SpeedOfSound wrote:

pl0bs wrote:Here are some interesting factoids:

- i know you guys really want to rub it in that im wrong/deluded/etc. (knock yourself out btw)
- you guys dont actually offer any counterarguments to my cold hard logic

These facts combined indicate there is a high probability that you guys dont have any counterarguments! In other words, you actually realise im right! Logic triumphs again.

Cold hard logic.

A. One lipid
B. 100,000 of them arranged in a lipid bilayer is a cell and can maintain an internal aqueous and homogeneous state different from the outside of it.
C. 100,000 of them with no bilayer, spherical arrangement. Say they are poured into water as a glut of molecules and have not yet arranged themselves.

B and C are the same quantity yet they are very different.

If the arrangement of particles is different, it means the quantity of spacetime and the forces between them is different too.

GrahamH wrote:

pl0bs wrote:- you guys dont actually offer any counterarguments to my cold hard logic.

You wouldn't know "cold hard logic" if walked up and smacked round the head ( which occurs regularly in these topics).
You haven't made any non-fallacious arguments as I recall. Your favourite is fallacy of division, that what is true of a whole must be true of it's parts. This is your failure of "simple C", which is obvious drivel.

"That is a fallacy" and "that is incoherent" are entirely adequate "counterarguments" so nonsense such as yours.

Rumracket[url="http://www.rationalskepticism.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=48835&p=2282273#p2282273"]invited to you[/url]try some "cold hard logic" but you seem too scared to even try.

Been there done that: Rumraket @ A machine can never ever surpass human intelligence

SpeedOfSound wrote:But damn. Now David is going to use up my last posts with his aspergian quibble over what the wiki says.

I was about to point it out too, but i thought you might explode.

pl0bs wrote:

pl0bs wrote:

Rumraket wrote:So are you going to construct a syllogism or what?

I probably did that many times already. Its pearls for the swine here.

Here is the proof that essentially makes 90% of the posts on this forum obsolete:

- Warning: do not click if you want your worldview to remain intact -
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/philo ... 29712.html

That didn't work out well for you then. Just a pile of assumptions and fallacies.

SpeedOfSound wrote:But damn. Now David is going to use up my last posts with his aspergian quibble over what the wiki says.

Rational, not!
I'd bet on Wiki against either you or pl0bs any day.

Sadegh wrote:I really have no idea what pl0bs is trying to argue exactly.

He let it drop a little over in the 'I think I am" thread. It's as weird as I suspected. I'll see if I can dig it up. A kind of consciousness-first force, wrought the universe and makes life out of itself. Another god thingy.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

Sadegh wrote:I think it was worth pointing out. But not worth getting hung up on.

Well. You see I knew that there was this bitty wittle definition issue but if I brought that up to pl0bs you can imagine how deep the shit would have piled right?

Then there is this issue about the first primordial cells and the fucking fact that they had no protein channels anyway. So no, it was not worthy or appropriate to bring this up.

Now on other issues. There is this bit about quantitative differences and complexity and structure that philosophy loves to kind of sort of forget about. There are some metaphysical gems here to consider. If we have a few NaCl molecules and we put them together they tend to form a cubic crystalline structure. The structure emerges. That emergence is due the field shape of the molecule, which is not the field shape of the ions when alone and separated by some space.

Consider identity of two individual NaCl's. They are same except for where they are. They have no identity buried within them other then that they are or 'beingness'. I am not so certain we can count on this beingness as it's not an actual property on it's own.

However if we lose the idea of particleness, which we probably should, we then have fields. Two NaCl's now are one field of a particular shape. A whole crystal is one big particular field of some greater shape. With this comes the likelihood that any two NaCl crystals are NOT identical. So in objects, macro's, we have recovered identity and you can see how this identity extends through all things that exist. I am always amazed that there are all of these differences across all things.

How did it get so jumbled up and still not so jumbled as for there to be classes of things or sameness still? It's like a tension between random soup and one big solid sameness.

I recommend a lie down. You're obviously over-heating!

GrahamH wrote:

pl0bs wrote:

pl0bs wrote:

Rumraket wrote:So are you going to construct a syllogism or what?

