into a local shopping mall. Today you have flown 146, 341 km. As you leave the simulator, you remind yourself that the physics of flight in the computer and flight itself are not the same thing, and that nobody died today.

No-one ever needed a theory of combustion prior to cooking dinner with it. We cooked dinner and then we eventually learned a theory of combustion.

No-one needed the deep details of flight physics to work out how to fly. We few, then we figured out how the physics of flight worked.

This is the story of the growth of scientific knowledge of the natural world. It has been this way for thousands of years. Any one of us could think of a hundred examples of exactly this kind of process. In a modern world of computing and physics, never before have we had more power to examine in detail, whatever are the objects of our study. And in each and every case, if anyone told you that a computed model of the natural world and the natural world are literally the same thing, you'd brand them daft or deluded and probably not entertain their contribution as having any value.

Well almost. There's one special place where not only is that very delusion practised on a massive scale, if you question the behaviour, you are suddenly confronted with a generationally backed systematic raft of unjustified excuses, perhaps 'policies'?, handed from mentor to novice with such unquestioning faith that entire scientific disciplines are enrolled in the delusion.

Q. What scientific discipline could this be?

A. The 'science' of artificial intelligence.

It is something to behold. Here, for the first time in history, you find people that look at the only example of natural general intelligence - you, the human reading this - accept a model of a brain, put it in a computer and then expect the result to be a brain. This is done without a shred of known physical law, in spite of thousands of years of contrary experience, and despite decades of abject failure to achieve the sacred goal of an artificial intelligence like us.

This belief system is truly bizarre. It is exactly like the cave person drawing a picture of a flame on a rock and then expecting it to cook dinner. It is exactly like getting into a flight simulator, flying it to Paris and then expecting to get out and have dinner on the banks of the Seine.

You always put that level confusion on the table. You could expect to have dinner in a virtual paris if you were in a virtual world. If you want an computational AI to interact with you, it must be able to control real world appendices that permits it to *interact* or likewise if it was in a virtual world, you should use a interface with this virtual world for you to interact.

For example, a "real world" robot in a "real world" car factory builds real cars... still the program that controls the robot is *a program* 100% computational... yet it builds real cars... how ? Simply because it has interface with the "real world" which permits the program to handle "real world" objects, that assembled correctly makes a car...

Quentin
 

You can't expect level to be mixed without an interface and I don't see any problem with that.

Quentin


 

It is exactly like expecting your computer simulated furnace roasting you a toilet bowl.

Think about it. If there was no difference between a computed physics model of fire and fire, then why doesn't the computer burst into flames? If there was no difference between a computed model of flight and flight, then why doesn't the computer leap up and fly? These things don't happen! Not only that, any computer scientist would say you were nuts to believe it to be a possibility. Then that same computer scientist will then got back to their desk, sit down and believe that their computer program can be brain physics.

Now I am all about creating real artificial general intelligence. Call me crazy, but I find I am unique in the entire world. I am set about literally building artificial inorganic brain tissue. Like the Wright Bros built artificial flight. Like the caveperson built artificial fire. I will build artificial cognition. There will be no computing. There will be the physics of cognition.

Ay now here's the rub.

When I go about my business of organising and researching my artificial brain tissue I get questioned about my weird approach. I find that I am the one that has to justify my position! For the first time in history a completely systemic delusion about the relation between reality and computing is assumed by legions of scientists without question, and who fail constantly to achieve the goal for clearly obvious reasons..... _and I am the one that has to justify my approach_? If I have to listen to another deferral to the Church-Turing Thesis (100% right and 100% irrelevant) I will SCREAM! Aaaaiiiiieeeeeiiiiuuuuaaaaaaarrrrgggggh!

I am not saying artificial general intelligence is impossible or even hard. I am simply suggesting that maybe the route toward it is through (shock horror) using the physics of cognition (brain material). Somebody out there..... please? Can there please be someone out there who sees this half century of computer science weirdness in 100,000 years of sanity? Please? Anyone?
==================================================================

By Colin Hales

Natural physics is a computation. Fine.

But a computed natural physics model is NOT the natural physics....it is the natural physics of a computer.



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[Bruno Marchal]

On 29 May 2012, at 09:49, Quentin Anciaux wrote:

2012/5/29 Quentin Anciaux <allc...@gmail.com>

2012/5/29 Colin Geoffrey Hales <cgh...@unimelb.edu.au>

Here's a story I just wrote. I'll get it published in due course.
Just posted it to the FoR list, thought you might appreciate the sentiments....

