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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Feb 23, 2015 - 06:01pm PT
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How "scientific" is sociology?
what the scientific method has goin for it is trial-n-error. Then statistic's. That may work for unemployment? But at it's heart, the law of 'where there is an action, inherently causes an opposite reaction', just doesn't fly when dealing with love.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Feb 23, 2015 - 06:25pm PT
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how do atoms of hydrogen find atoms of oxygen to make water?
well, i don't believe it to be an accident,or luck,or chance. Do you,really?
Obviously, without water there is no life. Thus no eye-balls to appreciate all the shinny colors provided by the stars. That alone should prove motivation for a plan? Or atleast an instructional environment?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Feb 23, 2015 - 07:38pm PT
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instructional environment?
"Instructional Environment", did i coin that term? i like it.
would it be an arguement that environment has as much, or more to do with 'evolution' as genetics do??
Re: the serpent in the garden
obliviously elements would go flat without an environment of gravity!?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Feb 23, 2015 - 07:47pm PT
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healyje, I'm afraid and quite certain that you are entirely mistaken about sentience being a a behavior and only a behavior - as in, behavior being "the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems, or artificial entities in conjunction with themselves or their environment, which includes the other systems or organisms around as well as the (inanimate) physical environment. It is the response of the system or organism to various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary."
What you have tried to do is objectify sentience and the fall out there is that the experiential aspect gets lost as you've striven to posit sentience as a strictly mechanical response, action, or move toward or away from some measurable thing.
Again, this is not even an advanced mistake, but one common one to beginning students of the experiential adventures. You will continue to disagree so long as you cling to your current perspective, and even heap virtue on it. Again, that's the benchmark of the discursive trance.
And what's all this talk about "God" on this thread. What do you mean by that term? Is your God - or the God you disparage - a thing, a personage in a rocking chair? White beard? White guy?
JL
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Feb 23, 2015 - 08:11pm PT
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Anybody here read "The Emperor's New Mind" by Penrose? Science types might really enjoy it.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Feb 23, 2015 - 08:32pm PT
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The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. . . . The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Social Text spring&summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue.
It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. . . . Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, identifying it as "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense ... structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics."
The hoax sparked a debate about the scholarly merit of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general . . .
In an interview on the NPR program All Things Considered, Sokal said he was inspired to submit the hoax article after reading Higher Superstition (1994), by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. In their book, Gross and Levitt said that an anti-intellectual trend had swept university liberal arts departments (especially English departments), causing them to become dominated by a "trendy" branch of postmodernist deconstructionism (Wiki)
Sound familiar?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Feb 23, 2015 - 08:41pm PT
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Does sound familiar. The arts with their inferiority complex with regard to science, imitated science with a new "method" that was quantifying and certain but completely tied as well to political interests that led us from "new criticism" to "structuralism" to "deconstruction" and an uncertain nihilism and finally nowhere.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 23, 2015 - 08:47pm PT
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Largo, I'm afraid and quite certain that you are entirely mistaken about sentience being an undefinable woo - as in, something inscrutably I-can't-quite-put-my-paw-on-it intangible lying wholly outside the range of observable behavior exhibited by organisms.
Origin: L. Sentiens, -entis, p. Pr. Of sentire to discern or perceive by the senses.
Again, all organism display sentience per their capabilities - including humans. You're VAAS philosophical definition tied to [human] qualia just doesn't even begin to cut it.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 23, 2015 - 08:53pm PT
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What is a science type, Paul?
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=972999&msg=982068#msg982068
Other Penrose-related posts were lost in a thread purge. The Emperor's New Mind was published in 1989. Shadows of the Mind in 1994 and The Road to Reality 10 years later responded to criticisms of The Emperor's New Mind.
You need the patience to follow a lengthy chain of abstract reasoning to appreciate Penrose's point about how a human mind can solve problems that a Universal Turing Machine cannot. And then you need either a very generous nature or a superhuman respect for logic to care about that difference.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Feb 23, 2015 - 08:53pm PT
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Good points, Paul.
I feel a little queasy in this regard when JL speaks of "no physical extent", "Hilbert spaces", "awareness fields", etc. At least he has abandoned the larger conflations of quantum flapdoodle. And in all fairness I believe he is a tad tongue and cheek at times.
But he does have a wonderful gift as a writer.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 23, 2015 - 08:57pm PT
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all organism display sentience per their capabilities - including humans
Yes but it should be stated as "all living organisms"
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Feb 23, 2015 - 09:06pm PT
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And then you need either a very generous nature or a superhuman respect for logic to care about that difference.
I don't know, the difference seemed rather sharp and thorough to me. The points were ultimately rather simple and made the notion of a strong AI seem remarkably problematic. Science type doesn't mean anything bad and I shouldn't have used it.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Feb 23, 2015 - 09:18pm PT
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Largo, I'm afraid and quite certain that you are entirely mistaken about sentience being an undefinable woo - as in, something inscrutably I-can't-quite-put-my-paw-on-it intangible lying wholly outside the range of observable behavior exhibited by organisms.
