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pc
climber
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Largo wrote, "The end result will be a creature, if we can call it that, which its maker believes within a decade may be able to think, feel and even fall in love."
It's the 'and get mad' feeling I'm worried about...
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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A lot of the stuff over on the politics, religion vs science thread should probably go here. Leave P,R vs S for the more emotional types who despise/adore religion.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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the referenced thread was also set up to be about science, politics, policy and belief in general (apart from religious belief which makes a mess of it) - all of which incl belief informs action, behavior, in our modern complex society and world.
It seems to me your use of "emotional types " is probably somewhat misplaced. Caring or concerned is probably more accurate. But whatever.
But thanks for your attn and help in moving all the woo stuff pertaining to mind to this thread, much appreciated. Whereas (a) it makes a mockery of the modern scientific understanding of mind-brain and (b) many here don't care about what certain climber types think about it.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 9, 2014 - 09:50pm PT
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One of the common themes in most of these discussions is how mind, consciousness and sentience are entirely beholden to and issue from the "rules" of physics, biology, and so forth. That is, mind acts according to the "rules," which unfold in a deterministic, bottom up fashion too complex and chaotic and shot with randomness and butterfly effects to be predictable, but if the data were all known, we could, the belief runs, REVERSE engineer things back to the parts, which are governed by the "rules."
Systems scientist Peter Corning has pointed out that living systems, however, cannot be reduced to underlying laws of physics:
"Rules, or laws, have no causal efficacy; they do not in fact “generate” anything. They serve merely to describe regularities and consistent relationships in nature. These patterns may be very illuminating and important, but the underlying causal agencies must be separately specified (though often they are not). But that aside, the game of chess illustrates ... why any laws or rules of emergence and evolution are insufficient.
Even in a chess game, you cannot use the rules to predict “history” — i.e., the course of any given game. Indeed, you cannot even reliably predict the next move in a chess game. Why? Because the “system” involves more than the rules of the game. It also includes the players and their unfolding, moment-by-moment decisions among a very large number of available options at each choice point.
The game of chess is inescapably historical, even though it is also constrained and shaped by a set of rules, not to mention the laws of physics. Moreover, and this is a key point, the game of chess is also shaped by teleonomic, cybernetic, feedback-driven influences. It is not simply a self-ordered process; it involves an organized, “purposeful” activity."
JL
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Even in a chess game, you cannot use the rules to predict “history” — i.e., the course of any given game.
Can't get much simpler than chess rules.
Ill bet you can't even predict the outcome of checkers.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess
Chess engines continue to improve. In 2009 chess engines running on slower hardware have reached the grandmaster level. A mobile phone won a category 6 tournament with a performance rating 2898: chess engine Hiarcs 13 running inside Pocket Fritz 4 on the mobile phone HTC Touch HD won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Buenos Aires, Argentina with 9 wins and 1 draw on August 4–14, 2009.[16] Pocket Fritz 4 searches fewer than 20,000 positions per second.[17] This is in contrast to supercomputers such as Deep Blue that searched 200 million positions per second.
so how does a computer do it? and better than humans...
Even in a chess game, you cannot use the rules to predict “history” — i.e., the course of any given game. Indeed, you cannot even reliably predict the next move in a chess game. Why? Because the “system” involves more than the rules of the game. It also includes the players and their unfolding, moment-by-moment decisions among a very large number of available options at each choice point.
The game of chess is inescapably historical, even though it is also constrained and shaped by a set of rules, not to mention the laws of physics. Moreover, and this is a key point, the game of chess is also shaped by teleonomic, cybernetic, feedback-driven influences. It is not simply a self-ordered process; it involves an organized, “purposeful” activity."
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zBrown
Ice climber
Brujo de la Playa
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I took Searle's class. He said, "why don't you all go out and do something useful?" It might have been "learn", it was a long time ago mind you.
Anyway, some folks are going to argue that all the "intrinsics" are just relative observations in the first place. So it's turtles all the way up, I spose.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 10, 2014 - 01:52am PT
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I think it would be an interesting game to pit the chess computers against each other.
I think the point was that even the computer cannot predict what will happen.
I would also note our inherent obsession to trying to anchor off reality to first or "efficient" causes - DNA, etc. It is such a reassuring idea. Everything issues - is some manner, shape or form - from (fill in the blank).
