asks the Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute
Moderators: kiore, Blip, The_Metatron
naffat wrote:I don't want to get bogged down in semantics here.
My central claim is that postbiological civilization has the opportunity to become greater than what will have preceded it on this planet, esp. given that ecological destruction appears to be in human nature somehow.
hackenslash wrote:My central claim is that postbiological civilization has the opportunity to become greater than what will have preceded it on this planet, esp. given that ecological destruction appears to be in human nature somehow.
And do you have anything to back up this claim, or is it something you extracted directly from your rectum?
Once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. ... At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler's Erewhon.
naffat wrote:Which part? If you mean the part about how "ecological destruction appears to be in human nature", I read a whole book about it, Too Smart for our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind. The author puts down the ecological destruction apparently endemic to the human species to sociobiological forces concerning resource acquisition and status seeking.
If you mean the part about "postbiological civilization has the opportunity to become greater [than humanity]", that remains to be seen,
but there are many reasons to expect that this is the case and many reasons to make it the case. Generally speaking, when something in nature is reverse engineered, it can then be improved greatly. As Alan Turing put it:Once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. ... At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler's Erewhon.
The fact that we see so much variation in human ability is evidence on its face that improvements can be made. How far those improvements can go is anyone's guess but I see no reason to believe that the upper reaches of human ability are the limit.
hackenslash wrote:naffat wrote:Which part? If you mean the part about how "ecological destruction appears to be in human nature", I read a whole book about it, Too Smart for our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind. The author puts down the ecological destruction apparently endemic to the human species to sociobiological forces concerning resource acquisition and status seeking.
A whole book, eh? Anything a bit mroe robust, like, oh, I don't know, research from the primary literature?
hackenslash wrote:If you mean the part about "postbiological civilization has the opportunity to become greater [than humanity]", that remains to be seen,
Ah, so just the ex recto then.
hackenslash wrote:Well, the problem is that this is all speculation, and there are those who present compelling reasons for thinking that it may never be possible to build thinking machines,
hackenslash wrote:not least because of various problems with algorithmic formulations of AI.
hackenslash wrote:Me, I don't know, but nor am I really interested in vacuous speculations based on nothing more than wishful thinking, If you have anything rigorous to present, I'm all ears.
It is instructive to reflect on the way in which earth-based biological evolution spent its time. Single cell entities arose out of the primordial soup roughly 3.5 billion years ago. A billion years passed before photosynthetic plants appeared. After almost another billion and a half years, around 550 million years ago, the first fish and vertebrates arrived, and then insects 450 million years ago. Then things started moving fast. Reptiles arrived 370 million years ago, followed by dinosaurs at 330 and mammals at 250 million years ago. The first primates appeared 120 million years ago and the immediate predecessors to the great apes a mere 18 million years ago. Man arrived in roughly his present form 2.5 million years ago. He invented agriculture a mere 19000 years ago, writing less than 5000 years ago and "expert" knowledge only over the last few hundred years.
This suggests that problem solving behavior, language, expert knowledge and application, and reason, are all rather simple once the essence of being and reacting are available. That essence is the ability to move around in a dynamic environment, sensing the surroundings to a degree sufficient to achieve the necessary maintenance of life and reproduction. This part of intelligence is where evolution has concentrated its time—it is much harder. This is the physically grounded part of animal systems.
naffat wrote:... esp. given that ecological destruction appears to be in human nature somehow.
naffat wrote:If you want I can give you the bibliography from this title. It is extensively researched.
That said, I expect more disingenuous goalpost shifting.
Only if every prediction about the future is "out of the ass".
It's your turn to start providing sources.
I personally think that no "compelling" case can be made that thinking machines will never exist unless you are a substance dualist—in other words, if you believe in some kind of "soul". Now I don't know about you, but I am not a dualist.
If artificial general intelligence cannot be built in the traditional disembodied von Neumann computing framework, so be it. Then use a different architecture!
I'd like to find out what you know about this subject. I'm guessing "not much".
n.b. I am as against logicism in AI and internalism in philosophy of mind as anyone, so any criticisms that focus on those aspects do not need to appear here.
Let's get away from speculation for a moment, since you seem to be completely unwilling to entertain at all, at least about this particular subject.
What about things that have been achieved in artificial intelligence beyond a shadow of a doubt? To me, the achievements in sensorimotor coordination are most impressive. Why? As Rodney Brooks pointed out in his classic paper Why Elephants Don't Play Chess:snip
Behaviors like chess-playing and proving theorems—where traditional AI efforts have been most successful—are more likely than not the icing on the cake.
