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WBraun
climber
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Jun 18, 2017 - 05:27pm PT
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still, like to believe in what seems to be an ability to think freely.
No one is stopping you except you yourself ......
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 18, 2017 - 07:45pm PT
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just checking in on this thread after spending time up at Lover's Leap... you all should get out a bit more...
It was almost the shortest day in the year, down south. It was cold and windy with rain coming down hard about 10 minutes each hour. I was thinking about going for a hike but whimped out. We hit the gym for a while instead.
In case you didn't notice, Ed, one of the articles Largo posted referenced another article that offers an explanation for how baseball players catch fly balls (and how dogs catch Frisbees). I am convinced that the explanation (or something like it) is, at least, approximately correct and I hadn't realized before that someone had actually worked this problem out. The point from the article Largo posted was was that the explanation should be counted as evidence that the brain should not be thought of as a computer, but in fact the success of the explanation is that it works the other way around (a robot that fields baseballs can be built on the principal). The interesting thing in terms of Dreyfus's stuff is that a computer needs a mechanical body in order to determine the catch point (determining this point depends on being able to observe while moving in coordination with the flight of ball and what goes on isn't anything like a calculation from Newtonian mechanics based on initial conditions). Anyways, in case you didn't know this I thought you might be interested because you're all way into this science stuff and everything.
In terms of MH2s stuff, it's interesting to note that this theory can be understood without any particular reference to the brain (as something organic made up of cells that light up in certain regions) although one does need a lens to input visual data, a body that moves in coordination with the movement of the ball and a computer that calculates algorithms.
By the way, this does not in anyway change my opinion that computers (even with bodies and lenses) will never give us a complete understanding of the mind.
Cheers!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 18, 2017 - 08:08pm PT
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the brain is the the inspiration for the computer, a word used to identify people who computed, prior to the very recent existence of mechanical computation.
but also, you might look at the link above establishing those places in the brains of primates in which are active when the individual is viewing social situations, but also physical processes.
I believe one learns to catch a ball...
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 18, 2017 - 08:37pm PT
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I believe one learns to catch a ball...
You mean like this: [Click to View YouTube Video]
I bet that the robot can too.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 18, 2017 - 08:41pm PT
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So ....
If there is no absolute, how can one even have a conception of an object being relative .......?
What is mind ......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 18, 2017 - 08:48pm PT
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cool, I read the article...
the brain is not a computer.
What's a computer?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jun 19, 2017 - 02:07am PT
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Most curious is that we all our "way out of our league" in understanding you, and your position. What, exactly, is it that we (including the authors of all the links provided) are NOT understanding?
No, my comment was that you personally are way out of your league when you stray into the computer realm and you should just drop that whole line of argument.
Per you last post, what I suspect you are really railing against is the preposterous ideas of Strong AI, and your "duh" might be more profitably directed at them. You are an outlier in that regards. You surely know that scores of people still use computational thinking to reckon not only WHAT we are aware of (thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, etc.), but the fact that we are aware in the first instance. The reckless conflation I keep harping on.
As I said, people use and reference what they know in the attempt to sort out things they don't know. People use 'computational thinking' because it is the hammer at hand at the moment. That said, and as I mentioned, the IP metaphor still has a lot of currency and relevancy in many ways. That some folks go overboard and get carried away with it all should come as no surprise as many of them don't have much or any grounding in life sciences and are just coming at it from a cs/ee perspective hoping to skip the ick.
Fact is, it would appear that you are as guilty as the people you disparage, in regards to the dog-eared metaphor of mind as machine/computer:
You said: "It's an idea fundamentally at odds with what we do know about both brains and computers: 'you can't capture and download an active and evolving biological state machine.'"
'State machine': sorry, I inadvertently waved a bone in front of you there without explaining it. You then clamped on and ran with it for the remainder of your post which is understandable given that has kind of been one whole leg of your discourse throughout this thread. But, in fact, I wasn't talking about a 'machine', bio or otherwise. I was merely referring to a frozen moment / slice in time of an ever-changing brain's 'state' relative to what Epstein correctly describes as what it is brains 'do' - i.e. they constantly change.