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 10, 2014 - 02:51am PT
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you cannot predict, exactly, what will happen in quantum mechanics, but you can calculate, to very high precision and accuracy, the probability of what will occur.
my guess is that the same is true in chess, as both humans and machines play the game.
we can claim to "understand" chess even if we cannot predict the sequence of moves in each game. the demonstration that we "understand" the game is that we have been able to program a computer to play it, and better than the best humans.
unless you want to attribute to the machines some inherent ability to play that does not come from the program.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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May 10, 2014 - 03:47am PT
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my guess is that the same is true in chess, as both humans and machines play the game.
The predictive capability of computers , used as analytical tools by players , has fundamentally changed the way chess is played between top human players.
Top player Anand puts it this way:
Top competitors who once relied on particular styles of play are now forced to mix up their strategies, for fear that powerful analysis engines will be used to reveal fatal weaknesses in favoured openings. The result has in some ways made chess more defensive, increasing the risks of daring, adventurous gambits. But in championship matches, where draws are common and the final result is likely to be decided by just a handful of victories, unexpected approaches become even more prized. “Anything unusual that you can produce has quadruple, quintuple the value, precisely because your opponent is likely to do the predictable stuff, which is on a computer,” Anand says.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/anand-on-how-computers-have-changed-chess-2013-11#ixzz31IRpi6rQ[/quote]
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zBrown
Ice climber
Brujo de la Playa
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May 10, 2014 - 10:49am PT
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I took classes with Globus too, haven't read this though. Generally, if I have to look up more than a couple words in the abstract I shy away from the book, but maybe someone here knows this stuff.
The Postmodern Brain,Gordon G. Globus,University of California, Irvine
(1995)
This interdisciplinary work discloses an unexpected coherence between recent concepts in brain science and postmodern thought. A nonlinear dynamical model of brain states is viewed as an autopoietic, autorhoetic, self-organizing, self-tuning eruption under multiple constraints and guided by an overarching optimization principle which insures conservation of invariances and enhancement of symmetries. The nonlinear dynamical brain as developed shows quantum nonlocality, undergoes chaotic regimes, and does not compute. Heidegger and Derrida are ‘appropriated’ as dynamical theorists who are concerned respectively with the movement of time and being (Ereignis) and text (Différance). The chasm between postmodern thought and the thoroughly metaphysical theory that the brain computes is breached, once the nonlinear dynamical framework is adopted. The book is written in a postmodern style, making playful, opportunistic use of marginalia and dreams, and presenting a nonserial surface of broken complexity.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 10, 2014 - 11:15am PT
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The problem with the chess metaphor is that it is useful in learning about tasking, but tasking is only one side of the coin per "mind." We can "understand" mind in terms of tasking, and objective functioning, but there is more that tasking involved per what a mind is. This is what makes sentience so slippery, because sentience is the quality of self-aware presence that is simply there (human "being") above and beyond all our human doing and tasking, and is related to who we actually are. When we talk about chess or QM we are talking about what something will do, not what something is. When we conflate doing with being or existing or being present and conscious, we have effectively cut the observer out of the equation. And there lies the rub of objectification: it give us a great view of one side of the coin.
JL
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rgold
Trad climber
Poughkeepsie, NY
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May 10, 2014 - 11:37am PT
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Isn't "prediction" the wrong standard to hold up for "understanding?" The study of chaotic dynamics, going back to Poincaré, combined perhaps with the catastrophe theory of René Thom, has taught us that, in many cases, phenomena people thought too complex to analyze turned out to be the end product of simple deterministic rules. The fact that we have found these rules and understand how they lead to chaotic outcomes constitutes a valid form of "understanding" which does not carry with it much if anything in the way of predictive power, especially when something like sensitive dependence on initial conditions meets computers' inability to represent arbitrary real numbers.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 10, 2014 - 12:03pm PT
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Isn't "prediction" the wrong standard to hold up for "understanding?"
how would you determine that you "understand" something?
maybe The Beatles had it right....
[Click to View YouTube Video]
...maybe that works for mathematics... but even there, if you have a feeling you're better off if it comes with a proof.
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MH2
climber
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May 10, 2014 - 12:21pm PT
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Thank you, rgold.