I probably did that many times already. Its pearls for the swine here.

Here is the proof that essentially makes 90% of the posts on this forum obsolete:

- Warning: do not click if you want your worldview to remain intact -
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/philo ... 29712.html

That didn't work out well for you then. Just a pile of assumptions and fallacies.

Oh it worked well. Just look at the number of pages, 232. It blew ppls minds and remains remains logically true even 5 years later.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

Sadegh wrote:I really have no idea what pl0bs is trying to argue exactly.

He let it drop a little over in the 'I think I am" thread. It's as weird as I suspected. I'll see if I can dig it up. A kind of consciousness-first force, wrought the universe and makes life out of itself. Another god thingy.

Feel free to dig it up. Its cold hard logic.

pl0bs wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

pl0bs wrote:

pl0bs wrote:I probably did that many times already. Its pearls for the swine here.

Here is the proof that essentially makes 90% of the posts on this forum obsolete:

- Warning: do not click if you want your worldview to remain intact -
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/philo ... 29712.html

That didn't work out well for you then. Just a pile of assumptions and fallacies.

Oh it worked well. Just look at the number of pages, 232.

The large number of pages is not a measure of a good argument. It is a measure of a failure to make a clear case.
It is 232 pages of pl0bs fail. Basically, you are boasting that everyone disagrees with you.

A really good argument well made would only need one page. Granted there aren't many of those round here.

pl0bs wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

Sadegh wrote:I really have no idea what pl0bs is trying to argue exactly.

He let it drop a little over in the 'I think I am" thread. It's as weird as I suspected. I'll see if I can dig it up. A kind of consciousness-first force, wrought the universe and makes life out of itself. Another god thingy.

Feel free to dig it up. Its cold hard logic.

GrahamH wrote:The large number of pages is not a measure of a good argument. It is a measure of a failure to make a clear case.
It is 232 pages of pl0bs fail. Basically, you are boasting that everyone disagrees with you.

A really good argument well made would only need one page. Granted there aren't many of those round here.

All true if your goal is clear philosophy or persuasive argument.

On the other hand if what you want is attention and/or to provoke reactions then the large number of pages would indicate a good score on the troll-O-meter.

Thommo wrote:

GrahamH wrote:The large number of pages is not a measure of a good argument. It is a measure of a failure to make a clear case.
It is 232 pages of pl0bs fail. Basically, you are boasting that everyone disagrees with you.

A really good argument well made would only need one page. Granted there aren't many of those round here.

All true if your goal is clear philosophy or persuasive argument.

On the other hand if what you want is attention and/or to provoke reactions then the large number of pages would indicate a good score on the troll-O-meter.

Yep.

GrahamH wrote:

pl0bs wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

pl0bs wrote:Here is the proof that essentially makes 90% of the posts on this forum obsolete:

- Warning: do not click if you want your worldview to remain intact -
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/philo ... 29712.html

That didn't work out well for you then. Just a pile of assumptions and fallacies.

Oh it worked well. Just look at the number of pages, 232.

The large number of pages is not a measure of a good argument. It is a measure of a failure to make a clear case.
It is 232 pages of pl0bs fail. Basically, you are boasting that everyone disagrees with you.

A really good argument well made would only need one page. Granted there aren't many of those round here.

I didnt need 1 page. I needed 1 post. The rest is the drama of shattered worldviews and shifted paradigms.

You forgot to pop a smiley on that one.

[I'm getting in this rather late, I've read quite a few pages of posts, but no where near all, did some searching, so please forgive if I'm repeating stuff, I know a lot of this isn't in there. And it's up in the TLDR zone, but I felt a real urge to get this out there.]

Turing didn't really think all that much of his Imitation Game. In the 1950 paper he says “The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.” Chomsky illustrates why by saying ask an English speaker if airplanes fly, and they'll look at you funny and say of course, then ask them if submarines swim, and you're likely to get a blank, confused look. It's the exact same situation, but English hasn't gone that route, other languages have. As someone else said, does it matter if they can think and are conscious if they turn all of us meat sacks into paperclips?