It was also a reference to the whole 'mind downloading' discussion, as in the pointlessness and utter futility of attempting to 'run' a captured femtosecond slice of the 'state' of a brain on a computer and thinking that will be a Hawking. Sadly, that slice or momentary 'state' of the brain isn't going to be a Hawking - i.e. a genuine Hawking isn't going to be found 'in' that slice or any other time slice of his brain state, but rather in the changing of such 'states' or slices. In other words, Hawking is the continuous changing and not the collective discrete changes in and of themselves. Again, my 'state machine' reference has nothing whatsoever to do with a machine of any kind. As an aside though, in computer science and mathematics parlance a 'state machine' typically refers to an 'abstract machine' (there's that word) that can only be in one of a finite number of states at a time. I was taking liberties with the concept; again, my apologies for not being clearer.
But again, at the core of the biomachine model still lurks the hope, at least in theory, that consciousness itself (NOT a particular consciousness, say yours) might be created if you only got the machine engineered just so. If you believe otherwise, say so, and tell us why.
Hopefully we're now clear I made no machine reference and so in that have also dismissed the notion any amount of engineering is going to yield a 'conscious' machine. Given that, I'll skip over most of your machine-related points.
Point is, the causal/mechanistic metaphor seems to have you by the short hairs, and I'm sure you can supply many reasons (evidence) to cling to it. And those reasons will tell us much about the generation of conscious content. But I suspect they will tell us nothing about being conscious in the first place, or what consciousness that really is - beyond mechanical functioning.
Of course there is a chance that I have misrepresented your position. Perhaps you are not holding out hope that causation and mechanisms are NOT the keys to understanding consciousness, that once we have these licked, a conscious machine is immediately forthcoming once the technology is up to speed.
Again, there is no 'up to speed' with regard to technology. As for causation / mechanism (i.e. basically your whole argument), the problem I have with it, Chalmers, and really anyone claiming consciousness is not sourced from brains (causally, mechanistically, or magically) is a simple, unavoidable reality: no brain, no consciousness. You can dance around on the head of as many logical pins as you want, but it's all for nought unless you are claiming brains aren't necessary for consciousness.
And, even though it is an infinitely interesting question just like the origins of life itself, I don't really need to understand the details of how consciousness is sourced from brains. All I really need to know is that one doesn't exist without the other and the fact that brains are beyond amazing and unique as physical organs. A brain exhibits an astonishing level of complexity, consumes a remarkable amount of energy, and is even shielded from it's owner's own body, so when I look at the unique qualities of both brains and consciousness, it is very, very hard for me to come up with any rational justification for the extraordinary evolutionary costs of brains other than consciousness. The details of how meat and mind relate, however confounding, are merely implementation details as far as I'm concerned.
Another point I want to make which moreorless relates to both AI folks and philosophers is that you all seem to come at this matter of consciousness from very Victorian leanings. By that I mean the first thing you both do is dismiss all the ick and mess of the meat (brain) as if it were an unpalatable week-old coldcut left out of the fridge for too long. You instantly abstract it out of both field's thinking and equations as basically insignificant. In fact, the blatant, out-of-hand dismissal of the brain, biology and the power of billions of years of evolution is really hard to take as anything but naive ignorance and intense arrogance.
And that arrogance has unfortunately repeatedly been fed by an industrial revolution, winning several world wars, going to the moon, and even "beating disease". It has really taken until this new century for people to start realizing and understanding that nature in fact does pretty much everything better than we do when it comes to making things. Whole fields within medicine, science, material science, and engineering have finally figured that out and are now turning to nature for solutions to problems evolution has already solved. And I really don't view consciousness any differently, it's just another problem evolution solved long ago - we just don't understand how.