The fundamental problem as regards the continuing existence of the human species is that, while we are ‘smarter’ than other species in our ability to develop technology, we, like them, follow the reaction, pioneering and overshoot principles when it comes to dealing with situations of sudden, continuous or great surplus. In keeping with this, and also like other animals, we are not karyotypically built so as to care about coming generations, other than those with which we have direct contact. As Georgescu-Roegen says, the (rat) race of economic development that is the hallmark of modern civilisation leaves no doubt about humans’ lack of foresight. Even if made aware of the entropic problem of the human species, humankind would not be willing to give up its present luxuries in order to ease the life of future generations.[1518] When problems arise we turn to the nearest solution to hand, and do not take into account the long-term consequences of our actions. In this regard we act irrationally. We humans, in whatever situation, will gladly use irreplaceable resources to produce a technological fix if it fills an immediate need. The longest we are prepared to put off gratification is perhaps a year, where in certain societies, though people may be dying of starvation, seeds are saved for the next year’s planting.
From the point of view of evolution, to react spontaneously to one’s immediate environment has been the best policy for all species up to now. But now, in our case, in acting spontaneously we are not only worsening the situation for our own species, but for all other complex species as well.
hackenslash wrote:My problem is simply that it's easy to read a book and believe what it says. I've fallen into that trap myself on occasion, and these days I'm a good deal more cautious about taking anybody's word for anything, unless they can actually support it.
hackenslash wrote:That said, I expect more disingenuous goalpost shifting.
And why would you expect that? Can you point to an instance?
hackenslash wrote:Not ever prediction, no, but since this prediction is based on a turn of events that you merely assert will be the case
hackenslash wrote:it's little better than the kind of made-up shit we experience all the time from supernaturalists.
hackenslash wrote:And yes, I know his conclusions are challenged, but there are arguments I haven't seen addressed as yet, mostly around the nature of intuition.
hackenslash wrote:I'm not any kind of 'ist', and in fact I have no horse in this race, I'm merely challenging your absolutist statements, mostly because they ARE absolutist.
hackenslash wrote:Agreed, but what architecture, and is there one that will do the job?
The most well known hallucinogenic substances, the indolamines such as LSD and psilocybin, produce hallucinations and other effects by interfering with the brain’s serotonin (or 5-HT) system. This is also true of the tryptamine derivatives such as N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and the phenylethylamines such as mescaline. The main site of action of these drugs are believed to be presynaptic 5-HT2A receptors located on excitatory inputs to large neurons in a deep layer (layer V) of the cerebral cortex where they abnormally prolong excitation (Aghajanian & Marek 1999).
This brief review traces the serotonin (5-HT) hypothesis of the action of hallucinogenic drugs from the early 1950s to the present day. There is now converging evidence from biochemical, electrophysiological, and behavioral studies that the two major classes of psychedelic hallucinogens, the indoleamines (e.g., LSD) and the phenethylamines (e.g., mescaline), have a common site of action as partial agonists at 5-HT2A and other 5-HT2 receptors in the central nervous system. The noradrenergic locus coeruleus and the cerebral cortex are among the regions where hallucinogens have prominent effects through their actions upon a 5-HT2A receptors. Recently, we have observed a novel effect of hallucinogens—a 5-HT2A receptor-mediated enhancement of nonsynchronous, late components of glutamatergic excitatory postsynaptic potentials at apical dendrites of layer V cortical pyramidal cells. We propose that an effect of hallucinogens upon glutamatergic transmission in the cerebral cortex may be responsible for the higher-level cognitive, perceptual, and affective distortions produced by these drugs.
Similarly, people who have mental illness in their family have a higher chance of being creative.
Associate Professor Fredrik Ullen believes his findings could help explain why.
He looked at the brain's dopamine (D2) receptor genes which experts believe govern divergent thought.
He found highly creative people who did well on tests of divergent thought had a lower than expected density of D2 receptors in the thalamus - as do people with schizophrenia.
The thalamus serves as a relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.
"Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus," said Professor Ullen.
He believes it is this barrage of uncensored information that ignites the creative spark.