There is a paper on aeos by David Deutsch, The very laws of physics imply that artificial intelligence must be possible. What’s holding us up?, not someone to write off cavalierly, where he wrote:

Despite this long record of failure, AGI must be possible. And that is because of a deep property of the laws of physics, namely the universality of computation. This entails that everything that the laws of physics require a physical object to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time and memory. The first people to guess this and to grapple with its ramifications were the 19th-century mathematician Charles Babbage and his assistant Ada, Countess of Lovelace. It remained a guess until the 1980s, when I proved it using the quantum theory of computation.

There's a good podcast, a Scientia Salon video chat between Dan Kaufman and Massimo Pigliucci on Strong Artificial Intelligence, where they are dismissive of an algorithmic AI, saying something is missing, can't be any kind of shuffling of symbols, which is what a Turing machine is only capable of. I don't know how to reconcile between what Deutsch says and those saying the opposite, this was largely discussed using Searle with his Chinese Room thought experiment. To me, it's a flawed experiment. The whole system understands, that's the 'system' argument, Searles defended this objection in his original paper, Minds, Brains, and Computing, and that defense I don't think works at all, it's more assertion without enough reasoning. I argued this in the comments for that blog with:

He posits the case that he could ‘internalize’ the rules and carry out conversations passing back and forth only squiggles and he still wouldn’t understand Chinese. I can only say WTF? A set of rules allowing for arbitrary conversations? Allowing him to answer ‘how do you feel’, ‘what color is my dress’, ‘how much did you enjoy third grade’, ‘what did you think of Dan and Massimo’s treatment of the Chinese Room thought experiment’, or ‘between Yale, Harvard and MIT, which school would I do better at if I opened a coffee shop called Gedanken Donuts’. That is one hell of a set of rules. If he doesn’t understand Chinese, then he is doing something far far more difficult.

I got this response from Dan:

You seem to be doing what several others have done, namely identify precisely what is crazy about Strong AI and then blame it on Searle.
It is the Strong AI proponent who claims that in understanding Chinese, we are doing what a computer does.
Computers *do* follow instructions, whose substance consists entirely of manipulating symbols based on nothing but their syntactic properties (shapes).
It is *this* that Searle is demonstrating cannot be correct, by way of his thought experiment.

I can't understand this response, the comments were closed before I could reply, and now Scientia is no more, so maybe someone here can tell me why his reply isn't bad, really bad. I'm arguing, and giving reasons why, that Searle's setup does lead to a system that understands, and I get back that I'm looking at it wrong, and because! Searle's demonstrated he's right. Isn't that kinda like 'the bible is true because it's god's word and I know it's gods word because it says it is”?

These arguments often are irrelevant, no one can define intelligence well, or consciousness, can't decide if they're talking about machines that think like humans, or think as well as, or whether consciousness is required, etc etc. They also get bogged down on the substrate issue, which really seems irrelevant to me. Dennett says neurons aren't conscious, minds are. Can you have an emergent system, built of algorithmic modules, that can then do better than mere algorithms? And there is never enough attention paid to what would 'motivate' a machine, what would they 'want' to do, why 'want' something at all? Humans become almost like the lobotomized if their emotional systems are damaged or otherwise inoperative, they can't really do anything, you have to want to do something before you act, you have to like one option of what to do next over all others before you can act. There is no reason machines can't be made able to out think us by vast margins in virtually every way, the question of whether it's intelligent is up to the vagaries of language.

@crank post #1176 above. Thank you for the links, I agree with your objections to the Scientia Salon discussion, I also thought Dan Kaufman and Massimo Pigliucci were being altogether too dismissive of the possibilities of non-biological intelligent systems. I gathered they also felt they were going against the mainstream. Like you, I think the speed and complexity arguments against the Chinese room thought experiment are the best ones. As the Wikipedia discussion points out, those arguments are only about our intuitions, but then I agree with Dennett that that is also true of the Chinese room thought experiment itself. As the Wikipedia article says:

The speed at which human brains process information is (by some estimates) 100 billion operations per second.[93] Several critics point out that the man in the room would probably take millions of years to respond to a simple question, and would require "filing cabinets" of astronomical proportions. This brings the clarity of Searle's intuition into doubt.

