Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Dec 21, 2016 - 03:25pm PT
|
If we are a mathematical universe, there could be never-ending subdivision
Omnifurcation at every instant. Perhaps our consciousness allows us to follow a path through this bewildering process. If so, do those alternate universes "exist" in some sense and are accessible to us only through our imaginations?
On another topic: I was talking with a couple of ex-academics (Wife, Nancy, a former HS English teacher, and a retired math professor and old colleague) about whether Critical Thinking can be taught. A brief search via Google shows a wide array of positions on the subject. Any thoughts here, among the citizens of the thread?
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Dec 21, 2016 - 03:39pm PT
|
Consciousness is something that has evolved. It's not magic. It's the science itself -- the way the universe works -- that is the magic. We are puppets in the magic theatre. We aren't the Wizard of Oz (actually, if you're familiar with the ending, I guess we are).
Not to say that consciousness can't do a lot of creative things.
Oh yeah, jgill, in spite of my belief that we don't have free will, I'm going to go with "Yes" on the critical thinking skills.
Also, I don't believe that we are a "mathematical universe". I do believe that we live in a universe that exists independently of my (or Largo's or MikeL's) perception of it.
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Dec 21, 2016 - 04:12pm PT
|
I want to throw out something a little different. I'm interested in why we believe as we do. It occurred to me that determining this in the most parsimonious manner possible would be a worthwhile goal. Here's my take with respect to positions on this thread.
1. Religion; Yes/No
2. Liberal Arts vs. Science Education
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Dec 21, 2016 - 04:13pm PT
|
Nothing in the universe is fully independent ever as everything within the universe is part parcel of that whole and thus the part parcels have only minute independence completely ultimately dependent on that whole ........
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Dec 21, 2016 - 04:31pm PT
|
Nothing in the universe is fully independent ever as everything within the universe is part parcel of that whole and thus the part parcels have only minute independence completely ultimately dependent on that whole ........
Was Iggy Pop a climber?
He was a couple years after Antonioni.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
edit:
And about a decade before Bryan Burdo's route on South Early Winters Spire.
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Dec 21, 2016 - 04:51pm PT
|
If he wasn't, I'd wager he'd be climbing better than me with about two month's training.
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Dec 21, 2016 - 05:38pm PT
|
Wonders never cease.
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
|
|
|
Dec 21, 2016 - 07:19pm PT
|
the output of an automaton - past, present and future...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html
Google’s decision to reorganize itself around A.I. was the first major manifestation of what has become an industrywide machine-learning delirium.
What is at stake is not just one more piecemeal innovation but control over what very well could represent an entirely new computational platform: pervasive, ambient artificial intelligence.
The Thinking Machine...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
The kinds of jobs taken by automatons will no longer be just repetitive tasks that were once — unfairly, it ought to be emphasized — associated with the supposed lower intelligence of the uneducated classes. We’re not only talking about three and a half million truck drivers who may soon lack careers. We’re talking about inventory managers, economists, financial advisers, real estate agents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aygSMgK3BEM
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Dec 21, 2016 - 07:29pm PT
|
eeyonkee:
Look at your own thoughts and try to follow them. Report what you see in their emergence, their existence, and their dissolution to be. Forget content. Quit trying to put everything into categories and polarities.
Do that and you will provide your own answers. They happen to be the only ones that really matter.
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Dec 22, 2016 - 07:18pm PT
|
Regarding AI and its putative dangers, why be concerned if robots have consciousness, when the real challenge is whether they will have free will?
Are we absolutely certain that free will ⇒ consciousness?
Suppose, as a machine, I am faced with deciding to take path A or path B. I am not conscious, but my very sophisticated computer brain analyzes the question and "makes a decision" which to an onlooker seems an exercise in free will.
Consciousness ⇒ free will remains open to debate.
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Dec 22, 2016 - 08:21pm PT
|
I seem to remember a person of curiosity who had themselves committed to a mental institution to see if they could demonstrate sufficient evidence of sanity to the doctors monitoring the patients to get a discharge. It was not easy to prove one's mental normalcy once one was on the inside.
This issue has no doubt been covered on WestWorld, though I wouldn't know, but if you were to be put amongst a group of convincingly human-like artificial intelligences, how would you convince someone else you were human and not a machine? Maybe an x-ray would be enough, but what if you had to do it just by talking?
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Dec 22, 2016 - 08:38pm PT
|
You are an inventive person, MH2. I mean that as a good thing.
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Dec 22, 2016 - 09:18pm PT
|
A step in the right direction. The first known image of a multiverse translator that will allow glimpses of alternate universes:
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Dec 23, 2016 - 08:15am PT
|
You are an inventive person, MH2.
What is "Mind?"
Mine's a rat's nest.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Dec 23, 2016 - 08:29am PT
|
how would you convince someone else you were human and not a machine?
A machine has no soul.
That is the difference.
A machine is artificial, the material bodies in this universe have a conscious sentient being as the driver which animates that matter.
Matter can not animate without spirit.
This a completely scientific fact.
Modern scientists immediately limit themselves by saying Science is ONLY about the material realm.
That is immediately pure scientism .......
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Dec 23, 2016 - 10:24am PT
|
Modern scientists immediately limit themselves by saying Science is ONLY about the material realm.
better to say that modern science posits that the universe can be explained by physical terms only.
Which is a hypothesis, no doubt, that cannot be completely tested, since it is exhaustive, and each physical description of the universe contains in it the limits of our "knowing." Currently that limit seems to be set at the Planck scale, beyond which we have no picture.
I don't think anyone in science would disagree. Saying that does not make "modern science" just another religion, and the simple fact that science is able to throw out ideas that are, at times, held as "scientific truth" one of its great strengths.
With all due respect to Werner, ancient ideas are based on a very incomplete view of reality, and can be described, at best, as doing the most with that view. For instance, less than 100 years ago no one had any idea how the Sun generated the amount of energy we observe from it. One could have said, at the time, that science failed, and that the ancient ideas of the divinity of the Sun were correct, and that believing otherwise was just an act of faith in science, scientism.
And perhaps that is an adequate description of the scientists that continued to look for an explanation of that phenomenon, a physical explanation. This waited until special relativity explained the equivalence of energy and mass, the discovery of the nucleus and of nuclear forces, and the measurement of the nuclear masses. In 1920 Eddington speculates that "nuclear fusion" could explain the energy generation in stars, though it took another decade to suss out the details.
As far as I know, the divinity of the Sun is now relegated to a metaphor, not as a fact. But perhaps the divinity has been transferred to another place thought safe from scientific examination.
While "past performance is no indicator of future return" I would think that continued scientific examination of all aspects of reality will continue, and while science will not be able to make a pronouncement of truth, it will continue to seek those physical explanations and expand its domain of understanding.
You can call that scientism if you wish...
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Dec 23, 2016 - 10:28am PT
|
ancient ideas are based on a very incomplete view of reality
If it's ancient then that is true,
But the absolute truth holds true past present and future in other words it transcends all ......
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Dec 23, 2016 - 10:38am PT
|
if you say so, Werner...
|
|
High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
|
|
|
Dec 23, 2016 - 11:02am PT
|
When the brain won't change its mind...
Sam Harris, et al
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep39589
"Few things are as fundamental to human progress as our ability to arrive at a shared understanding of the world."
Better... "a shared understanding of the world" that is factual.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Dec 23, 2016 - 11:05am PT
|
Ed -- "if you say so, Werner..."
No it should never be "if I say so"
It should be tested by you ......
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!