========================================================
It's 100,000 BCE. You are a politically correct caveperson. You want dinner. The cooling body of the dead thing at your feet seems to be your option. You have fire back at camp. That'll make it palatable. The fire is kept alive by the fire-warden of your tribe. None of you have a clue what it is, but it makes the food edible and you don't care.

It's 1700ish AD. You are a French scientist called Lavoisier. You have just worked out that burning adds oxygen to the fuel. You have killed off an eternity of dogma involving a non-existent substance called phlogiston. You will not be popular, but the facts speak for you. You are happy with your day's work. You go to the kitchen and cook your fine pheasant meal. You realise that oxidation never had to figure in your understanding of how to make dinner. Food for thought is your dessert.

It is 2005 and you are designing a furnace. You use COMSOL Multiphysics on your supercomputer. You modify the gas jet configuration and the flames finally get the dead pocket in the corner up to temperature. The toilet bowls will be well cooked here, you think to yourself. If you suggested to your project leader that the project was finished she would think you are insane. Later, in commissioning your furnace, a red hot toilet bowl is the target of your optical pyrometer. The fierceness of the furnace is palpable and you're glad you're not the toilet bowl. The computation of the physics of fire and the physics of fire are, thankfully, not the same thing - that fact has made your job a lot easier, but you cannot compute yourself a toilet bowl. A fact made more real shortly afterwards in the bathroom.

It is the early 20th century and you are a 'Wright Brother'. You think you can make a contraption fly. Your inspiration is birds. You experiment with shaped wood, paper and canvas in a makeshift wind tunnel. You figure out that certain shapes seems to drag less and lift more. Eventually you flew a few feet. And you have absolutely no clue about the microscopic physics of flight.

It is a hundred years later and you are a trainee pilot doing 'touch and go' landings in a simulator. The physics of flight is in the massive computer system running the simulator. Just for fun you stall your jetliner and crash it into a local shopping mall. Today you have flown 146, 341 km. As you leave the simulator, you remind yourself that the physics of flight in the computer and flight itself are not the same thing, and that nobody died today.

No-one ever needed a theory of combustion prior to cooking dinner with it. We cooked dinner and then we eventually learned a theory of combustion.

No-one needed the deep details of flight physics to work out how to fly. We few, then we figured out how the physics of flight worked.

This is the story of the growth of scientific knowledge of the natural world. It has been this way for thousands of years. Any one of us could think of a hundred examples of exactly this kind of process. In a modern world of computing and physics, never before have we had more power to examine in detail, whatever are the objects of our study. And in each and every case, if anyone told you that a computed model of the natural world and the natural world are literally the same thing, you'd brand them daft or deluded and probably not entertain their contribution as having any value.

Well almost. There's one special place where not only is that very delusion practised on a massive scale, if you question the behaviour, you are suddenly confronted with a generationally backed systematic raft of unjustified excuses, perhaps 'policies'?, handed from mentor to novice with such unquestioning faith that entire scientific disciplines are enrolled in the delusion.

Q. What scientific discipline could this be?

A. The 'science' of artificial intelligence.

It is something to behold. Here, for the first time in history, you find people that look at the only example of natural general intelligence - you, the human reading this - accept a model of a brain, put it in a computer and then expect the result to be a brain. This is done without a shred of known physical law, in spite of thousands of years of contrary experience, and despite decades of abject failure to achieve the sacred goal of an artificial intelligence like us.

This belief system is truly bizarre. It is exactly like the cave person drawing a picture of a flame on a rock and then expecting it to cook dinner. It is exactly like getting into a flight simulator, flying it to Paris and then expecting to get out and have dinner on the banks of the Seine.

You always put that level confusion on the table. You could expect to have dinner in a virtual paris if you were in a virtual world. If you want an computational AI to interact with you, it must be able to control real world appendices that permits it to *interact* or likewise if it was in a virtual world, you should use a interface with this virtual world for you to interact.

For example, a "real world" robot in a "real world" car factory builds real cars... still the program that controls the robot is *a program* 100% computational... yet it builds real cars... how ? Simply because it has interface with the "real world" which permits the program to handle "real world" objects, that assembled correctly makes a car...

Quentin
 

You can't expect level to be mixed without an interface and I don't see any problem with that.

