On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 12:47:58PM +1000, Colin Hales wrote:
> RUSSEL
> > What sort of misconstruals do you mean? I'm interested...
> > 'organisational complexity' does not capture the concept I'm after.
>
> COLIN
> 1) Those associated with religious 'creation' myths - the creativity
> ascribed to an omniscient/omnipotent entity.
It still seems like we're talking about the same thing. Its just that
in the myth case, there is no explanation for the creativity, it is
merely asserted at the start. I have little interest in myths, but I
recognise that the omniscient being in those stories is being creative
in exactly the was as evolution is being creative at producing new species.
> 2) The creativity ascribed to the act of procreation.
Well I admit that pornographers are a pretty creative bunch, but what
is so creative about reproducing?
> 3) The pseudo-magical aspects of human creativity (the scientific ah-ha
> moment and the artistic gestalt moment).
> and pehaps...
Human creativity is an interesting topic, but I wouldn't call it
pseudo-magical. Poorly understood, more like it. Comparing creativity in
evolutionary processes and the human creative process is likely to
improve that understanding.
> 4) Belief in 'magical emergence' .... qualitative novelty of a kind
> utterly unrelated to the componentry.
>
The latter clause refers to "emergence" (without the "magical"
qualifier), and it is impossible IMHO to have creativity without emergence.
> These are all slippery slopes leading from the usage of the word
> 'creativity' which could unexpectedly undermine the specificity of a
> technical discourse aimed at a wider (multi-disciplinary) audience.
>
Aside from the easily disposed of reproduction case, you haven't come
up with an example of creativity meaning anything other than what
we've agreed it to mean.
>
> The system (a) automatically prescibes certain trajectories and
Yes.
> (b)
> assumes that the theroem space [and] natural world are the same space and
> equivalently accessed.
No - but the system will adjust its model according to feedback. That
is the very nature of any learning algorithm, of which EP is just one example.
> The assumption is that hooking up a chemistry set
> replicates the 'wild-type' theorem prover that is the natural world. If
> you could do that then you already know everything there is to know (about
> the natural world) and there'd be no need do it in the first place. This
> is the all-time ultimate question-begger...
Not at all. In Evolutionary Programming, very little is known about the
ultimate solution the algorithm comes up with.
>
> > Theoretical scientists, do not have laboratories to interface to,
> though, only online repositories of datasets and papers. A theoretical
> algorithmic scientist is a more likely proposition.
>
> A belief that an algorithmic scientist is doing valid science on the
> natural world (independent of any human) is problematic in that it assumes
> that human cortical qualia play no part in the scientific process in the
> face of easily available evidence to the contrary, and then doubly assumes
> that the algorithmic scientist (with a novelty exploration -theorem
> proving strategy-programmed by a human) somehow naturally replicates the
> neglected functionality (role of cortical qualia).
>
Your two "assumptions" are contradictory. I would say no to the first,
and yes to the second.
...
> >It is therefore not at all clear to me that some n-th
> generational
> > improvement on an evolutionary algorithm won't be considered conscious
> at some time in the future. It is not at all clear which aspects of human
> cortical systems are required for consciousness.
>
> You are not alone. This is an epidemic.
>
> My scientific claim is that the electromagnetic field structure literally
> the third person view of qualia.
Eh? Electromagnetic field of what? The brain? If so, do you think that
chemical potentiation plays no role at all in qualia?
> This is not new. What is new is
> understanding the kind of universe we inhabit in which that is necessarily
> the case. It's right there, in the cells. Just ask the right question of
> them. There's nothing else there but space (mostly), charge and mass - all
> things delineated and described by consciousness as how they appear to it
> - and all such descriptions are logically necessarily impotent in
> prescribing why that very consciousness exists at all.
>
> Wigner got this in 1960something.... time to catch up.
>
I don't know what your point is here ...
> gotta go....
>
> cheers
> colin hales
>
>
>
>
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Mathematics
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpcoder.domain.name.hidden
Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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Received on Thu Jun 14 2007 - 00:22:16 PDT