Hi,
it seems you start with the assumptions that an AI can't do science as
humans... to conclude just that.
Regards,
Quentin
2009/8/6 Colin Hales <c.hales.domain.name.hidden>:
> Man this is a tin of worms! I have just done a 30 page detailed refutation
> of computationalism.
> It's going through peer review at the moment.
>
> The basic problem that most people fall foul of is the conflation of
> 'physics-as-computation' with the type of computation that is being carried
> out in a Turing machine (a standard computer). In the paper I drew an
> artificial distinction between them. I called the former NATURAL COMPUTATION
> (NC) and the latter ARTIFICIAL COMPUTATION (AC). The idea is that if COMP is
> true then there is no distinction between AC and NC. The distinction should
> fail.
>
> I found one an one only situation/place where AC and NC part company. Call
> this situation X.
>
> If COMP is false in this one place X it is false as a general claim. I also
> found 02 downstream (consequential) failures that ultimately get their
> truth-basis from X, so they are a little weaker as formal arguments against
> COMP.
>
> FACT: Humans make propositions that are fundamentally of an informal nature.
> That is, the utterances of a human can be inconsistent and form an
> fundamentally incomplete set (we don't 'know everything'). The
> quintessential definition of a scientist is a 'correctable liar'. When a
> hypothesis is uttered it has the status indistinguishable of a lie. Humans
> can participate in the universe in ways which can (apparently) violate any
> law of nature. Humans must be able to 'violate' laws of nature in the
> process of accessing new/novel formal systems to describe the unknown
> natural world. Look at the world. It is not hard to see how humans exemplify
> an informal system. All over the world are quite normal (non-pathologically
> affected) humans with the same sensory systems and mental capacities. Yet
> all manner of ignorance and fervently held contradictory belief systems are
> ‘rationally’ adopted.
> ===================
> COMP fails when:
> a) You assume COMP is true and build an artificial (AC/computer) scientist
> <Sa> and expect <Sa> to be able to carry out authentic original science on
> the a-priori unknown....identically to humans. To do this you use a
> human-originated formal model (law of nature) ts to do this.... your
> computer 'computes ts, you EMBODY the computer in a suitable robotic form
> and then expect it to do science like humans. If COMP is true then the human
> scientist and the robot scientist should be indistinguishable.
>
> b) You then discover that it is a fundamental impossibility that <Sa> be
> able to debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>
> c) Humans can debate/propose that COMP is a law of nature.
>
> BECAUSE: (b) <> (c) they are distinguishable. NC and AC are different
> THEREFORE: ts cannot be the 'law of nature' for a scientist.
> THEREFORE: COMP is false in the special case of (b)
> THEREFORE: COMP is false as a general claim.
>
> (b) is not a claim of truth or falsehood. It is a claim that the very idea
> of <Sa> ever proposing COMP (= doubting that COMP is true) is impossible.
> This is because it is a formal system trying, with a fixed, formal set of
> rules (even self modifying according to yet more rules) to construct
> statements that are the product of an informal system (a human scientist).
> The very idea of this is a contradiction in terms. The formal system is 100%
> deterministic, unable to violate rules. When it encounters a liar it will be
> unable to resolve what falsehood is being presented. It requires all
> falsehoods to be a-priori known. Impossible. How can a formal system
> encounter a world in which COMP is actually false? If it could, COMP would
> be FALSE! If COMP is true then it can't. Humans are informal....ergo we have
> some part of the natural world capable of behaving informally....=> GOTCHA!
>
> This argument is has very 'Godellian' structure. That was accidental.
>
> When you say 'physics is fundamental'. I don't actually known what that
> means.
>
> What I can tell you is that to construct an authentic ARTIFICIAL SCIENTIST
> (not a simulation, but an 'inorganic' scientist), you have to replicate the
> real physics of cognition, not 'compute a model' of the cognition or a
> 'compute a model of the physics underlying cognition'. Then an artificial
> scientist is a scioentist in the same sense that artificial light is light.
>
> R.I.P. COMP
>
> => Strong AI (a computer can be a mind) is false.
> => Weak AI (A computer model of cognition can never be actual cognition) is
> true.
>
> It's nice to finally have at least one tiny little place (X) where the seeds
> of clarity can be found.
>
> Cheers
> colin hales
>
>
>
>
> 1Z wrote:
>
> On 31 July, 22:39, David Nyman <david.ny....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>
> I note that the recent posts by Peter Jones - aka the mysterious 1Z,
> and the originator of the curiously useful 'real in the sense I am
> real' or RITSIAR - occurred shortly after my taking his name in vain.
> Hmm.......
>
> Anyway, this signalled the resumption of a long-running debate about
> the validity of causal accounts of the first person based on a
> functional or computational rationale. I'm going to make an attempt
> to annihilate this intuition in this thread, and hope to encourage
> feedback specifically on this issue. You will recall that this is at
> the heart of Bruno's requirement to base COMP - i.e. the explicitly
> computational account of mind - on the the number realm, with physics
> derived as an emergent from this. Step 08 of the UDA addresses these
> issues in a very particular way.