This would explain how highly creative people manage to see unusual connections in problem-solving situations that other people miss.
hackenslash wrote:Guess what you like.
hackenslash wrote:Glad to hear it. I'm only against absolutist statements in any arena unless they can be supported, and even when they can be supported I'm suspicious.
hackenslash wrote:I'm willing to entertain whatever you can support.
hackenslash wrote:Impressive indeed, but not the whole shooting match by any stretch
hackenslash wrote:Well, I'm less impressed than you at a computer that can play chess.
hackenslash wrote:From an algorithmic perspective, not hugely difficult. Recognise a pattern and follow simple rules.
hackenslash wrote:We used to have a member on the old forum that was a cognitive scientist heavily into the development of AI, and I have a few friends who worked on the UK government AI project for a time.
hackenslash wrote:and I do know that some pretty monumental problems have to be solved
hackenslash wrote:I'll also challenge any statements that deal with speculations about our nature given that our awareness of our impact on ecology is relatively new, and not everybody is fully aware or accepting of it as yet.
I believe that, from a socio-psychological point of view, there are three major factors that account for the failure on the part of the vast majority of educated people to admit what is happening, and none of them is that they are unaware of it. The first, and perhaps most important, is that it does not accord with the way they see the world (which is largely determined by short-term contingencies, in particular capitalists’ desire to make as large a profit as possible); the second is that the facts themselves are unsavoury; and the third is that the effort that would be required to change them is gargantuan. Thus, though most educated people are aware that something is terribly amiss in the human situation, and that it bodes ill for our children, the negative view of the human condition as is implied by environmental research of the past 50 years or so is both psychologically and practically repressed.
hackenslash wrote:Really, I'm only asking you to own your statements, nothing more.
naffat wrote:Then primary literature has the same problem.
You just did it, see above.
Advances in things like neuromorphic computing and embodiment have nothing to do with it, I guess.
Not even remotely similar.
Penrose is a brilliant mathematician, but those claims are almost universally recognized as quackery.
To start with, there is the claim that microtubules are somehow fundamental to consciousness. This revolves around quantum mechanical claims. I am not greatly familiar with QM but to my knowledge:
- The timescales of neural activity make quantum effects irrelevant.
- Quantum computers do not transcend the limits of the "ordinary" Turing machine.
- Cockroaches have these same microtubles. So?
- Creativity in computation can be achieved without recourse to Chopraesque quantum woo-woo; it's done all the time with metaheuristics like genetic algorithms and PSO on the run-of-the-mill desktop and laptop computers we have today, by use of random number generators. Creativity as a fundamental architectural principle is being explored by others. ("It sounds cockamamy, but it is true. Scientists have found that the brain’s 100 billion neurons are surprisingly unreliable. Their synapses fail to fire 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet somehow the brain works. Some scientists even see neural noise as the key to human creativity.")
Then there's the questionable use of Gödel's theorems, which is another issue.
Anyway I'm not impressed by Penrose's claims about AI, and neither is just about anyone else informed about the subject.
Yeah? Go on. Enlighten me with his impressive case that humans are capable of hypercomputation.
It seems more like veiled angst that we will eventually go the way of the dinosaur.
Remember what I said about creativity and noise? There is no need for quasi-mystical statements about quantum blahhaha like Roger Penrose made, and the link between creativity and noise was being investigated well before he started barking up that wrong tree. For instance, in the 1950s or so it became known that substances like LSD are known to enhance creativity:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7fOuPTZtWI[/youtube]
The major action of a substance like LSD is through agonism of the serotonin receptor 5-HT2A. From the Blackwell Companion to Consciousness:The most well known hallucinogenic substances, the indolamines such as LSD and psilocybin, produce hallucinations and other effects by interfering with the brain’s serotonin (or 5-HT) system. This is also true of the tryptamine derivatives such as N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and the phenylethylamines such as mescaline. The main site of action of these drugs are believed to be presynaptic 5-HT2A receptors located on excitatory inputs to large neurons in a deep layer (layer V) of the cerebral cortex where they abnormally prolong excitation (Aghajanian & Marek 1999).
Here is the paper in question: http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v21/n ... 5318a.html
And here is its abstract:This brief review traces the serotonin (5-HT) hypothesis of the action of hallucinogenic drugs from the early 1950s to the present day. There is now converging evidence from biochemical, electrophysiological, and behavioral studies that the two major classes of psychedelic hallucinogens, the indoleamines (e.g., LSD) and the phenethylamines (e.g., mescaline), have a common site of action as partial agonists at 5-HT2A and other 5-HT2 receptors in the central nervous system. The noradrenergic locus coeruleus and the cerebral cortex are among the regions where hallucinogens have prominent effects through their actions upon a 5-HT2A receptors. Recently, we have observed a novel effect of hallucinogens—a 5-HT2A receptor-mediated enhancement of nonsynchronous, late components of glutamatergic excitatory postsynaptic potentials at apical dendrites of layer V cortical pyramidal cells. We propose that an effect of hallucinogens upon glutamatergic transmission in the cerebral cortex may be responsible for the higher-level cognitive, perceptual, and affective distortions produced by these drugs.