I think the people you speak of who desire hard AI and machine consciousness just see that consciousness is a solved problem and so seek a solution by other means; a faster, simpler, short-cutting solution, but there is none. Evolution is a ruthlessly efficient process yielding solutions which are highly optimized and efficient. In 99% of cases it's just more blind arrogance to believe we can do better or even a fraction as well. One need only look at energy efficiency across the natural world to understand just how crude our solutions are and how arrogant many of us remain in our dismissal of biology and nature.
So basically you and Chalmers can talk till you're blue in the face about causation, machines and 'hard problems' and the AI guys can build neuron chips out the ying yang, but just by the fact we're having this conversation I'd say nature is a far better philosopher and engineer than the lot of you, particularly so if you believe the 'secret' of consciousness won't be solved until there is a "complete philosophical conception" (or the right neural chipset).
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 19, 2017 - 03:38am PT
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What's a computer?
It's a machine that loops back to a point earlier in the thread to find its own definition right there.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Jun 19, 2017 - 05:20am PT
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Healyje,
And I really don't view consciousness any differently, it's just another problem evolution solved long ago - we just don't understand how.
I liked your rebuttal and my belief is the workings our minds is a problem evolution solved long ago.
Somewhere back in time primitive organisms learned to lay low when danger was near. Using this strategy they were sometimes bit on the ass before they moved. As they evolved more they became capable of deciding whether to stay or flee to avoid getting bit on the ass. As organisms got more and more alternatives with real time choices their minds had to calculate trajectories if excellent choices were made. With more choice choices has to be prioritized.
From an internet witness point of view it looks like to me you bit Largo on the ass. One can only wonder whether if he will ever move from what you see as a Victorian point of view?
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Jun 19, 2017 - 05:20am PT
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Past---------( at the moment of thought for only a moment , "mind" then)-----------future
As the only Gotd here, you all should hear me & try to learn at my expense
[actually as much as it hurts me The Smokin' duck and a few others are gotdz too also ]
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jun 19, 2017 - 08:26am PT
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MH2 / 2011: Although the mind may have evolved to solve the problems of movement in a complex and dangerous environment...
healyje / 2011: The human brain seems almost hard-wired to produce metaphysical responses to lingering or intransigent unknowns. I personally suspect it's a higher-order translation of some innate, low-level survival responses to predation.
My contention remains that steadily escalating predation was the primary driver behind the evolution of consciousness.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 19, 2017 - 08:39am PT
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Actually I think that human consciousness, and "mind" are a product of sexual selection. Had big complex brains been an important adaptation you'd have seen more species with minds... right now we have a relatively few species, and they are all related, with this adaptation.
The mind would then be, literally, our "peacock feathers," an attraction to mates.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 19, 2017 - 08:48am PT
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Math nerds are hawt??
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jun 19, 2017 - 09:00am PT
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I would agree sexual selection certainly played a role in the evolution of consciousness, though less in an ornamental peacock way and more in subtle versions of typical male competition and less subtle versions of female mate choice. In the end, though, it comes down to selecting the best provider and that falls under the rubric of predation.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 19, 2017 - 09:25am PT
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as for the question: what are computers?
it is a serious question and one that even the author of Largo's link bungles, not only because he cherry picked a snippet of von Neumann's work [and in a way that reveals that: 1) he didn't understand that paper, 2) he didn't read the paper or 3) he was being intentionally misleading], but also because the architectures of the object you are using to post to this thread was designed to address fundamental engineering constraints of the 1940s and 1950s, and therein is a very important point.
von Neumann is credited with coming up with a particular computer architecture, a central processing unit, a memory unit, input and output units, because of the limitations of the electronics to be used to realize automated computing. The idea was to reduce to a minimum the CPU hardware so that its mean-time-between-failure was long enough to get a computation done. In this architecture the "program" which instructs the CPU what to do is stored in the memory.
