Re: Strong AI Thesis (No Chinese room, I promise)

I wrote:
What is one to say about a math result like
Pi (the ratio of circumference of a circle to diameter) is
a non-repeating, non-terminating decimal.
It seems wrong to say that this statement is "physical". But also wrong
to say that it "doesn't exist".

curt@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote on 18 Mar 2006 10:2:
Yes, it seems wrong to you because you don't correctly understand the
universe you live in.

You are incorrect about that.

You are making the same type of argument someone from the day when everyone
knew the earth was the center of the solar system would make. You are in
effect saying:
But nobody talks like that. Sure, you could say the sun is the center,
but you would just confuse everyone because we know in fact the earth is
at the center and everything revolves around us. If we lived on the Sun
it might make sense to see the Sun as the center, but since we don't
there just no point to it.

No, your analogy is false.

There's a difference between the definition of words, and assertions made
using those words. In order to communicate, we need to agree on what words
mean. It doesn't really matter what we decide; whatever different words mean,
we can then debate claims/statements using the words.

My objection was that you are using the word "existence" differently from most
people. This isn't a claim about the world. It can't possibly be "right" or
"wrong", like the sun-centered theory. It's merely that you're causing
unnecessary confusion by using your own private definitions of words. Hence
your claims get objected to through misunderstanding, not because of
disagreements about the substance.

People bitched amd moaned when Copernicus took their plant away from them.
They bitched and moaned when Darwin took the God of creation away from
them, and now as I'm trying to demystify the mind, here your are, playing
the part of the fool, saying, why switch, I like it the way I currently
think about it.

1. You've called me a "fool" many times in your posting. Naturally that's
annoying and insulting to me (not to mention wrong). In the future, try
to elevate your level of debate and respond just with ideas, avoiding the
unnecessary ad hominem attack.

2. Your ranting about something that not only didn't I bring up, but isn't
even a source of disagreement between us. I've stated many times that I
agree completely with you that there is no mind/body duality, and the
so-called "mind" is simply the outcome of the 100% physical brain. So in
future, when replying to me, please cut out the 50% of your posting which
continues to rant that minds are completely physical. I know that.

Sure we know the mind is a physical effect, but what's the harm in sticking
with the old ways of saying math isn't physical?

It's not "what's the harm". It's that your claim that math is physical is
false. Physical things have a physical location, they can be isolated in
time and space, they can be sensed, etc. The value of Pi, and it's various
properties (such as being a transcendental number) don't share any of this
characteristics. I can't point to a place in the space/time universe where
the "Pi is transcendental" exists. I can't put it in a box.

If you're making the absurd claim that the statement "Pi is transcendental"
is physical, then the burden is on you to prove it.

And try to do it without resorting to mind/body discussions. That has
nothing to do with our current disagreement.

Try this example instead: what about a computer algorithm ...

No point on trying to fix my thinking with examples like that. I've been
thinking about this for about 5 years now and believe me, nothing you are
going to come up with in the next 50 messages is going to change my
position on this.

"Thinking for 5 years" doesn't guarantee that you have come across the right
answer. Nor even that you know more than me.

I've asked you specific questions, and all I request is that you answer the
specific questions, without all your multitude of asides and red herrings.

If you like I can take all your examples and explain to you what in them
exists, and what doesn't exist if it would help you.

Of course. That's why I asked in the first place!

But, none of that answers your real question, of how is the quicksort
algorithm physical.
The quicksort algorithm, when it's not just a physical hardware
implementation (which people call software), is hardware in your brain,
which is able to understand, and explain, and implement, and even manually
emulate, the algorithm.

You have missed the key point. An instance of the quicksort algorithm may
indeed exist inside some particular brain(s) at some particular point in time.
But when I prove a property about "the quicksort algorithm", such as its
worst-case running time, the object I'm discussing is NOT a particular set of
neurons in a particular brain.

Instead, it is all instances of the algorithm, in anyone's brain, or computer,
past, present, or future. That's the set of objects that I'm constraining.
That set is an abstract idea. Not something physical.

The concept didn't exist in this universe until the brain of Hoare was
correctly physically reconfigured to represent the algorithm. And once it
was correctly physically reconfigured, quick sort was created. It existed
in this universe because it was physical at that point. Before that point,
it didn't exist in anyone's mind.

Pi was transcendental before anyone had proved it, and it will remain
transcendental even if all humans cease to exist.

Your insistence that "everything" is physical is not only silly, it is
counter-productive and misleading. It would lead people to expect false
things, such as that Pi might cease to be transcendental if only all people
thinking about it were killed (and perhaps all circles in the universe also
eliminated).

That is wrong. The property of Pi is a piece of abstract, non-physical math,
and it isn't dependent upon any specific physical instantiation in order to
remain true.

Now, back to more of why it's so important to get these things fixed
instead of going on using the old language in a day where we have long
since known enough to know that the language is wrong.
To start with, it makes almost everyone fail to correctly understand what a
mind is.

I've skipped most of the long irrelevant drivel that you posted at the end,
because you would already know (if you bothered to read what I've written)
that we don't disagree about this, and I know that the mind is a purely
physical phenomenon.

When the Behaviorists from the 50's figured out how simple the mind was -
discovering it was just a reinforcement learning machine - few people
believed them.

Whether true or not, this is at best misleading. Especially the "just" word.

It would be similar to you looking at a modern PC, and saying "it's all just
0's and 1's, and a CPU." Yes it is, but if you stick with that level of
description you miss all the complexity of CPU branch prediction, and
Linux vs. Windows OS, and quicksort algorithms in Excel, and the design of
GUIs, and the desktop metaphor.

Yes, the mind is all physical. But it is far from a simple undifferentiated
mass. There is clearly enormous algorithmic complexity inside.

Everything is physical. What this means, is that the entire belief that
the subjective is untouchable by the objective tools of science is wrong.
Everything is objective. That includes, emotions, and beliefs, and faith.
It's all objective and all subject to the study, verification, and
validation, by science.

I know all this, so as you continue to rant you clearly aren't addressing me.

Please separate your thoughts. When you reply to me, please try to focus on
what I've said. Reserve your rants for your own separate postings.

And step one to yanking the mind away from man, is to get the AI PhDs, to
understand that no matter how we might talk about things with our outdated
12th century language, everything that exists is physical, and if it's not
physical, it doesn't exist.

That's wrong.

The mind is in fact, not what the brain does, but it is the brain.

The mind is "what the brain does" in the same sense that my PC computer is
"doing" Microsoft Word. They are simply different levels of abstraction,
talking about the same purely-physical thing.

But trying to describe minds using only physical neurons is as silly as
trying to debate Apple's Aqua desktop vs MS's Windows XP desktop, but limiting
your vocabulary to only transistors. It isn't exactly wrong, but it's very
misleading and so unhelpful that you'll never make progress on the interesting
issues if you restrict yourself so much.

-- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don@xxxxxxxxxx
What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse,
what if only that fat guy in the third row exists? -- Woody Allen
.

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