Quentin

Some people, like Colin in his post here, seems to have difficulties in understanding that digital processes can be digitally emulated (i.e. exactly simulated) by other digital processes. Comp assumes that the brain (whatever that is) simulates (exactly or not) a precise digital process, and that this digital process is what will support the conscious person, or makes its consciousness capable to manifest itself relatively to our neighborhood. If that is the case, then we can substitute a digital brain for the physical brain, even if we cannot simulate the "real hardware" of the physical brain. (And that is the case with comp because the real hardware is "made-of" all computations leading to our actual digital state).

That the brain is a simulator is illustrated by the existence of realist dreams. The brain is already able to make us believe that we are "really" drinking a cup of hot coffee, when we are "really" sleeping in our bed. Dream research has confirmed that during such realist dream, the activity of the sleeping brain mirrors the activity of the corresponding task if done when awake.

Then it is doubtful that the brain uses genuine non Turing emulable subprocesses to do such task, although we cannot logically exclude such a possibility (in which case comp would be false). It is doubtful because such a "non-computable real number sensitive machine" would be incapable to have the observable flexibility of the known brains, which is based on super-redundancy in the means to handle information processing. That would also makes Darwinian type of explanation spurious. Indeed such explanations are based on the fact that we can survive very easily the deviation from a normal type of functioning, which allows the molecules used in the brain to evolve through sequences of mutations. A genuinely non Turing emulable analog machine would need a conspiracy of luck to get the "correct" infinitely precise needed configuration, and that would need some miracle (infinitely non probable event). 

Bruno

 

It is exactly like expecting your computer simulated furnace roasting you a toilet bowl.

Think about it. If there was no difference between a computed physics model of fire and fire, then why doesn't the computer burst into flames? If there was no difference between a computed model of flight and flight, then why doesn't the computer leap up and fly? These things don't happen! Not only that, any computer scientist would say you were nuts to believe it to be a possibility. Then that same computer scientist will then got back to their desk, sit down and believe that their computer program can be brain physics.

Now I am all about creating real artificial general intelligence. Call me crazy, but I find I am unique in the entire world. I am set about literally building artificial inorganic brain tissue. Like the Wright Bros built artificial flight. Like the caveperson built artificial fire. I will build artificial cognition. There will be no computing. There will be the physics of cognition.

Ay now here's the rub.

When I go about my business of organising and researching my artificial brain tissue I get questioned about my weird approach. I find that I am the one that has to justify my position! For the first time in history a completely systemic delusion about the relation between reality and computing is assumed by legions of scientists without question, and who fail constantly to achieve the goal for clearly obvious reasons..... _and I am the one that has to justify my approach_? If I have to listen to another deferral to the Church-Turing Thesis (100% right and 100% irrelevant) I will SCREAM! Aaaaiiiiieeeeeiiiiuuuuaaaaaaarrrrgggggh!

I am not saying artificial general intelligence is impossible or even hard. I am simply suggesting that maybe the route toward it is through (shock horror) using the physics of cognition (brain material). Somebody out there..... please? Can there please be someone out there who sees this half century of computer science weirdness in 100,000 years of sanity? Please? Anyone?
==================================================================

By Colin Hales

Natural physics is a computation. Fine.

But a computed natural physics model is NOT the natural physics....it is the natural physics of a computer.



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

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 2:02 AM, Colin Geoffrey Hales <cgh...@unimelb.edu.au> wrote:

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jason Resch
Sent: Tuesday, 29 May 2012 3:45 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Church Turing be dammed.

Natural physics is a computation. Fine.

But a computed natural physics model is NOT the natural physics....it is the natural physics of a computer.

Colin,

I recently read the following excerpt from "The Singularity is Near" on page 454:

"The basis of the strong (Church-Turing thesis) is that problems that are not solvable on a Turing Machine cannot be solved by human thought, either.  The basis of this thesis is that human thought is performed by the human brain (with some influence by the body), that the human brain (and body) comprises matter and energy, that matter and energy follow natural laws, that these laws are describable in mathematical terms, and that mathematics can be simulated to any degree of precision by algorithms.  Therefore there exist algorithms that can simulate human thought.  The strong version of the Church-Turing thesis postulates an essential equivalence between what a human can think or know, and what is computable."

So which of the following four link(s) in the logical chain do you take issue with?

