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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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re: nested infinities, etc
"How can something that has no end be larger than something else that has no end?"
[Click to View YouTube Video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhHtBqsGAoA
"Every generation has its badass scientists." -ndgt
...
(1) Is this true? As far as we know, there are four fundamental (parts or particles) in the universe - (1) photon (2) electron (3) quark (4) neutrino. (ndgt)
(2) So the observer effect in physics (in regards to measuring) has jackshit to do with consciousness, mind... (ndgt)
re: What the Bleep Do We Know
"The film has been described as an example of quantum mysticism, and has been criticized for both misrepresenting science and containing pseudoscience. While many of its interviewees and subjects are professional scientists in the fields of physics, chemistry, and engineering, several have noted that the film quotes them out of context."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Bleep_Do_We_Know!%3F
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 7, 2017 - 12:23pm PT
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Despite the dramatic discoveries made in neurobiology and information technology over the last few decades, both specialized fields are widely ridiculed whenever objective functioning and data processing are recruited to "explain" sentience and experience. The standard criticism is that when sentience itself is posited as identical with biology and/or some form of information processing, the only external object that can stir the various components of consciousness into a dedicated bio-machine or sentient computer ... is a magic wand.
Popular books taking the most intense heat in this regards include Francis Crick’s and Christof Koch’s Toward a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness, Bernard Baars’s Global Workplace theory, Gerald Elderman’s and Giulio Tononi’s The Dynamic Core theory, Rodolfo Llinas’s Thalamocortical Binding theory, Victor Lamme’s Recurrent Processing theory, Semir Zeki’s Microconsciousness Theory, and Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens theory, to mention a few.
The strongest criticism leveled against these writers is that none of them remotely address Chalmer's hard problem of consciousness (why and by what means do we have subjective experience, the "internal sense of being you"), posed in 1995. The Hard Problem puts the question directly to those believing that matter becomes conscious through a physical mechanism, basically asking: How? The question is pertinent and essential because any materialist belief about consciousness is inevitably left with only two explanations: Either the brain "causes" an emergent function we know as consciousness, or else the brain itself IS conscious, in the sense that the sky is blue.
There is no doubt that objective functioning plays a crucial part IN consciousness, and the Hard Problem seeks to discover how and to what extent. The curious part of all this is how the Hard Problem is avoided like the plague. Chalmers explains this wholesale failure of addressing the hard problem, mentioning five typical strategies:
1. The first strategy is to explain something else. Researchers simply admit the problem of experience is too difficult for now and may be outside of the domain of science. Koch openly admits this failed strategy to his Toward a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness theory. In a published interview he confesses: “Well, let’s first forget about the real difficult aspects, like subjective feelings, because they may not have a scientific solution. The subjective state of play, of pain, of pleasure, of seeing blue, of smelling a rose–there seems to be a huge jump (the "explaitory gap") between the materialistic level, of explaining molecules and neurons, and the subjective level.”
2. The second strategy is to simply deny the hard problem of consciousness. It is to assert we are Zombies, with an illusion of free will and volition. This strategy describes the human reality as a biological machine with no subjective experience.
3. The third strategy is to claim that subjective experience is explained by understanding the physical processes in our brain. Sounds like magic, because it is. Experience somehow emerges without explanation. The question “how do these processes give rise to experience?” is never answered.
4. The fourth strategy is to explain the structure of experience. This strategy tells us nothing of why or how there is experience in the first place.
5. The fifth strategy is to isolate the substrate (the underlying basis or layer) of experience. This strategy aims to isolate the neural basis for experience by understanding certain processes. However, this strategy does not explain why experience emerges from these process, or how.
A sixth strategy is a facile bait and switch: dismiss or explain away the hard question, re-frame it, and answer that one.
As Kinsey has pointed out, the most crucial questions about the mind arise from the question of just how it is that its characteristic abilities — intelligence, consciousness, intentionality, and emotion — are purported to arise from processes that have nothing resembling these traits. And what's more, of the countless examples in Nature that demonstrate X arising from Y, none in the history of observation and measurement have ever shown the slightest sign of consciousness. Same goes for other analogies to processes both natural and engineered. Complexity, physical arrangement, processing etc. are all abundantly evident in the natural and technological worlds, but no evidence nor yet any conceivable reason can be given why objective features like wiring, computing, etc. are efficient causes to source subjective experience and awareness of same.