This was a successful engineering approach, the ENIAC had electronic component failure multiple times a day. First built in 1946, by 1954 it had a achieved a record 116 hour period of no failures, 5 days. Imagine your cell phone having a physical failure every 5 days....
but even that dismal record afforded the time to actually get some complex (for that time) computations completed.
The point is that computer architectures are driven by physical constraints.
The brain is a computer, it is the first computer, and numerical abilities are found generally in our cladistic Order, and perhaps even more broadly in our Class. So there are aspects of the brain that have evolved to compute.
These computer architectures are quite different, however, in essentially every aspect with von Neumann's architecture. von Neumann understood the powerful mathematics involved with the abstraction of the idea of computation, a problem posed by Hilbert, taken up by Gödel and elaborated by Turing and Church. This abstraction of what a computer is not limited by the computer architecture, and von Neumann knew this very well.
Gödel's Gibbs Lecture, Some basic theorems on the foundations of mathematics and their implications a 1951 lecture is a very interesting read if you want, considering many points brought up in this thread.
While Gödel didn't like the idea that the brain was the source of mind, he couldn't rule it out, as he states in his footnote 13:
"I shall distinguish these two meanings of mathematics as mathematics in the objective and in the subjective sense. Evidently no well-defined system of correct axioms can comprise all objective mathematics, since the proposition which states the consistency of the system is true, but not demonstrable in the system. However, as to subjective mathematics, is is not precluded that there should exist a finite rule producing all its evident axioms. However, if such a rule exists, we with our human understanding could certainly never know it to be such, that is, we could never know with mathematical certainty that all propositions it produces are correct, (12) or in other terms, we could perceive to be true only one proposition after another, for any finite number of them. The assertion, however, that they are all true could at most be known with empirical certainty, on the basis of a sufficient number of instances or by other inductive inferences.(13) If it were so, this would mean that the human mind (in the realm of pure mathematics) is equivalent to a finite machine that, however, is unable to understand completely (14) its own functioning."
12) For this (or the consequence concerning the consistency of axioms) would constitute a mathematical insight not derivable from the axioms and rules under consideration, contrary to the assumption.
13) For example, it is conceivable (although far outside the limits of present-day science) that brain physiology would advance so far that it would be known with empirical certainty
 1. that the brain suffices for the explanation of all mental phenomenon and is a machine in the sense of Turing;
2. that such and such is the precise anatomical structure and physiological functioning of the part of the brain which performs mathematical thinking.
Furthermore, in case the finitistic (or intuitionistic) standpoint is taken, such an inductive inference might be based on a (more or less empirical) belief that non-finitistic (or non-intuitionistic) mathematics is consistent.
14) Of course, the physical working of the thinking mechanism could very well be completely understandable; the insight, however, that this particular mechanism must always lead to correct (or only consistent) results would surpass the powers of human reason.
It is a trivial to state that the brain IS NOT a computer in the sense that your iPhone IS a computer when you compare the architecture, the possible equivalence is more subtle, as the quote of Gödel demonstrates.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 19, 2017 - 09:26am PT
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healyje: And I really don't view consciousness any differently, it's just another problem evolution solved long ago - we just don't understand how.
And what was the problem that it solved? Are you arguing that it (the evolution of consciousness) is all done now? Would that imply the development of some kind of stable state in consciousness? Would that also imply that the problem is also stable and unchanging?
Evolutionary theorists mistake clever narratives for evidence.
You make a pretty big deal about performance, instrumentalism, materialism, and utilitarianism. Is that all that matters? Are those things the final arbiters of what what constitutes the good, the true, the beautiful? Do they prove how the question of consciousness is no longer worthy of discussion or investigation? We should all move on to something else—I suppose about how we can increase performance, instrumentalism, materialism, and utility? I guess the world simply needs more engineers, hmmmm?
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jun 19, 2017 - 09:39am PT
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Interestingly enough, Ed, "most" real numbers are not computable. Penrose tried to use something like this to prove the mind is not a computer, but it seems his attempts were inconclusive.
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