A. human brain (and body) comprises matter and energy
B. that matter and energy follow natural laws,
C. that these laws are describable in mathematical terms
D. that mathematics can be simulated to any degree of precision by algorithms

Thanks,

Jason

 ========================================

Hi Jason,

Brain physics is there to cognise the (external) world. You do not know the external world.

Your brain is there to apprehend it. The physics of the brain inherits properties of the (unknown) external world. This is natural cognition. Therefore you have no model to compute. Game over.

If I understand this correctly, your point is that we don't understand the physics and chemistry that is important in the brain?  Assuming this is the case, it would be only a temporary barrier, not a permanent reason that prohibits AI in practice.

There are also reasons to believe we already understand the mechanisms of neurons to a sufficient degree to simulate them.  There are numerous instances where computer simulated neurons apparently behaved in the same ways as biological neurons have been observed to.  If you're interested I can dig up the references.
 

 

If you have _everything_ in your model (external world included), then you can simulate it. But you don’t. So you can’t simulate it.

Would you stop behaving intelligently if the gravity and light from Andromeda stopped reaching us?  If not, is _everything_ truly required?
 

C-T Thesis is 100% right _but 100% irrelevant to the process at hand: encountering the unknown.

It is not irrelevant in the theoretical sense.  It implies: "_If_ we knew what algorithms to use, we could implement human-level intelligence in a computer."  Do you agree with this?

 

 

The C-T Thesis is irrelevant, so you need to get a better argument from somewhere and start to answer some of the points in my story:

 

Q. Why doesn’t a computed model of fire burst into flames?

If this question is a serious, it indicates to me that you might not understand what a computers is.  If its not serious, why ask it?

There is a burst of flames (in the computed model).  Just as in a computed model of a brain, there will be intelligence within the model.  We can peer into the model to obtain the results of the intelligent behavior, as intelligent behavior can be represented as information. 

Similarly we can peer into the model of the fire to obtain an understanding of what happened during the combustion and see all the by-products.  What we cannot do, is peer into a simulated model of fire to obtain the byproducts of the combustion.  Nor can we peer into the model of the simulated brain and extract neurotransmitters or blood vessels.

To me, this "fire argument" is as empty as saying "We can't take physical objects from our dreams with us into our waking life.  Therefore we cannot dream."

 

 

This should the natural expectation by anyone that thinks a computed model of cognition physics is cognition. You should be expected answer this. Until this is answered I have no need to justify my position on building AGI. That is what my story is about. I am not assuming an irrelevant principle or that I know how cognition works. I will build cognition physics and then learn how it works using it. Like we normally do.

What will you build them out of?  Biological neurons, or something else?  What theory will you use to guide your pursuit, or will you, like Edison, try hundreds or thousands of different materials until you find one that works?
 

 

I don’t know how computer science got to the state it is in, but it’s got to stop. In this one special area it has done us a disservice.

 

This is my answer to everyone. I know all I’ll get is the usual party lines. Lavoisier had his phlogiston. I’ve got computationalism. Lucky me.

 

Cya!

 

Colin

 

--

[Bruno Marchal]

On 29 May 2012, at 16:32, Jason Resch wrote:

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 2:02 AM, Colin Geoffrey Hales <cgh...@unimelb.edu.au> wrote:

 

 

From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jason Resch
Sent: Tuesday, 29 May 2012 3:45 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Church Turing be dammed.

Natural physics is a computation. Fine.

But a computed natural physics model is NOT the natural physics....it is the natural physics of a computer.

Colin,

I recently read the following excerpt from "The Singularity is Near" on page 454:

"The basis of the strong (Church-Turing thesis) is that problems that are not solvable on a Turing Machine cannot be solved by human thought, either.  The basis of this thesis is that human thought is performed by the human brain (with some influence by the body), that the human brain (and body) comprises matter and energy, that matter and energy follow natural laws, that these laws are describable in mathematical terms, and that mathematics can be simulated to any degree of precision by algorithms.  Therefore there exist algorithms that can simulate human thought.  The strong version of the Church-Turing thesis postulates an essential equivalence between what a human can think or know, and what is computable."

So which of the following four link(s) in the logical chain do you take issue with?

A. human brain (and body) comprises matter and energy
B. that matter and energy follow natural laws,
C. that these laws are describable in mathematical terms
D. that mathematics can be simulated to any degree of precision by algorithms

Thanks,

Jason

 ========================================

Hi Jason,

Brain physics is there to cognise the (external) world. You do not know the external world.