Specificity arguments - for example, that the wiring of this object "causes" consciousness - go no distance in explaining why that might possibly be so. Fact is, all suppositions claiming that sentience arises from a given physical mechanism can look neither to Nature or technology for even the remotest analogue, rather only to magic to explain not just why your Aunt should become your Uncle, so to speak, but rather why she becomes a phenomenon unlike anything else in the known universe, real or imagined. And again, why now-ubiquitous processes like processing, calculating, and electric circuitry should suddenly birth sentience when they never have before. Same goes for conflating sentience with information.
My sense of the log jam here arises from people not understanding nor yet making the crucial distinction between awareness and that which is perceived (aka content - memories, thoughts, feelings and sensations).
Ironically, when such plain talk is heard, shouts go up that the SPEAKER is now appealing to magic, or some unobservable, other worldly mechanism to "explain" consciousness (don't expect Type A materialists to give on their mechanisms). Another sidestep is the "privileged knowledge ploy," where anyone could understand (fill in the blank) if they only had the speaker's special aptitude in electronics, particle physics, neurobiology, or for that matter, Zen meditation. The privileged knowledge ploy is only viable if the special knowledge is brought directly to bear on explaining or providing a model that can be further explored. And none of us (and I'm at the top of the list) has remotely done this.
There are some screwy assumptions made by most everyone involved in mind studies, and none of us, it seems, in immune to making some or many blunders per even the most basic features.
For example (as noted by physicist Berg), few people take issue with gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak forces simply being part of reality, with no mechanism to explain them, but after all, these are measurable phenomenon. And yet 95 out of 100 of these people are Identity Materialists.
The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain - identical meaning the very same, or dead equals. Put differently, there is NOTHING in one that is not present, in every detail and phenomenon, in the other.
It follows that electrochemical activity in the brain IS consciousness (there is no other way to play identity materialism), and we can measure that activity all day long with manifold tools. But the measurement itself doesn't EXPLAIN anything. So for those seeking a mechanism to explain WHY we are aware, their only answer, so far, is magic.
Once you really born into the issues involved, you eventually realize that the confusion mostly arises from people talking about one specific area of study, like objective functioning, while firmly believing that are also talking about the WHOLE of consciousness - or at any rate, the only part that needs investigating, all else being immaterial. The most curious aspect of this concerns the train of thought that makes people believe any such thing. Since there is no direct evidence to even remotely associate awareness with a machine, of any kind, what is the thinking that makes people do so anyway? Those probably most guilty of double talk in this regard are found in the Strong AI camp.
One critical thinker of note, who has done a marvelous job at exposing the erroneous logic and loopy assumptions of Strong AI, is Luciano Floridi, Professor of logic and ethics at University of Oxford. For those unfamiliar with modern logic, most of the leading proponents are math geeks who've traversed sideways out of numbers into syllogisms and proofs. Such studies are the polar opposite of metaphysics and remain an invaluable tool in verifying the objective rigor and verity of arguments, statements and conclusions. Logic is especially effective in doing to death bullshit claims that one thing necessarily follows from another thing, when in fact there is no logical reason to support it.
Generally speaking, trying to thieve a jive argument and conclusion past a skilled logician is as likely as sneaking the sun past a rooster. If ever there was such a skilled logician, it must be professor Floridi, who doesn't mince words: Strong AI is unequivocal "bullsh#t," and presently, "there is no such thing as artificial intelligence."
In all cases of purported Strong AI, real or (mostly) imagined, it can be logically demonstrated that the entity or process is merely a Syntactic Engine, a shuffler of symbols. No exceptions. If you really have an interest in Mind, you need to get clear on what a syntactic engine actually is.
However, said bullshit pays a lot, says Floridi, while playing on mankind's infatuation with immortality, starting with Scarab beetles, the god Osarius, Fountains of Youth, Beelzebub and Dr. Faustus, Frankenstein, and now, modern charlatans of immortality like Ray Kurtzweil, et al.