The effect then appears to be one of pushing thoughts and perceptions that are normally filtered out of consciousness over the top by increasing their gain in the nervous system—an enhancement of noise.
Psychopathology has also been implicated in creativity. Perhaps the earliest example of such an observation is Seneca the Younger's remark: "There is no great genius without some touch of madness." Hans Eysenck did a lot of work tying creativity to the trait he called "psychoticism" and neuroimaging has since borne out his psychometric research.Similarly, people who have mental illness in their family have a higher chance of being creative.
Associate Professor Fredrik Ullen believes his findings could help explain why.
He looked at the brain's dopamine (D2) receptor genes which experts believe govern divergent thought.
He found highly creative people who did well on tests of divergent thought had a lower than expected density of D2 receptors in the thalamus - as do people with schizophrenia.
The thalamus serves as a relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.
"Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus," said Professor Ullen.
He believes it is this barrage of uncensored information that ignites the creative spark.
This would explain how highly creative people manage to see unusual connections in problem-solving situations that other people miss.
Here again we are talking about diminished filtering of noise in cognition. How does this correspond to artificial intelligence and the like? In metaheuristic optimization there is a trade-off between "exploration" and "exploitation". Exploration is going in search of new solutions; exploitation is refining what is known. In all these optimization methods there is at least one way to increase the noise if greater exploration is desired. Notably, in particle swarm optimization, which is a model of a society, exploration can be enhanced by increasing the importance attached to the individual best solution rather than the best solution of one's neighbors. This results in more aloof, more idiosyncratic behavior of the "people" in the society, just as is seen in major psychotic illnesses.
So, in conclusion, Penrose's appeal to quantum mechanics appears to be completely superfluous. The reality of creativity is, in a sense, mundane, but it is also amazing in the sense that the principle is altogether simple. If we want creative behavior in machines, then we must not expect perfect execution of instructions as is the case in von Neumann architectures. Creativity can be achieved in these traditional architectures with RNGs, but it is to be fully exploited in unconventional neuromorphic architectures whose most fundamental components operate imperfectly. (A knock-on advantage of this change is that, without the need to separate logic levels by magnitudes on the order of volts, as opposed to millivolts, size and power consumption will be reduced, allowing embodiment, and thus a full realization of the artificial general intelligence concept.)
One can thus imagine tuning the noise to an optimum level. If the machine intelligence is narrow-minded, use noise. And if that don't work, use more noise!
I suspect that we will live in truly exciting times!
I don't need to guess. You're revealing your level of knowledge through your behavior here.
I don't know what this talk of "absolutism" is about. The only way you can make a case is if biological evolution has a privileged place in creating consciousness.
Mainstream cognitive science implicitly and even overtly accepts that artificially intelligent beings can exist.
The strongest current in philosophy of mind in cognitive science is functionalism (a philosophy I do not espouse because of my externalist leanings btw—none of which preclude machine intelligence however), and that is explicitly on board with / derived from a lot of thinking in artificial intelligence.
Somehow I suspect that nothing will count as support.
Sure but fortunately we have a huge military-industrial complex that seems hell-bent on achieving general machine intelligence.
Yeah kind of. (Grandmaster level performance wasn't quite that easy though.)
It really shows that their knowledge has rubbed off on you.
And they had better be solved. Otherwise this planet is toast.
More likely, also from Too Smart for Our Own Good:I believe that, from a socio-psychological point of view, there are three major factors that account for the failure on the part of the vast majority of educated people to admit what is happening, and none of them is that they are unaware of it. The first, and perhaps most important, is that it does not accord with the way they see the world (which is largely determined by short-term contingencies, in particular capitalists’ desire to make as large a profit as possible); the second is that the facts themselves are unsavoury; and the third is that the effort that would be required to change them is gargantuan. Thus, though most educated people are aware that something is terribly amiss in the human situation, and that it bodes ill for our children, the negative view of the human condition as is implied by environmental research of the past 50 years or so is both psychologically and practically repressed.
^ that and evolutionary propensities towards short-term thinking which have already been mentioned and I doubt the human species has much of a future on this planet. That is not of course to say that sentience doesn't.
For all your complaining about ex recto etc. it should be obvious to anyone reading this thread that one of us can develop their ideas rather elaborately and the other has "Uh ... Penrose! ... Intuition!" Can you guess who is who?
hackenslash wrote:You just did it, see above.