Healyj, all you have confirmed is your rigid adherence to the aforementioned trance, whereby unless you can fit "it" into your slide rule, then it must be woo. Again, this is simply knucklehead level scientism, which admits only the measurable, all else being voodoo.
Your comment about awareness being tied to qualia is also missing the mark - for the simple reason that any form of mindful meditation can disclose to a person, with some little training, that qualia (WHAT is observed or experienced) is not the same as observation itself. Once a wide focus can be held, and the discursive can no longer "lasso" a person, place, thing or phenomenon (thing of "lasso" as the lasso function on something like Photoshop, which cuts out a discrete something from the whole), then one can directly experience the difference between stuff and observation.
Your contention that I am saying "observation" is "leying wholly outside the range of observable behavior exhibited by organisms," implies that observing itself can be seen by our sense organs. I cordially invite you to come to the Zendo sometime, watch the people quietly sitting in a row and tell me where, exactly, you are observing overservation itself. What's more, kindly show the class where observing itself is present on a qEeeg, a pet or catscan or any other instrument. Of course you cannot because instruments only disclose objective functioning, not empirical, experiential reality, the only one you actually live in.
You have backed yourself into the same trap as many have - in a die-hard effort to objectify consciousness, you are left with only objective functioning. you can conflate that with awareness above and beyond stimulus response, but you will never find it. Rather than accept the obvious limitation of measuring, you deny that simple fact and assign the catch-all woo tag to what you do not understand, you r uderstanding being limited to things, as yo have so thoroughly demonstrated.
Again, this is not even an advance level blunder but one of the very easy ones to get past with a few simple exercises. You are stuck with a stimulus response picture in your head. Next time you have an impulse to do something, some behavior, be it pick up a magazine or kiss your boyfriend, simply observe the impulse and DO NOTHING. No action. No response.
What does this tell you. Stick with it till you get it.
JL
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 23, 2015 - 09:33pm PT
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the difference seemed rather sharp and thorough to me. The points were ultimately rather simple and made the notion of a strong AI seem remarkably problematic.
I would be grateful if you could summarize the Penrose argument against strong AI.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Feb 23, 2015 - 10:06pm PT
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What is a science type,
and what is a God type?
isn't the censes here is that science types are in search of reasoned verifiable truth. Staunchly?
whereas God proclaims to be The Truth. Staunchly!
Science types can't go on with something that is unverifiable within their reason. and are halted.
Whereas God is exalted by turning a negative into a positive by justifiably/verifiably providing forgiveness.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Feb 23, 2015 - 11:12pm PT
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causing them to become dominated by a "trendy" branch of postmodernist deconstructionism (Wiki)
whatever they want to call it? it's just evolution with the young Bucks questioning the old Bucks' status quo.
same as Corny try'in to shoot Jesus in the foot.
yea it does sound familiar
this new language is tweetable though
the Duck is a good tweeter
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Feb 24, 2015 - 12:02am PT
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I would be grateful if you could summarize the Penrose argument against strong AI.
In essence: that there is something missing from any purely computational model of consciousness. That the function of mind takes us far beyond the limited construct of computation. That it is an error to perceive complexity within computer functions as a lead in to self awareness as such awareness may be entirely separate from such functions. That computation cannot evoke emotion. That science insists mind is to be understood solely in terms of computation and that there is something striking missing in that assessment.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 24, 2015 - 07:04am PT
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The big money question is... insofar as mind is discovered to be a system of computations what percentage of humans (what fraction of the species) will have the wherewithal to adapt to this knowledge not by intentionally ignoring it (by bailing) but by intentionally incorporating it into their iOS in order to advance.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 24, 2015 - 07:30am PT
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Thanks, Paul. That seems a good statement of Penrose's intuition. A far-ranging and penetrating mind like Roger Penrose will sometimes get a feeling about an unresolved question, a feeling that it knows the answer without knowing how it knows. Many other people also feel that human consciousness could not be simulated by any software or hardware we have made or imagined.
What separates Roger Penrose from many other people is his recognition that IF his intuition is correct he should try to demonstrate the truth of it to skeptics, AND his profound understanding of the arguments from mathematical logic and quantum weirdness that he chooses to try to demonstrate the deficiencies of computational artificial intelligence.
Roger Penrose's case against "strong AI" is not as easily summarized as his feelings about the issue are. His critics have made good points against his argument, especially as first put forth in The Emperor's New Mind. He is worth listening too but other people equally capable of following the math and physics have not been convinced. He is prone to and indeed dependent on speculative ideas as are other great minds which have ranged the frontiers of what we know.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Feb 24, 2015 - 07:31am PT
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Sociology studies the results of greed, anger and ignorance not the actual conditions. What is the appropriate method for studying G,A and I ?
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