Floridi calls the Strong AI arguments a "Gallery of Horrors," then runs down the false arguments commonly used in both popular and specialized reviews of the so-called existence or Strong AI . Surely there is something here, Floridi asks. "There isn't."
"If-Then" is the first argument. "If" intelligent machines take over (the so-caled Singularity), "we are totally screwed." Yes, that is totally true. But it's also true if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were to suddenly appear, or it the sky started falling, we'd all be gonners. But none are going to happen.
But they say, "Surely, it COULD happen." But what kind of "could" are we talking about. There are various ways of teaching logic, and they all cover iterations of "could." Such as, "I could miss the flight this afternoon." And there's a "could" such as, "I could receive a million pounds from a military officer in Nigeria, or an uncle I've never heard of." There's a difference between, COULD, as in, likely, plausible, in the cards, etc,. versus, "it is not a contradiction to assume that Strong AI is just a few decades away." There's no contradiction in talking about Strong AI, it's just not going to happen with the science we have, and the data processing model normally employed. There is no evidence or logical connection between processing, information, etc., and human-style sentience. None.
But there could be a breakthrough in the future ... Well, of course. But that's not an argument. It's a miracle. And science is not normally done in miracles.
But naysayers are "missing the evidence." The growth of AI, they say, is exponential. Things are getting faster and bigger as we speak. Case in point, the average turkey has grown from an average size (in 1929) of 7 kilos to 13 kilos today. Following this growth curve, the turkey will eventually outsize the entire planet. Of course this is ludicrous, and underscores the false assumption of unlimited growth. In business, technology and all aspects of life, the process is a sigmoid function (graph of logistic curve) - every time. Things grow, they reach a point, and they hover around that point. They never simply keep increasing in any aspect.
But what about "sooner or later." Sooner or later, sentient machines are gonna happen. Again, not so much. Sooner or later looks like this. Imagine a time line. And above it, another line, climbing slightly toward the end. This second line represents human intelligence. And a third line, commencing toward the end of the time line and rising almost in a straight line, is machine intelligence (vaguely or magically conflated with human intelligence, associated (with no evidence) with bits per second and processing speed). It intersects the second or human intelligence line at a point in the near future when machine intelligence is believed to pass human intelligence. There is no tangible explanation or rationale given for even the possibility of this happening other than to refer to various trends in data processing. This is the kind of "science" used by the AI folks - unconvincing to say the least.
Next up, better safe than sorry. Now even if all the aforementioned are not remotely tenable, surely you want to be safe rather than sorry. Surely you should invest millions of dollars now, because you never know. Likewise, you surely should wear a lead-lined helmet whenever you go biking because they could be reading your brainwaves from Mars. So better safe than sorry.
In logic, better safe than sorry buys you ANYTHING. It's NOT an argument because it opens all doors. Safe than sorry - absolutely ... if there's something to be safe about. Better safe than sorry means that you never fly, because there COULD be an accident. Of course that's more likely than sentient machines, says Floridi, but in fact the rationale is so lacking that the notion is fatally flawed to begin with.
And then one of the true whoppers - we've been wrong before. You say this now (strong AI is rubbish), but in the past, we believed we could not fly, and look at us now, traveling the galaxy in space ships and space stations. Let's look at the argument.
Past, can't fly. Now, you can fly. And that leads to, Present, no AI, future, AI. Present, mortal. Future, immortal. Except that is a total bullshit line of reasoning. With that faux argument, you can prove anything. By being wrong before, you put into the equation, A and B (where you have been wrong before), then add C and D, of whatever kind, and suddenly rhinos can walk on water.
Remember, if an argument buys you everything, it's equivalent to: White I win; black, you lose. This kind of argument is not a key to anything. It's just a ham fisted way of not respecting the lock.
Of course we can also conduct an "expert survey." Though the most vocal, granstanding experts are earning six figure salaries from outfits like Google, Mircrosoft, and so forth. Asking AI folk about the likelihood of intelligent machines happening "sometime," is like asking Dodger fans if the club will some day win the World Series.