Point it out or fucking retract. Merely re-asserting is the height of fuckwittery.
hackenslash wrote:They have plenty to do with it, but you're still extrapolating from your arse.
hackenslash wrote:Penrose is a brilliant mathematician, but those claims are almost universally recognized as quackery.
Utter fucking shit. They have been challenged, but hardly 'universally recognised as quackery'.
hackenslash wrote:I agree with all of that, but that doesn't address the fundamental problem of precisely what consciousness is
hackenslash wrote:Indeed, but that doesn't alter the fact that there are still major problems to be overcome. Simply insisting that there is a solution is the kind of fervour we see from the religious all the time, and I'm less impressed by that than your are about Penrose's claims.
hackenslash wrote:Yeah? Go on. Enlighten me with his impressive case that humans are capable of hypercomputation.
Where did I assert that?
hackenslash wrote:And how does that address the question of architecture?
hackenslash wrote:What behaviour would that be? Perhaps you didn't see the sign over the door. This is the place where claims are challenged, especially absolutist claims with regard to unkowns, and you have those in spades, it seems.
hackenslash wrote:Not at all. I need only point out that only organic entities are conscious.
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."
"So ... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat."
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we marked the entire sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone ..."
hackenslash wrote:Oh look, the Stanford Dictionary of navel-gazing. Quelle surprise.
hackenslash wrote:And this makes a difference because..?
hackenslash wrote:Personalisation won't aid you in your quest to present evidence.
hackenslash wrote:Actually, I suspect that much of the lethargy in this regard stems directly from people's clinging to their imaginary friends, and the idea that they are favoured and will be saved.
naffat wrote:Claiming first that I just made shit up. Then backing away from that when I said I had an entire book making that case and demanding "primary literature", which I can also provide, since there are hundreds of references in that title.
hackenslash wrote:naffat wrote:Claiming first that I just made shit up. Then backing away from that when I said I had an entire book making that case and demanding "primary literature", which I can also provide, since there are hundreds of references in that title.
Ah, I see, so it's reading comprehension you have trouble with, is it?
hackenslash wrote:As for the book, I'm far less interested in that (although I do intend to read it, as it looks interesting) than I am in the primary literature.
hackenslash wrote:
That is how we do things here . The general operating principle in play is that ideas are disposable and that bad
ideas only exists to be disposed of . Only by challenging ideas can we actually ascertain which are the bad ones
naffat wrote:No, I can read just fine. However I am dealing with someone who decided to be a douche out of the gate and, for all his arrogance, displays little comprehension of the subject in question. (Beyond "Um ... Penrose!")
surreptitious57 wrote:Surely it is not bad ideas but falsifiable ones which are disposable
As notions of good or bad here are subjective emotional terms and do not apply to scientific hypotheses as such
That would only be for philosophical ideas which are non falsifiable and so cannot be proven or disproven
And given your famous disregard for that discipline
now one does not think you were referring to it any way
I know this is invoking semantics
and argumentum ad lexicon
but it is important to be as precise as one can in use of language as you yourself have previously acknowledged
hackenslash wrote:I comprehend that you erected an assertion that neither you nor all the world's fucking experts in cognitive science have a fucking prayer of supporting robustly.
hackenslash wrote:There are few words whose meaning is entirely unambiguous (omnipotence and omniscience are two of them).
hackenslash wrote:
the first ideas to be disposed of are unfalsifiable ones because they are untestable and have no value
Good and bad in this context have nothing to do with emotion and everything to do with accord with reality
It is not the case that philosophical ideas are unfalsifiable
I have a great deal of respect for philosophy but none for navel gazing
naffat wrote:hackenslash wrote:I comprehend that you erected an assertion that neither you nor all the world's fucking experts in cognitive science have a fucking prayer of supporting robustly.
Mainstream cognitive science generally presupposes that such a thing is possible. Though I am personally not quite as gung-ho about substrate independence as other cognitive scientists are, it is a staple of their research program.
To conclude that you are more or less as sentient as I am—despite my doubts—is to acknowledge that it's not the particular atoms in the body that count, it's their relations to each other and the rest of the world that counts. This of course raises a further question: why is carbon magic?
Until you can answer that, I will note that your counterargument is still nothing but a namedrop of Roger Penrose, whose quantum woowoo is in no way, shape or form specious or, as you like to say, "ex recto".
Hit the books—you now have your 18 pages of "primary literature" references for starters—and spare me your verbal diarrhea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
These are some of the hits from the Corpus of Contemporary American English for "omniscient":
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