"If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment. but even if it were the case that the natural laws had no longer any secret for us, we could still only know the initial situation approximately. If that enabled us to predict the succeeding situation with the same approximation, that is all we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon. - in a 1903 essay "Science and Method"
-Henri Poincaré
That people could come to understand the planets and their orbits and then go on to wonder whether the system was stable is a marvelous testament to the roving mind of the human.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 10, 2014 - 12:41pm PT
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When we conflate doing with being or existing or being present and conscious, we have effectively cut the observer out of the equation.
there are ways that this statement is trite, that in describing a thing we essentially focus on a particular aspect of it, and usually the aspect relevant to our description.
the sum of these descriptions can be "associative" in a way that starts to define a thing, like the ideas evoked by reference to a sunset. I can describe the actual time dependent bearing and altitude of today's sunset anyplace on the globe, but that definition is only a part of what I know as a "sunset."
Now there may very well be aspects to the sunset that are not descriptive. In fact, the generation of the celestial mechanical information regarding sunsets did not exist prior to the 17th century. Yet the regularity of the sunset was well known by pre-historic humans.
We know that because we find astronomical monuments constructed to "predict" special sunsets, like the solstices and equinoxes, which apparently have special meaning to humans in their interactions with nature.
Sunsets have special characteristics, the quality of "redness" of them depends on the particulates in the atmosphere. Recent interest in the natural variability of particulates. Determining the pre-industrial baseline of atmospheric aerosols has some looking at paintings to determine the atmospheric qualities before human activity had a significant impact on the atmosphere.
It is a sweet idea that something classified as "sublime," a quality we are quite familiar with in our own wanderings on the planet, is pressed into the service of science on the basis of its descriptive qualities. While sublime, also a quantitative record of the time, perhaps useful to scientific investigation today.
When Church painted the twilight in 1860, he tried to capture more than just a visual description of the scene, and succeeded. He had no idea that that scene might also be a record for the future.
It is a mistake to look at science or mathematics as a set of "rules." While there are rules, these rules change as we learn more about the science and the mathematics. It is not just a map we take out of the bin and unroll on a table, the map is unmade in most of the parts we're interested in, and the made parts show us where the edges are, but how we extend those edges, and how that extension alters what we know, are the part of science and mathematics that their practitioners are most interested in.
We can speculate about those unknown parts of the maps, the parts off the edges, and then try to go to those places and see what is actually there. Sometimes our speculations are right, sometimes they are not. Those speculations are based on what we know about the map, and what we know that that helps us extend the map, but our speculations are informed by our observations, and that helps us fill in more of the details as we go on, and often changes the details of where we've been.
And there is no reason not to sit right where we are and contemplate that, too.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
Henry David Thoreau On Walden Pond
if he had written this to this thread I suspect he'd be chided as a "silly rabbit" because he missed the whole point, apparently, that "to know it by experience" is considered by some here as contradictory to the sentiment "to give a true account of it."
Thoreau badly missed the mark, then... he gave us a description of a thing that was not what he described.
[/proof by contradition]
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 10, 2014 - 12:47pm PT
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the ability to understand whether or not a dynamical system is "chaotic" is a prediction...
but it is one of limited usefulness. For instance, a 10-body dynamical system could be chaotic, yet we know of one example which has had a remarkable run of stability.
Poincaré helps us understand this, but empirical fact can be a very powerful regulator of our speculations.
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Jim Clipper
climber
from: forests to tree farms
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May 10, 2014 - 01:15pm PT
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unless you want to attribute to the machines some inherent ability to play that does not come from the program
Mr. H, We are currently, in the anthropocene, no? May intelligent, organized, biological, mechanical, social conglomerations of matter save us from ourselves. (or some combination thereof, others?)
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 10, 2014 - 02:08pm PT
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unsure of your the point you're making Jim Clipper
it would seem that humanity has "made its bed" and will now have to lay in it...
fundamentally, humans have been successful behaving the way they have, as evidenced by the very large population increases.
politically, there is not many more fundamental individual rights than to procreate (the outrage over China's birth control policies is an example of our reaction).
one could speculate on the outcome of uncontrolled population expansion which is politically protected.
ecology (of which economics is a subfield) has a lot to say about the prospective outcomes, and that is undoubtedly not something that will affect human behavior.
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