This is perhaps the opposite problem from the counter-intuitiveness of evolution: we find it difficult to get an imaginative grasp of how slowly evolution works, how long a million years is; and we find it equally difficult to grasp the massive speed and complexity of what is going on in our brains, it all feels so (comparatively) simple.

The question of strong artificial intelligence does seem to be about our social intuitions, this is a major strength of the Turing test, that it’s both measurable and clearly linked to our intuitions. As you say, Turing himself was careful not to claim more than that it would show that a computer could succeed in the imitation game. I suppose in that game, the motivation is assumed to be that of winning the game for the fun of it, which is a standard human motivation. As pl0bs is pointing out, we can ascribe consciousness to almost anything, perhaps a computer/robot would have to be a serious competitor before we had the intuition of “real” intelligence?

zoon wrote:@crank post #1176 above. Thank you for the links, I agree with your objections to the Scientia Salon discussion, I also thought Dan Kaufman and Massimo Pigliucci were being altogether too dismissive of the possibilities of non-biological intelligent systems. I gathered they also felt they were going against the mainstream. Like you, I think the speed and complexity arguments against the Chinese room thought experiment are the best ones. As the Wikipedia discussion points out, those arguments are only about our intuitions, but then I agree with Dennett that that is also true of the Chinese room thought experiment itself. As the Wikipedia article says:

The speed at which human brains process information is (by some estimates) 100 billion operations per second.[93] Several critics point out that the man in the room would probably take millions of years to respond to a simple question, and would require "filing cabinets" of astronomical proportions. This brings the clarity of Searle's intuition into doubt.

This is perhaps the opposite problem from the counter-intuitiveness of evolution: we find it difficult to get an imaginative grasp of how slowly evolution works, how long a million years is; and we find it equally difficult to grasp the massive speed and complexity of what is going on in our brains, it all feels so (comparatively) simple.

The question of strong artificial intelligence does seem to be about our social intuitions, this is a major strength of the Turing test, that it’s both measurable and clearly linked to our intuitions. As you say, Turing himself was careful not to claim more than that it would show that a computer could succeed in the imitation game. I suppose in that game, the motivation is assumed to be that of winning the game for the fun of it, which is a standard human motivation. As pl0bs is pointing out, we can ascribe consciousness to almost anything, perhaps a computer/robot would have to be a serious competitor before we had the intuition of “real” intelligence?

Thanks for that reply zoon. I think the Turing Test is more a test of human gullibility, the latest annual Turing Test competition was 'won' by an AI that was supposed to be a 12 year old Romanian boy who barely spoke english, gave them a ready excuse for obvious errors. The examples I heard about were painfully obvious, I can't believe some of the judges were actually fooled.

Their big thrust was about whether there was any understanding by the system, answering arbitrary questions would require the rules system to query Searle, so to me it would 'understand', it would have access to the data in Searle's head.

Fascinating topic, it's really foolish to assert such blanket statements as 'machine never surpass human intelligence' when you can't really define 'intelligence'. Whether a machine can think depends on whether we decide to call what they do 'thinking'. There will be vastly more powerful machines in the not to distant future, to think you can understand what they will be capable of is way to optimistic, as you say, with speed and complexity, new capabilities can emerge that no one can predict.

crank wrote:The whole system understands, that's the 'system' argument, Searles defended this objection in his original paper, Minds, Brains, and Computing, and that defense I don't think works at all, it's more assertion without enough reasoning.

I'm down with the original Chinese room but once the Chinese gym etc. came into the picture and became increasingly similar to what the human brain in fact does then it really breaks down for me because you can just turn it around on our biology and conclude we are all zombies.

And if embodiment is a major issue it's not like an AI can't have that. They're called robots. I think embodied cognition has made some interesting progress and has (tentatively) solved the symbol grounding problem.

I really think the only remaining objections are dualistic in nature. If you're going to defend those, fine, I don't object in principle, but there is no other room for some of these Chinese room variants from my point of view.