And the final argument: Not yet. So the question is put to you and only a yes or no answer is wanted. So, they ask, are you 100%, no doubt about it certain that sentient machines will never happen. As a scientist, you say things like: Almost certainly, and so forth, and the aficionado says, see, he's not quite sure. What gets left out of the drift of those playing the short odds is the question: Is there anything in our technology, in our science today, that promises even a vague, remote resemblance to machine sentience, the unequivocal answer is: NO. As in, end of the story.
Ari N. Schulman said it well: Any investigation seeking any explanation for consciousness must begin with an acknowledgment that the very fact of the mind’s improbable existence means that the answers are likely to defy our intuitions. It follows that answering the Hard Problem will involve a hell of a lot more than a rundown of physical data.
More on this later. But the thing I'm beginning to realize is that each camp holds a key piece of the consciousness puzzle. And that includes AI. The problems arise when people believe that one camp holds the entire puzzle, when in fact they are not even studying the entire puzzle, no matter how much they believe they are.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Paul said
Most scientists are woefully ignorant of even the most elementary precepts of the humanities. Sheesh, you couldn't be more wrong! Scientists are much more likely to remove the religious bullshit parts to expose what it really is to be human.
Largo said
Despite the dramatic discoveries made in neurobiology and information technology over the last few decades, both specialized fields are widely ridiculed whenever objective functioning and data processing are used to "explain" sentience. Oh, really? Hmmm, those totally discredited fields of neurobiology and information technology. This is a poor opening to a long post, Largo. Makes me not want to waste my time.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Hey thanks for those latest links, HFCS. I'm in digesting mode. I'm 4/5ths of the way through Homo Deus. Man, what an intellectual tour de force. I didn't expect to learn so many things.
One thing I did just read was him dissing Dawkins and Pinker. Here it is; Page 307.
Indeed, even Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and the other champions of the new scientific world view refuse to abandon liberalism. After dedicating hundreds of erudite pages to deconstructing the self and freedom of will, they perform breathtaking intellectual somersaults that miraculously land them back in the eighteenth century, as if all the amazing discoveries of evolutionary biology and brain science have absolutely no bearing on the ethical and political ideas of Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson. This is entirely in keeping with my (current) model of free will. I still haven't watched the round table part of that video link, as I would have put Pinker in the anti-liberalism camp (free will is absolutely an illusion).
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sheesh, you couldn't be more wrong! Scientists are much more likely to remove the religious bullshit parts to expose what it really is to be human.
Come on... it's a joke poking fun at the previous post above it...really, get a grip.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 7, 2017 - 03:00pm PT
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Oh, really? Hmmm, those totally discredited fields of neurobiology and information technology.
You're yanking things out of context, amigo. Critics are not discrediting neurobiology and informational technology, per se. So long as they stick to neurobiology and informational technology. If they want to traverse sideways into the study of consciousness, as many have started to do, more power to them, but they need to provide some form of hard evidence per answering Chalmers Hard Question - that is, what is there to suggest that any biological or data management process has anything to do with us being conscious and having a first person, experiential life?
So again, just to make things perfectly clear, what has been "discredited" are the claims, without evidence or even convincing arguments, about why and how biology becomes conscious. So far, all "explanations" have deferred to magic, especially from the informational camp. No one is taking a hack at either field in terms of their study on objective functioning. But that's not what the hard problem is even talking about.
No sane person would claim that neurobiology has not made fantastic strides per objective functioning, and that information technology has not advanced wonderfully. But linking them to our subjective experience has so far been a bust.
My sense of this, as mentioned, is that each specific camp of study holds a key piece to the puzzle. Only when one camp claims to have the definitive low-down on the entire puzzle do the arguments become absurd.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Largo,
Objective functioning and subjective experience are just words. Do you have any testable hypothesis? If you don't, you can say whatever you want to, but it is only your opinion.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 7, 2017 - 05:40pm PT
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Largo,
Objective functioning and subjective experience are just words. Do you have any testable hypothesis? If you don't, you can say whatever you want to, but it is only your opinion.
--
We've been though this many times before, MH2, and once again you are merely digging in your heels and doing one of the listed dodges Chalmers has mentioned per running away from the hard problem. The onus is not on me, rather it's on anyone making claims that A "causes" B, B in this case being subjective experience, the internal sense of "being MH2."