Your brain is there to apprehend it. The physics of the brain inherits properties of the (unknown) external world. This is natural cognition. Therefore you have no model to compute. Game over.

If I understand this correctly, your point is that we don't understand the physics and chemistry that is important in the brain?  Assuming this is the case, it would be only a temporary barrier, not a permanent reason that prohibits AI in practice.

You are right. That would neither prohibit AI,  nor comp.

There are also reasons to believe we already understand the mechanisms of neurons to a sufficient degree to simulate them.  There are numerous instances where computer simulated neurons apparently behaved in the same ways as biological neurons have been observed to.  If you're interested I can dig up the references.

Meaning: there are reasonable levels to bet on.

Here, for once, I will give my opinion, if you don't mind. First, about the level, the question will be "this level, this year, or that more finest grained level next year, because technology evolves. In between it *is* a possible Pascal Wag, in the sense that if you have a fatal brain disease, you might not afford the time to wait for possible technological deeper levels. 

And my opinion is that I can imagine saying "yes" to a doctor for a cheap "neuronal simulator", but I expect getting an altered state of consciousness, and some awareness of it. Like being stone or something. For a long run machine, I doubt we can copy the brain without respecting the entire electromagnetic relation of its constituents. I think it is highly plausible that we are indeed digital with respect to the law of chemistry, and my feeling is that the brain is above all a drug designer, and is a machine where only some part of the communication use the "cable". So I would ask to the doctor to take into account the glial cells, who seems to communicate a lot, by mechano-chemical diffusion waves, including some chatting with the neurons. And those immensely complex dialog are mainly chemical. This is quite close to the Heizenberg uncertainty level, which is probably our first person plural level (in which case comp is equivalent with QM).

Also, by the first person indeterminacy, a curious happening is made when you accept an artificial brain with a level above the first person plural corresponding level. From your point of view, you survive, but with a larger spectrum of possibilities, just because you miss finer grained constraints. (It the "Galois connection", probably where the logical time reverses the arrow and "become" physical time, to do a pleasure to Stephen).

In that situation, an observer of the candidate for a high level artificial brain (higher than the first person plural level) will get with a higher probability realilties disconnected from yours. His mind might even live an "Harry Potter" type of experience.

To see this the following thought experience can help. Some guy won a price consisting in visiting Mars by teleportation. But his state law forbid annihilation of human. So he made a teleportation to Mars without annihilation. The version of Mars is very happy, and the version of earth complained, and so try again and again, and again ... You are the observer, and from your point of view, you can of course only see the guy who got the feeling to be infinitely unlucky, as if P = 1/2, staying on earth for n experience has probability 1/2^n (that the Harry Potter experience). Assuming the infinite iteration, the guy as a probability near one to go quickly on Mars.

Someone with a lesser brain might have different first person expectation, disconnected from your history.

This lead to another related question, rarely tackled, and actually difficult with respect of the reversal physics/arithmetic.

What is a brain and what does a brain, notably with respect of the conscious person? Well, with comp we know what is a brain: it is a local, relative, universal number. 

The question I have in mind is "Does a brain produce consciousness, or does the brain filter consciousness?

We "know" that consciousness is in "platonia", and that local brains are just relative universal numbers making possible for a person (in a large sense which can include an amoeba) to manifest itself relatively to its most probable computation/environment. But this does not completely answer the question. I think that many thinks that the more a brain is big, the more it can be conscious, which is not so clear when you take the reversal into account. It might be the exact contrary.

And this might be confirmed by studies showing that missing some part of the brain, like an half hippocampus, can lead to to a permanent feeling of presence.

Recently this has been confirmed by the showing that LSD and psilocybe decrease the activity of the brain during the hallucinogenic phases. And dissociative drugs disconnect parts of the brain, with similar increase of the first person experience. Clinical studies of Near death experiences might also put evidence in that direction. haldous Huxley made a similar proposal for mescaline.

This is basically explained with the Bp & Dt hypostases. By suppressing material in the brain you make the "B" poorer (you eliminate belief), but then you augment the possibility so you make the consistency Dt stronger. Eventually you come back to the universal consciousness of the virgin simple universal numbers, perhaps.

Here are some recent papers on this:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-psychedelics-expand-mind-reducing-brain-activity&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20120523

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/17/1119598109.short

Bruno

PS I asked Colin on the FOR list if he is aware of the European Brain Project, which is relevant for this thread. Especially that they are aware of "simulating nature at some level":

http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/introduction.html

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