>
> However, I've always felt that there's a more intuitively obvious and
> just as devastating blow that can be dealt to functional or
> computational notions based on physical entities and relations
> conceived as ontologically foundational and singular (i.e. no dualism
> please). So as not to be misunderstood (too quickly!) let me make it
> clear at the outset that I'm addressing this to first person conscious
> experience, not to third person descriptions of 'mentality' - so
> eliminativists can stop reading at this point as there is nothing
> further that requires explanation in their view (as odd as I trust
> this sounds to you non-eliminativists out there).
>
> The argument runs as follows. To take what physics describes with
> maximal seriousness - as standing for ontological reality - is just to
> take its entities and causal relationships seriously to the same
> extent. God knows, physicists have gone to enough trouble to define
> these entities and relationships with the most precisely articulated
> set of nomological-causal principles we possess. Consequently, taking
> these with maximal seriousness entails abjuring other causal
> principles as independently efficacious: i.e. showing how - or at
> least being committed to the belief that - all higher order causal
> principles somehow supervene on these fundamentals. Any other
> position would be either obscurantist or incoherent for a physical
> realist.
>
> Now I should say at this point that I'm not criticising this position,
> I'm merely articulating it. It follows from the foregoing that
> although we may speak in chemical, biological, physiological or
> historical narratives, we believe that in principle at least these are
> reducible to their physical bases. We also know that although we may
> speak of cabbages and kings, weather, oceans, processes, computations
> and untold myriads of equally 'emergent' phenomena, we still must
> retain our commitment to their reducibility to their physical bases.
> So of course, we can - and do - legitimately speak, in this way, of
> physical computers as 'performing computations', but following the
> foregoing principle we can see that actually this is just a convenient
> shorthand for what is occurring in the physical substrates upon which
> the notion of computation must - and of course does - rely for its
> realisation in the world.
>
> To be more explicit: The notion of a 'program' or 'computation' - when
> we place it under analysis - is a convenient shorthand for an ordered
> set of first person concepts
>
>
> In what sense "first person"? Surely not in the sense that qualia are
> supposed to be mysteriously and incommunicably first-person.
>
> Presumably in the sense that something is only a computer
> when regarded as such, (like certain pieces of paper being money).
> But that is quite contentious. It is not enough to say "under
> analysis",
> one must actually analyse
>
>
>
> which finds its way into the physical
> account in the form of various matter-energy dispositions. The
> macroscopic media for these are variously paper and ink, actions of
> computer keyboards, patterns of voltages in computer circuitry,
> illumination of pixels on screens, etc. All of these, of course, can
> - and must - reduce to fundamental relations amongst physical
> 'ultimates'. At some point after entering the physical causal nexus,
> this chain of dispositions may re-enter the first person account
> (don't ask me how - it's inessential to the argument) at which point
> they may again be construed *by someone* in computational terms in a
> first person context. But at no point is the 'computation' - qua
> concept - in any way material (pun intended) to the physical account;
> a fortiori, in no way can it - or need it - be ascribed causal
> significance in terms of the physical account. After all, what could
> this possibly mean? Are these spooky 'computational' relationships
> 'reaching across' the energy-transfers of the computer circuitry and
> changing their outcomes? Of course not. How could they? And why
> would they need to? Everything's going along just fine by itself by
> purely physical means.
>
> I hope the foregoing makes it clear that computer programs and their
> computations - at the point of physical instantiation - literally
> don't exist in the world.
>
>
> It doens't remotely. Just because something (eg a horse)
> isn't a *fundamental* constituent of the world doesn't make it
> non-existent in the sense that unicorn is.
>
>
>
> They're semantic formulations - ways of
> speaking - that have applicability only in the first-person context,
> and we can see that this is true any time we like by performing the
> kind of 'eliminativist' demonstration performed above: i.e. we can
> eliminate the concept without affecting the action on the ground one
> whit. Of course, this is the insight that makes the strictly physical
> account of mind - as presently understood - problematic if one wishes
> to take the first person seriously, because it shows the notion of
> 'emergence' to be redundant at the level of causation. It's just
> another way of speaking, however much insight it carries - for us.
> However, it isn't my wish to make that point again here. Rather my
> intention has been to show that whatever options are left in strict
> physicalism to address the first person issues seriously - without
> eliminating them - emergence is emphatically not one of them.
>
> I hope this makes the argument clear, and also illustrates the point
> of Bruno's reversal of numbers and physics to save the computational
> account of mind (and body, as it happens). To be absolutely explicit:
> if functional-computational relations are to be taken to be
> fundamentally causally efficacious, they must be held to be real and
> foundational in exactly the sense (RITSIAR) ascribed to those in the
> physical account. But for that to be the case, all other causal
> relations must supervene on them - again just as in the physical
> account. But now, of course, this must include physics itself.
>
>
> What must include physics itself?
>
>
>
> Now, you don't of course have to accept COMP. But if you want to be a
> physical realist, it means you can only hang on to the computational
> explanation of mind by eliminating the mind itself from reality.
>
>
> I don't see how that follows at all.
>
>
>
> Personally, not being committed to such an explanation, this doesn't
> in itself constitute my problem with current physical accounts. The
> alternative is rather that physics as an account of mind must be
> incomplete, or else it is wrong. But that's another story.
>
> David
>
>
>
>
> >
>
--
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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Received on Thu Aug 06 2009 - 08:21:52 PDT