The "testable hypothesis" is a kind of last ditch effort of materialists to wrangle the investigation into terrain in which the very essence of Chalmers' Hard Problem has no traction. The method is basically to insist that you provide 3rd person, material "proof" of a 1st person phenomenon, possible only if identity materialism was true (3rd and 1st person are identical in EVERY aspect).
"Objective functioning" derives from measurements of brain function. Writing these measurements off as merely "words" is something most neuroscientists would take issue with.
What's telling here is MH2's continual attempt to write off even an Oxford logician as having only "an opinion," while said logician went to pretty significant lengths to show what any schoolboy can recognize as the purest blarney coming from the Hard AI camp.
In fact, the statement, "subjective and objective are only words" to which every individual in space and time can have only an "opinion" is itself a logical howler that can find zero play in the real world. In the sense that the map is not the territory, "words" describing objective and subjective reality are not the external object nor the internal experience itself, but this in no wise suggests that there is nothing meaningful behind those words.
What would be more interesting to this discussion would be for MH2 to actually read the post, present an alternative take on the articles discussed, and propose a logical argument supporting said take. As is, "Objective functioning and subjective experience are just words" cannot be considered a studied nor yet an intelligible answer to Chalmer's Hard Problem, but it can be seen as an illogical and intelectually dishonest way to try and dodge the problem altogether.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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The onus is not on me
Some of it is. Some is on Chalmers. He hasn't shown anything.
Are these his words:
2. The second strategy is to simply deny the hard problem of consciousness. It is to assert we are Zombies, with an illusion of free will and volition. This strategy describes the human reality as a biological machine with no subjective experience.
He is only using words with negative connotations, like zombie, illusion, and machine, and claiming that someone unmentioned denies subjective experience.
Whatever you or he calls subjective experience is, until a better explanation is put forward, fully capable of being implemented by biology.
The onus is on Chalmers to show why he is sure that biology is not up to the task.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Ed: ... and that evidence will grow in the coming decade...
Pshaw. I think I've heard this claim more than a few times professionally.
You're a scientist, not an investor. Say what you know.
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WBraun
climber
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That which is impossible, they are trying for, that ..... and wasting their hard earned money and time creating more and more humanitarian disasters ......
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messnerrocks
Mountain climber
Bozeman
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"why and how biology becomes conscious"
why? because of evolution. new parts of the brain form and are capable of new thought made by new neuron connections.
how? brains have gotten bigger and have more connections. why is consciousness any different than being able to do math or think theoretically? consciousness isn't some magic thing. pretty sure apes realize they are alive and will die.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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I referred to "what I know" in the links above...
And here's the problem: what is it to "know" and what do you mean by the "value" you speak of in a finite situation of accident and brevity in which we are nothing more than a biological happenstance no more unique or unusual than a kind of bacteria?
What is the point of "knowing" if knowing is pointless? Wouldn't it be better to simply give all that grant money to the poor around the world and mediate their suffering?
There must be some value in knowing and that value is a function of the initial value of mind, an extremely unusual element/quality/thing in our solar system and perhaps the universe, whether a product of biology or not. By diminishing mind, what it is to be aware, you diminish knowing itself and, in effect, the whole purpose of your (scientific) endeavor.
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capseeboy
Trad climber
salem, oregon
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Explain something by using more words even though the essence of the thing in itself can never be explained. Words and numbers are abstracts. They are not the thing in itself. I might describe the conditions that help a seed to grow but I will never know 'how' it grows. Einstein nailed it. While the observer is looking at the time something else is happening in space. It is not possible to simultaneously observe time and space. As soon as the observer is measuring the time something else is happening with space. Look at the double-slit experiment, it demonstrates the fundamental limitation of the ability of the observer to predict experimental results. It's my opinion that consciousness will never be explained any more then why a photon behaves as a wave, and a particle, but their behavior cannot be simultaneously observed. Personally it all comes back to Socrates Cave. We see the shadow on the cave wall and will never know what the essence is of the thing that is casting it. We live our lives with blinders on and blunder through it. Theres no way to avoid it.
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capseeboy
Social climber
portland, oregon
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Socrates didn't have a cave? Sad.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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He did, but Plato got all the credit. Little known factoid.
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